Jean Metcalfe

Jean Metcalfe (2 March 1923 - 28 January 2000) was an English radio broadcaster.

She was born on in Reigate, Surrey, the eldest child of Guy Vivian Metcalfe, a railway clerk with Southern Railway at Waterloo station, and Gwendoline Annie, née Reed. Hers was a typical lower middle-class family of the time, without a bathroom, and they used her father's Southern Railway privilege tickets to get them to their most ambitious holiday destination, Cornwall.

She excelled at elocution and art at the local county school, and formed a passionate love of the radio at home. She joined the "Children's Hour" radio circle, and entered for competitions which entitled the winners to visit Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC. She also excelled at school dramatics, and once played Queen Victoria.

After leaving school in 1939, she went to secretarial college and then applied for a job at the BBC in 1940. By bending the truth on her CV, inventing grandparents in Norfolk and describing her father's occupation as "welfare officer", she succeeded in getting a job with the variety department, being paid £2 5s. 6d. a week. Her first broadcast was on 21 May 1941, reading the poem "Spring, The Sweet Spring" by Thomas Ashe for the Empire Service programme "Books And People".

She was auditioned as an announcer for the new BBC General Forces Programme, a joint BBC–War Office venture which was the BBC's first worldwide service and the first to use women announcers. She joined the Africe Service, and began her period of service with the programme that made her famous: "Forces Favourites", a request programme in which members of the armed forces abroad, and their families at home, could ask the "compère", as presenters were called, to play their favourite music. She began the job after five hours of studying the programme under its editor, Margaret Hubble. It was while doing the programme from London that she met her male colleague at the Hamburg end of the operation, Squadron Leader Arthur Clifford (Cliff) Michelmore. They married on 4 March 1950 (after the programme had been converted to the peacetime Two-Way Family Favourites) and went on to have two children; actress Jenny Michelmore and the broadcaster and composer Guy Michelmore.

In August 1950, Metcalfe started to present "Woman's Hour" on BBC radio, a programme which at that time had a long list of forbidden topics. Self-effacing and gently spoken, she pioneered the art of interviewing stars in their own homes, including the wartime "forces sweetheart" singer Vera Lynn, the irascible television personality Gilbert Harding, the song and dance man Frankie Vaughan, and the stiff-upper-lipped film actor Kenneth More. The "Daily Mail" made her broadcasting personality of the year in 1955, and she won a Variety Club of Great Britain radio personality award in 1963.

She gave up broadcasting in 1964 to raise her family and did not return full-time until 1971, when she presented "If You Think You've Got Problems", a programme in which a broad range of human problems were discussed, many of which would not have been allowed when she began her association with "Woman's Hour". The programme continued until 1979, although BBC objected to one of her programmes, on lesbianism, because it would be going out on a Sunday.

On television, she made her début with Robert Beatty in "Saturday Night Out" and did guest spots for "Juke Box Jury" and "Wednesday Magazine". In 1986 she published a joint autobiography with her husband, "Two-Way Story". She died at Petersfield, Hampshire, survived by her husband and their two children.

References

*"Oxford Dictionary of National Biography"
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3956492,00.html Obituary] , "The Guardian", 29 January 2000