Radio presenter and trombone player
Radio presenter and trombone player
Born: January 10, 1934; Died: September 30, 2014.
Sheila Tracy, who has died aged 80, broke not one, but several moulds during her showbusiness and broadcasting career. She played trombone in an all-female dance band in the 1950s, developed a career in radio and in 1974 became the first woman to read the news on Radio 4.
She is fondly remembered as the presenter of Radio 2's Big Band Special, where her intimate tones introduced jazz recordings and seduced listeners on Saturday nights for more than 20 years from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
Born Sheila Margery Tracy near Helston in Cornwall in 1934, she showed prodigious musical talent at an early age and studied piano, violin and trombone at London's Royal Academy of Music. It was trombone she chose as her specialist instrument when she joined the Ivy Benson All Girls Band in her early twenties.
She branched out in a duo with fellow trombonist Phyl Brown, calling themselves The Tracy Sisters. They toured internationally, featured regularly on radio and appeared on the phenomenally popular Black and White Minstrel Show on television. Tracy also served as a judge on the legendary Juke Box Jury in 1962 and was a guest on Call My Bluff several times in the 1960s and 1970s.
Her early appearances on radio and television whetted her appetite for more and she began working as an on-screen announcer with BBC television. When the corporation dropped on-screen announcers in favour of a voice-over and pictures of the trademark revolving globe, Tracy developed her career as a presenter on regional shows in the south of England. In the late 1960s she co-hosted the BBC1 show A Spoonful of Sugar, with Michael Aspel, on which they took celebrities into hospitals to brighten up patients' time there. She also commentated on several editions of Miss World.
In the early 1970s she joined Radio 4 and argued passionately that the nation was ready for a female newsreader. She made her debut in a late-night slot in July 1974. No archive recording exists, but Tracy revealed years later that they pretended the regular newsreader was ill and that was why she was doing it. She said there was only one complaint.
The following year Angela Rippon began reading the UK news regularly on BBC television although Mary Marquis had been presenting Reporting Scotland for years by then.
Tracy transferred to Radio 2 in 1977 and was there at the start of Big Band Special. Borrowing an idea from the US, she also pioneered Trucker's Hour in the middle of the night on Radio 2 in the early 1980s. She reckoned it was the most popular show she ever did, but her official website noted: "Some of the CB language, innocently repeated by Sheila on air, caused consternation amidst the BBC hierarchy and after 12 months the Trucker's Hour was axed."
CB was Citizen's Band radio, which was a popular means of communication between lorry drivers.
She interviewed many musicians for Radio 2, which led to her books Bands, Booze and Broads (1995) and Talking Swing (1997). She was made a freeman of the City of London in 1997.
In the early 2000s she presented Swing Time with Sheila Tracy on the Saga commercial radio network and just last year she featured in the nostalgic BBC television documentary Len Goodman's Dance Band Days.
She was married to the actor John Arnatt, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s. He died in 1999 and she is survived by one son Richard.
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