Sylvia Peters
Pioneering broadcaster who, as the BBC’s continuity announcer on Coronation Day, had to wear an evening gown and pearls
The Times,
27 July 2016

The first face to appear on the nation’s television screens on Coronation Day in 1953 belonged not to Queen Elizabeth but Sylvia Peters. At 10.15am on June 2 the 26-year-old continuity announcer, chosen in part because she was almost the same age as the Queen, gave a live introduction from the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace to this “great and joyous day for us all”. Attired in an evening dress and pearls, she pointed on a map to the route the Queen would take from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey.

Neither the Dean of Westminster nor the Archbishop of Canterbury had wanted to admit television cameras to the abbey on that day, lest the religious mystery of the occasion be spoilt. “In the end, the Queen decided,” Peters recalled in a 2013 interview. “But there was a lot of hoo-hah about it.”

Although she was experienced, having joined the BBC in 1947, she was nonetheless still nervous. She had no teleprompter to read from and had to learn the long opening announcement by heart. “Part of the reason I was chosen was I had a very good memory. I was given the script the night before, and I had to learn it in time. I was about the same age as the Queen as well, which they liked.” Also she was telegenic and, unlike their wireless counterparts, television announcers were seen as well as heard. Peters, who was a petite brunette with large eyes and a dazzling smile, once admitted that she was partly hired for her appearance: “We were meant to be decorative, charming hostesses. They wanted us to look beautiful and feminine.”

She was given a six-page document which listed the various procedures to be followed in the event of a breakdown in transmission or a commentator losing sound. “We were always having breakdowns, and this was the first time we had done such a big thing,” she said. “We were told to make our commentary more explanatory if we lost the pictures. If the transmitter suddenly lost power, I had to come on and tell people to adjust their sets to try to get a better picture.”

There was a surge in retail sales of television sets in the month preceding the Coronation. Peters’s parents were the only household in their street with a television set, so they invited their neighbours round to watch the broadcast. “When I first went to the BBC, people did not admit they had a set,” Peters recalled. “They would say: ‘The servants have a set, and I occasionally see it downstairs.’ We were very junior to radio, and considered idiots. But the Coronation made us. After that, everybody wanted to watch. The audience increased incredibly, just down to that day.”

Sylvia Lucia Petronzio was born in Highgate, north London, to an Italian father, Romelo Petronzio, who had a clock-making business, and an English mother, Ethel Edwards, who adored the ballet and arranged for Sylvia to have ballet and acting lessons. As a young actress she was in a couple of big revues at the Coliseum, one of which was the VE Day show. In 1947 her mother happened to notice that the BBC were looking for a continuity announcer. “We had seen television in a friend’s house,” Sylvia said. “My mother forced me to apply because she didn’t like me being on the stage.”

Peters attended an interview, did several screen tests and got the job. She was also tested for linguistic pronunciation skills and was told she had to speak reasonable Italian, French and German. One test involved enunciating the sibilants in the phrase Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. She even had to go back and do another test wherein she was filmed going downstairs, even though announcers were never seen walking.

She started on a salary of about £10 a week and met her future husband, Kenneth Milne-Buckley, on her first day. He took her photocall as studio manager. A handsome man 19 years older than Peters, he had been an actor, and was already married with children. Milne-Buckley and Peters found themselves working together a great deal. When she was making announcements live on television and he was floor manager he would flick peanuts at her trying to get one down her cleavage, in the hope of putting her off just as she was welcoming viewers to the evening programmes.

The full splendour of Peters’s gowns was largely obscured from viewers because the studios in Alexandra Palace were too small for the camera to draw back far enough. With strapless gowns, the BBC insisted she wore a scarf or stole in case viewers seeing her shoulders in close-up might think she was naked. She was also ordered to wear plastic flowers on the front of her dresses to cover any suggestion of cleavage. The limited camera technology of the time imposed tight restrictions on what could be worn, with stripes or checks ruled out because they could unsettle the picture. Jewellery was borrowed from a firm in Mayfair and returned the next day.

Studio broadcasts were beset with frequent breakdowns as well as other problems associated with live transmission. “You just had to cover and carry on, even if the scenery was falling down, which it quite often was because it was so flimsy. We were doing an Agatha Christie drama and I was up one end of the studio, because you’d be in the studio with a play. One of the characters was killed, but the actor didn’t realise he was in shot so the body got up and walked off, nobody could stop him. Things like that were happening all the time.”

Peters met the Queen prior to the Coronation when the princess, as she then was, visited the studios. After the Coronation, Peters was chosen to assist the Queen with her televised Christmas broadcast. She performed one of the Queen’s speeches in different ways — using a teleprompter or just reading from a script, or a mixture of the two — so that the Queen could then choose which approach she preferred. The training film was sent to Balmoral for the summer. When the Queen opened parliament the BBC’s head of outside broadcasts, Peter Dimmock, asked her to go to the House of Lords, sit on the throne and read from Hansard in order to give levels for the sound-recording engineer, because her voice was of a similar pitch to that of the Queen.

She was chosen to compere the bandleader Victor Silvester’s Television Dancing Club, but flying back from a holiday in Majorca on the day she was expected in the studio she was bitten by a mosquito and her faced swelled up. The programme’s producer, Dickie Afton, put Nanette Newman on to compere the show instead, although Peters compered later programmes. Silvester, a former world champion ballroom dancer, would give a different lesson every week with a female partner, and other dancers would demonstrate steps. Peters would describe the clothes worn by the ladies and explain who the dancers were, filling in their backgrounds. She also compered Come Dancing with Peter West.

She gave birth to her only child, her daughter Carmella, in 1955 and three years later, having announced 7,500 programmes, she decided to retire as a full-time announcer, instead choosing to freelance on such occasions as Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot as well as for Come Dancing. Unlike Strictly Come Dancing, the original “was much more low budget so the dancers had to provide all of their own clothes. They stuck the sequins on to the dresses they wore so by the end of the show the floor was covered in them.”

For the new ITV channel she did one of the early advertising magazine programmes called Jim’s In. It seemed to viewers like an actual programme, but every now and then an advertisement would pop up. Peters was filmed wandering around a flat, picking up various household items and endorsing them.

In 1963 she had opened a shop in Wimbledon called Accent on Youth, which sold children’s and teenagers’ clothes, and was fortunate enough to ride the bandwagon of the teenage fashion craze. Hot pants in bright colours were a big hit with her clientele. She also stocked women’s clothes though, being something of body fascist, never anything larger than a size 12. As a ten-year-old Carmella would write all the signs for the sales and by 12 she was even selling. The family would buy stock wholesale on Great Portland Street, from suppliers such as French Connection. In order to devote more time to the shop, Peters ended her regular television career in the late 1960s, after 20 years. She opened a second shop in Wimbledon, Encore, in 1977. This one was for all sizes of women. She had it for a few years until her husband, a heavy smoker, fell ill with cancer of the oesophagus.

She is survived by her daughter Carmella Gosling, 61, a freelance studio floor manager, her son-in-law Pete Gosling, 71, a musician and by her step-children, Clive Milne-Buckley, 76, a retired purser on cruise ships, and Wendy Rose, 78, a housewife.

Always impeccably dressed and with exquisite manners, Peters had a close circle of friends and an inquiring mind. She enjoyed playing bridge and mah-jongg as well as attending adult education classes on the history of art and advanced English. She also belonged to a poetry group. For several years she was president of Merton Vision, a charity that provides talking books and newspapers for blind people.

Peters adored Strictly Come Dancing, and watching it in the company of her daughter Carmella over white wine and smoked salmon, critiquing the dancers, was a Saturday night ritual.

Sylvia Peters, television announcer, was born on September 26, 1925. She died on July 26, 2016, aged 90