This is taken from The Guardian:

Mary Malcolm
Postwar BBC television announcer, one of the first to grace the living-rooms of the nation
by Philip Purser
Thursday 14 October 2010 18.49 BST
           
Mary Malcolm, who has died aged 92, together with Sylvia Peters and McDonald Hobley made up the trinity of announcers who nursed us into becoming a nation of television watchers. This was in the 1940s and 50s, when the BBC had resumed its pioneering service after the wartime shutdown. Pretty well all the programmes went out live; breakdowns, gaffes, broken links and missed cues were commonplace. The announcer's task at such times was to reassure and placate the audience, and fill in the time as best as he or she could.

On one occasion the interruption went on so long that Malcolm advised everyone to go and make a cup of tea. She would call them back if anything happened. Even when things went smoothly, viewers seemed to need the announcer to usher the next item on to the air. When they bade the viewers goodnight at closedown, it was, the critic Peter Black fancied, as if they were tucking them up for the night.

They were the first television celebrities, or at least the first to enjoy celebrity beyond a limited London and home counties area, and thus the first to experience the familiarity in which the nation would hold its heroes and heroines who came into the home. These were were not the outsize deities of cinema posters. Except for their BBC accents – Mary Malcolm would have been enunciated as Merry Melcombe – they were not so different from people encountered in ordinary life. The impulsive would ring the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace or Lime Grove and ask to speak to them. Malcolm took a call once from a woman who was aggrieved because she was not wearing the nice dress she had worn earlier. She had asked a friend round especially to see it. Could Miss Malcolm possibly change back?

The dress allowance, incidentally, was frugal, but after a while a deal was struck with London fashion houses whereby the announcers could take their pick from ex-show models. They could also borrow jewellery overnight from the Paris House, and were allowed to have their hair done on a BBC account. In return, they were expected to attend ladies' lunches and other opportunities to publicise television as it graduallly colonised the regions.

Malcolm did not join the team until 1948. The BBC's first instinct had been to reconvene the pre-war announcing trio of Leslie Mitchell, Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell, but only Bligh was available, and she soon left again. Hobley was recruited in time for the relaunch, and Peters the following year. Both came from the theatre. Malcolm came from BBC radio, having been urged to apply for a job there after appearing on a wartime Workers' Playtime. She did continuity announcing and presented a forces' favourites request show of the sort associated later with Jean Metcalfe.

Malcolm fitted easily into place on TV. Viewers liked the contrast of the dark, vivacious Peters and the cooler, more patrician-seeming Malcolm. At this time she was in fact Lady Bartlett, married to the actor-baronet Sir Basil Bartlett, who had played Antony in a brave, pre-war TV production of Antony and Cleopatra and was now a television script editor. What was successfully kept from the papers, even – or especially – during the Coronation season was that she was also a second cousin of the Queen. Her mother, Jeanne-Marie, was the daughter of Edward VII and Lillie Langtry and the only one of his illegitimate children he acknowledged. Her father was the politician Sir Ian Malcolm.

Whatever her lineage, Malcolm was held to be a good sport by colleagues. She loved to recall interviewing a snake-keeper whose snake wound itself round her neck. "He never harms anyone," said the man confidently. "Of course he won't," said Malcolm, "he's a lovely snake." She continued the interview, her voice getting higher and higher as the snake tightened its embrace, her eyes beginning to bulge, until finally the keeper rescued her.

For an outside broadcast from Woburn Abbey, she was dressed in period crinolines, with a battery-operated radio microphone underneath. On the final rehearsal she surprised everyone by hoicking up her skirts and announcing that her batteries needed recharging. On another occasion, she was wearing a strapless sundress and bolero for a studio item about camping. It was so hot under the lights that she shed the bolero. Unfortunately, the camera shot was cut off just above the top of the dress, giving the impression – to the impressionable – that she was naked. Memos flew.

With the advent of ITV in 1955, the reliance on announcers diminished. Far from being a handicap, as had been hoped or feared, the commercial breaks quickly became popular. People enjoyed these lively mini-intervals. They decided that they no longer needed a hostess to soothe them. By the time I was briefly employed by the BBC's presentation department in 1960, it was fully occupied creating commercial-type trailers to pop on the screen between programmes. Announcers were out. Malcolm must have read the signals – she had left about four years before – although she continued to make guest appearances on various programmes, and at one stage set up her own film company. Her autobiography, Me, was published in 1956.

Her marriage to Bartlett ended in divorce in 1960. They had had three daughters. She then married Colin McFadyean, a solicitor who famously stated, when the ITV serial Lillie (Langtry) opened in 1978: "I have just seen my mother-in-law being born on television."

Malcolm's last years were clouded by the onset of dementia. Her stepdaughter Andrea died in 1983, her daughter Lucy in 2006 and Colin the following year. Two grandchildren also predeceased her. She is survived by her daughters Jemima and Annabel, stepdaughter Melanie, four granddaughters and three grandsons.

• Helen Mary Malcolm, BBC television announcer, born 15 March 1918; died 13 October 2010

This is taken from The Guardian, Monday November 1st:

Patrick Mills writes: BBC continuity announcers such as Mary Malcolm (obituary, 15 October) sometimes had to announce late changes to the early evening weather forecast. On one such occasion this plain-speaking "lady" declared that the earlier forecast was now "about as much use as a sick headache". It is clear from Philip Purser's affectionate tribute that this unaffected attitude was typical of her.