The woman behind the voice

Charlotte Green ©Calyx Picture Agency

There are few people who could open a presentation by reading the football scores but such is the familiarity of Charlotte Green’s voice one immediately felt you knew the person behind the sound.

Scores of mariners around the British coast relied on her clear diction, comforting delivery and calm style to keep them company in the wee small hours or during a force ten through Finisterre.

Such was her affinity with the forecast that her BBC colleagues called her the ‘Fisherman’s Friend’.

She has such a voice so distinctive, that people recognise her speaking even before they recognise who she is.

Charlotte mentioned one rather elderly lady who, on being introduced to her for the first time said, ‘Don’t you sound awfully like yourself?’

Much to the annoyance of her sister, Charlotte has been reading aloud since she was six years old. Her childhood was filled with radio classics such as Round the Horn, The Navy Lark and the Just William books by Richmal Crompton.

When she left university she went straight to work at the BBC and was soon on the fast track from continuity to the news reading department. Imagine her thrill to be working with one of her childhood heroes, James Alexander Gordon.

Charlotte is tall and elegant with a professional air which belies, what she freely admits, an ‘earthy’ sense of humour, something she needed when working on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with arch pranksters Brian Redhead and John Timson.

Now Charlotte has her own radio programme on Classic FM and loves being able to chat to her heroes such as actors Bill Nighy and Michael Cain.

When asked later if she missed her full time role at the BBC, she looked me in the face and said with conviction, “I could never give up the football results and the News Quiz – well the bits that don’t get edited out.”

And with that, dashed off to catch her train.

Charlotte Green appeared at Swindon Arts Centre as part of Swindon Festival of Literature, 9 May 2017, with her book the News is Read.

Words by voice over artist Stephen Ryder who also hosts Stephen’s Voice on Warminster Community Radio, 5-7pm Monday.