Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Welcome: How Trish Bertram Became the Voice Behind the World’s Biggest Events

The veteran continuity announcer, Voice of God, and Olympic stadium voice on bluffing her way in, chasing the jobs that matter, and why prep is the only thing standing between you and catastrophe in front of a global audience.

There’s a particular kind of voice that most people never think about but would immediately miss if it vanished. It’s the voice that tells you what’s coming next on television. The voice that fills a stadium with sixty thousand people and makes the hairs on their arms stand up. The voice that announces award winners at black-tie events in the Grosvenor House ballroom while remaining entirely invisible.

Trish Bertram has been that voice for more than thirty years.

As one of the UK’s longest-serving female TV continuity announcers, the live stadium announcer for the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games and both Paralympic ceremonies, and the Voice of God at eleven Olympic and IOC international game ceremonies across the globe, Bertram occupies a rarefied corner of the voiceover world — one where there are no second takes, no safety nets, and no room for error.

In a recent episode of Voice Acting Unplugged, the podcast hosted by Margaret Ashley and Anthony Rudd, Bertram brought her characteristic warmth, candour, and self-deprecating humour to a conversation about how she stumbled into continuity announcing thanks to a letter from Fern Britton, blagged her way onto London Weekend Television because she happened to live five minutes down the road, and chased an Olympic dream halfway around the world — twice — before it finally came true.

What emerged was a masterclass in persistence, preparation, and the irreplaceable art of being the voice that nobody notices until it goes wrong.

The Precocious Kid with the Big Voice

Trish Bertram didn’t set out to become a disembodied voice. She wanted to be an actress.

Growing up as, by her own description, “that precocious kid at school with the deep voice and the big voice,” she was the one who read at assemblies and announced on the microphone at Sports Day. She attended a convent boarding school — “which wasn’t really a good introduction to life” — and did the rounds of the London drama schools.

They all told her the same thing: go away, live a bit, then come back.

“I took this as a sign of hope,” Bertram said. “My parents went, ‘Oh, well, you can’t be any good then.'”

Rather than abandon the theatre entirely, she pivoted to stage management — and it was there, making front-of-house and backstage announcements in London’s great theatres, that she first found herself behind a microphone professionally.

“That was my first microphone experience,” she said. “That’s where it started for me.”

Throughout the 1980s, Bertram worked in stage management at the National Theatre, the Royal Court, and the Young Vic. It was a world she loved — but two things happened that would redirect her career entirely.

First, actors kept approaching her. Not to praise her voice, exactly, but to note its distinctiveness.

“They’d hear me on the announcements and say, ‘You’ve got a really unusual voice. Have you ever thought about doing anything with it?'” Bertram recalled. “When enough people say that to you — and they weren’t saying it was a great voice, they were saying it was really unusual — I thought, hmm.”

Second, she received a letter from an old flatmate and fellow student from the Central School of Speech and Drama. The friend had fallen into a job as a continuity announcer for Westward Television and thought Bertram, with her “wacky voice,” should give it a try.

That friend was Fern Britton.

Living Five Minutes Down the Road

Armed with Fern Britton’s encouragement and a cassette tape she’d recorded on a portable player — reading continuity announcements she’d written from the TV Times — Bertram began sending demos to every broadcaster she could think of. ITV, BBC, the soon-to-launch Channel 4.

It takes one person to give you a chance. For Bertram, that person was at London Weekend Television.

“The reason they gave me a chance,” she said, “was because I lived five minutes down the road.”

It wasn’t the most glamorous origin story. But every other LWT announcer — Peter Lewis, Sue Peacock, Pam Rhodes — lived out of town. If anyone was stuck in traffic, there’d be a panic. The station needed someone on their doorstep who could be trained up as an emergency backup.

“Never, ever knock what gets you in,” Bertram said. “That’s my philosophy.”

And so began one of the more unusual dual careers in London entertainment. By day, Bertram was working as an assistant stage manager at the National Theatre. By evening and weekend, she was the emergency voice of London Weekend Television.

“I’d get this panic call — ‘Peter Lewis is going to be an hour late, can you come in?’ — and I’d run in my blacks, my stage management blacks, from one building to another. ‘Welcome to the weekend, you are watching London Weekend Television.’ And Peter would arrive and I’d disappear.”

Everything was live. No pre-records, no safety net. You stepped up to the microphone, and whatever came out of your mouth went directly to air.

Channel 4 and the Revolution That Put Women on Trailers

Bertram’s emergence as a continuity announcer coincided with a seismic shift in British broadcasting — one that most people have forgotten ever happened.

Before Channel 4 launched in 1982, no woman had ever voiced a television trailer in the UK.

“Can you believe it?” Bertram said. “Until Channel 4, no women ever voiced a television trailer on British television.”

When Channel 4 broke that barrier by putting female voices on their promos, the ripple effect was immediate. Bertram’s boss at LWT saw what was happening and decided to follow suit. A promo producer named Steve knew exactly who to call.

“He went, ‘Where’s Trish? She might be all right,'” Bertram recalled.

But rather than simply winging it, Bertram took the initiative to train herself. She came in on her days off to watch and learn from Mike Carson and Greg Bands, LWT’s established male promo voices. And the environment she was learning in bore no resemblance to the comfortable post-production suites of today.

“Back then, when you voiced promos, you literally did it live in thirty seconds,” she said. “They had a gallery — run VT, caption on, music up, cue announcer — and you hopped in and out in between the sync and everything. You learned how to voice a thirty-second trailer live.”

The 1990s brought an explosion of satellite and cable channels, and there weren’t enough women doing promo voicing to fill the demand. Bertram found herself “hopping around various satellite stations” — right place, right time, right voice.

“I think I’ve been really lucky,” she said. “Right time, right place is a lot of my career, really.”

The Voice of God: Chasing Qatar

The transition from television announcing to live event announcing — the role known in the industry as “Voice of God” — came through a combination of luck, persistence, and a willingness to chase what she wanted with a tenacity that most people would find uncomfortable.

In 2006, Bertram’s agent mentioned an opportunity: someone was looking for a female announcer with a deeper voice and live announcing experience for an event in the Middle East. The event was the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, and the production company behind it was David Atkins Enterprises — the same company that had produced the Sydney 2000 Olympic ceremonies.

Bertram was desperate for the job. She was an Olympics junkie who had watched ceremonies all her life, and her stage management background gave her a natural affinity for massive, technically complex live events.

The casting process was agonisingly slow. She was down to the last twelve. Then the last six. Then the last two. Then she was told it was a no.

“I was heartbroken,” she said. “I really wanted this job.”

A few weeks later, a fellow voiceover artist named Graham Bannerman spotted the job re-advertised online and rang Bertram. Something had clearly gone wrong with their first choice. Bertram contacted her agent, who reluctantly provided the casting director’s name, and she did something that many voice actors talk about but few actually do: she chased it herself.

“I emailed him and said, ‘Hello. I understand I was down to the last two for this job. I understand you’ve advertised again. I’m not quite sure what it was that you didn’t like about me, but is there anything I can fix?'”

The casting director’s reply was illuminating. Bertram had been their number one choice. But the Qatari clients had felt her voice was “too sexy.”

“Can you lighten it up a bit?” he asked.

Bertram raced to a sound studio, borrowed an engineer, and mocked up a string of ceremony announcements in a lighter, more “girly” tone. The engineer added crowd noises and fanfares to sell the demo. She sent it to Qatar.

The phone rang. The casting director’s words have stayed with her ever since: “Trish, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. You got the gig.”

From Doha to London 2012: The Power of a Cup of Tea

The Doha Asian Games were, by Bertram’s account, one of the most expensive ceremony events ever produced. But the most important thing that happened there had nothing to do with the show itself.

The executive producer was a woman called Catherine Ugwu — later Dame Catherine Ugwu. Her box was near the announcer’s position, and Bertram, seeing how stressed she looked during the long production, kept making her cups of tea.

Six years later, Catherine Ugwu became the executive producer of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies. She knew Bertram. She remembered the cups of tea.

“That’s how Doha led to London 2012 for me,” Bertram said.

It’s the kind of story that sounds too neat to be true — except that it perfectly illustrates a principle Bertram has built her entire career on: show up, be professional, be kind, and never underestimate the power of small gestures.

The Olympics: Sleepless Nights and the Queen Next Door

For anyone who has ever been nervous before a voiceover session, it’s worth pausing to consider what it feels like to announce at the Olympic Games. The audience isn’t a production team on the other end of a phone line. It’s a stadium full of sixty thousand people, a global television audience of billions, and — in Bertram’s case — the Queen of England sitting in the box next door.

“I had sleepless nights,” Bertram admitted. “Because I thought, if I fluff anything, this goes out to the world. There’s no rerecord button.”

She developed two psychological tricks to manage the pressure. The first was a mantra she’d repeat on her walk to the stadium during rehearsals.

“I would remind myself: this isn’t about you. You’re just the voice. You’re there to give information. It’s about the athletes, it’s about the country, it’s about the crowds. Get a grip, Trish — it’s not about you.”

The second was a visual trick. Their announcer’s box was positioned right next to the royal box, with an extraordinary view of the stadium floor. Rather than letting the scale of what she was seeing overwhelm her, Bertram trained herself to pretend she was looking at a television screen — as though she were back in the continuity suite, doing the job she’d done thousands of times before.

“I’d trick my brain into pretending I was watching a TV screen and doing continuity in my head — that it wasn’t real through that window,” she said. “So that I felt comfortable in my environment.”

Bertram didn’t actually do the opening ceremony — that went to a younger voice after Danny Boyle, the ceremony’s creative director, decided Bertram sounded “too middle-aged and too middle-class.” (She noted with evident irritation that she and Boyle had once worked together in stage management at the Royal Court Theatre.) But she landed the closing ceremony and both Paralympic ceremonies — and considers the experience the highlight of her life.

“I bloody love the Paralympics,” she said with genuine passion. “It was the first time the Paralympics had been taken seriously by any country. London took them seriously, put them on the map. And I think following countries have had to treat them with equal importance — and quite right too.”

Prep, Prep, Prep

If there’s one word that defines Bertram’s approach to live announcing, it’s preparation. Not talent, not luck, not connections — preparation.

For the Olympic closing ceremony, she went through the complete list of participating nations and rang their embassies to confirm the correct pronunciation of every name. When she arrived and asked her fellow announcer whether he’d done the same, the answer was no.

“I thought, I don’t do anything without prep,” she said.

The one genuinely unknown quantity was the marathon, whose finishing stretch runs through the stadium during the closing ceremony. Bertram couldn’t know in advance who would win. So she went through every potential contender — perhaps a dozen names, many of them African — and rehearsed each one until she could deliver it flawlessly at a moment’s notice.

“If you are over-prepped, nothing should throw you,” she said. “I’m an obsessive prepper of names.”

The philosophy extends to corporate Voice of God work, which Bertram considers in some ways harder than Olympic ceremonies because the sheer volume of speaking is greater. Award shows in particular are relentless: reading nominations, introducing winners, delivering background information, bridging between segments — all nonstop, all live.

Her advice is simple: always ask for the script at least a day ahead.

“No one ever has time to tell you anything at the venue,” she said. “You have to be self-reliant. Ninety percent of the time, you’re on your own.”

When Things Go Wrong: Storms, Spice Girls, and Cutting on the Fly

Live events are, by definition, unpredictable. And Bertram has the war stories to prove it.

During the Doha Asian Games opening ceremony — her first major international event — an unexpected storm blew up over the open-air stadium. Entire sequences of aerial acrobatics and flying acts had to be cut or restructured in real time. The director was on headsets to hundreds of crew members, calling out changes on the fly.

“He was literally saying, ‘Follow me, everybody follow me,’ and cutting, cutting, cutting,” Bertram recalled. “We as announcers were doing it on the fly.”

The disruption was severe enough that when the official DVD was produced afterwards, the production team used footage from the dress rehearsal rather than the actual ceremony.

“Having got through that,” Bertram said, “nothing was ever going to throw me.”

The London 2012 closing ceremony, by comparison, went relatively smoothly — apart from one memorable panic over the Spice Girls, who were late getting onto their iconic London taxis.

“‘Where are the Spice Girls? Where are the Spice Girls?’ — screaming going on around all the headsets,” Bertram laughed.

And then there were the quieter, more surreal moments: Sir Ian McKellen wandering into the announcer’s box during rehearsals because he happened to know the announcers, asking if he could have a Hob Nob.

“I can’t believe I’m sitting here offering Sir Ian McKellen biscuits,” Bertram said. “Making him a cup of tea. People would hide in our box when they wanted to not be found.”

The Corporate Voice of God: Harder Than the Olympics

For voice actors curious about the Voice of God world, Bertram offered a clear distinction between the two main categories of the work.

Olympic and major sporting ceremonies are epic in scale but involve relatively contained announcing — specific cues, scripted moments, and gaps between them. Corporate Voice of God work, by contrast, is an endurance event.

“You are literally nonstop talking all the way through the event,” Bertram said. “The nominations are read, and you go down them all, and then the host announces the winner, and then you’re doing some spiel about the winner, and they’re going up and then they’re off stage and you’re onto the next one.”

The physical demands are real — throat lozenges and water are essential companions — and the intellectual demands are equally punishing. Every company name, every person’s name, every piece of industry jargon needs to be correct. And there’s never enough time at the venue to check anything.

Among the hosts she’s worked alongside, Bertram singled out Bill Bailey as a model of professionalism: arriving early, rehearsing thoroughly, learning everyone’s names, treating everyone with courtesy. Others — unnamed, though Bertram promised to reveal their identity off-air — were less impressive: arriving at the last minute, botching the autocue, running off to other gigs during the dinner break, and forgetting to announce the lifetime achievement winner.

“It’s a lesson,” she said. “A lesson to see who is professional and who isn’t.”

One of her favourite memories was working with Sandi Toksvig, who stood up at a Grosvenor House event and announced to the room that something rare had happened: both the host and the Voice of God were female.

“In my entire career, this has never happened,” Toksvig told the audience — before introducing Bertram by name from her invisible perch above the ballroom.

“I loved her for that,” Bertram said.

Continuity: The Art Nobody Notices

Bertram’s take on her longest-running role — continuity announcing — was characteristically self-effacing.

“If it’s done well, you don’t notice it,” she said. “If it’s not sticking out like a sore thumb, if they aren’t stumbling all over their words, if it’s not an unappealing voice — if it’s done well, you shouldn’t notice the announcers. They’re just feeding you stuff.”

She welcomed the shift away from mandatory RP accents toward regional voices on British television, calling it a change “for the better.”

“I want to hear the information coming out of my television,” she said. “I don’t care what flavour it comes in, providing I can understand what’s being said and the information is clear. I’m happy to hear different voices.”

She noted with amusement that when London Weekend Television first took her on, it was specifically as “the downmarket voice” — because everyone else on the station sounded impeccably RP.

Breaking In: The Honest Answer

When asked what advice she’d give to someone hoping to become a Voice of God, Bertram was characteristically honest about the limits of her own counsel.

“That’s a hard one, because I feel I blagged my way into it,” she said.

Her practical suggestions, though, were concrete and useful. Make the best demo you can — and inform it by studying the working voices currently out there, not to copy them, but to understand what they’re doing. Research event production companies, since they’re the ones who hire Voice of God announcers. And consider approaching them directly with your demo.

“You don’t have to go through an agent,” she said. “Here I am, here’s my demo tape.”

But the deeper lesson of Bertram’s career isn’t about any specific tactic. It’s about persistence, self-reliance, and the willingness to chase the things you want — even when the door has apparently closed.

“I’m very much a believer that you make your own luck,” she said. “If there’s something you want to do in whatever industry you’re in, you have to go and get it.”

The Next Act

Today, Bertram is — by her own description — “passively grateful” for whatever work comes her way. She still does the occasional Voice of God event (the World Procurement Awards at the O2 most recently), some radio imaging, station announcements, and the Cruise Channel. But the relentless hustle of building a career has given way to something gentler.

Her first love, theatre, has reasserted itself. She’s spending her state pension on theatre tickets. And she’s discovered a new creative outlet: playwriting. A short play she wrote recently reached the final four of a competition and was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

“I thought, I’m not worthy,” she said. “I went to the Orange Tree Theatre and saw my play being done. And I thought, now I can die happy.”

The plan is to keep writing — longer and longer pieces, building on the craft the same way she once built her announcing career: one step at a time, one opportunity pursued at a time, one cup of tea offered at a time.

Final Thoughts

Trish Bertram’s appearance on Voice Acting Unplugged was a reminder that the voiceover industry contains worlds within worlds — and that some of the most extraordinary careers are built not through conventional routes but through a combination of distinctive talent, relentless persistence, and the kind of practical adaptability that comes from spending eight years in stage management before ever stepping behind a microphone as a featured voice.

Her story is full of lessons that apply far beyond the Voice of God niche. The importance of preparation — obsessive, thorough, leave-nothing-to-chance preparation. The value of chasing the opportunities that matter to you, even after you’ve been told no. The power of human connection — a letter from a friend, a cup of tea for a stressed colleague, the respect earned by being the person who shows up early, does the homework, and never makes the event about themselves.

And perhaps most fundamentally: never knock what gets you in. Whether it’s living five minutes down the road, having an unusual voice, or simply being the person who answers the phone when everyone else is stuck in traffic — the path into any career is rarely the one you planned.

“I’ve been really lucky,” Bertram said, more than once. But luck, as she also said, is something you make for yourself. And thirty-plus years of evidence suggests she’s been making it with remarkable consistency.

This blog post is based on an episode of Voice Acting Unplugged, hosted by Margaret Ashley and Anthony Rudd. For more episodes of the podcast — including conversations with agents, producers, casting directors, and voice actors from across the industry — subscribe and follow Voice Acting Unplugged on your preferred platform.