For most people, Vincent was simply one of a shower of dull presenters who killed time on BLUE PETER in that dull decade or so between Si, Saz'n'Pete and the current team. However TV Cream knows him as Wrexham's Own Tim Vincent as, thanks to him being perhaps the most famous person to come from there (apart from Ian Rush, Mark Hughes, half of K-Klass and Andy Scott out of The Sweet), the local rag has always kept up to date with his career. Hence we know quite a bit about the man - he was born in Marchwiel, which is on the outskirts of Wrexham. His first telly work came when he was still in his teens when he appeared as one of the bed-ridden kids in CHILDREN'S WARD on CITV, and after doing some modelling work, he did what many actors have done before and tried to move into television presenting. As far as we can remember, his first presentational gig was a stand-in on THE BIG BREAKFAST during 1993 when Evans was on holiday. He didn't do the whole thing, though - Paul Ross was the main host that week, but he was clearly too old/miserable to appear with Zig and Zag, so Tim did The Crunch instead. Very badly, we recall.

Still, something must have been there, as later in the year he joined Blue Peter when John Leslie quit. He began a lively exchange of innuendo with Anthea ("Bonnie's between my legs right now..." "What a lovely place that is to be!" etc) and was one of the presenters in charge when the programme was extended from two to three shows a week in 1995. However these were pretty much dog days for BP and he really didn't do much in the slightest bit memorable - although the Wrexham Evening Leader were still fond of him. By the time he left in 1997 he was also fronting the final series of THE CLOTHES SHOW, before deciding to concentrate on the acting for a bit - most notably in deadly dull Friday night staple DANGERFIELD. He returned to presenting in 1998 as one of the new hosts of FULLY BOOKED, although few people noticed because they were all too busy perving over Gail Porter. In 1999 the show was dropped and Tim got a job on EMMERDALE, but we don't think he's in it anymore. What we do know is that for a time he was holed up in a hotel in Australia acting as standby contestant on I'M A CELEBRITY ... GET ME OUT OF HERE. We know that, of course, because it got on the front page of the Evening Leader, headlined 'Wrexham celeb in hit TV show'. Well, in spirit.

We get a lot of the information in this A-Z from This Is Their Life, a book of profiles of notable personalities compiled by then-jobbing journalist Jonathan Meades in 1979. Dave's entry consists of "The Vine file is to be found between those of Gene Vincent, the crippled, leather-clad rock singer who died of a perforated ulcer, and Leonardo da Vinci, the painter, mathematician, scientists and scholar. Vine is none of these things, though he speaks better English than Leonardo did and knows more about the sharp end of Clive James' Sheaffer Krait than the rock singer did". So Meades didn't really know that much about Dave, then, though there is a lovely picture of him.

What Jonathan does tell is is that Dave started off on Westward before joining the Beeb, which he did in 1966. He soon established himself as a real all-rounder, able to cope with any sport the Beeb threw at him. Notably winter sports was his thing, and he fronted SKI SUNDAY for many years - but he also did virtually every other sport, too, including show jumping and weightlifting, which he used to be great at, basically because all he had to do was simply go "Oh, ho ho ho!" and that was it. There was the odd bit of presentation too - during the 1968 Olympics, Dave was fronting the colour coverage on BBC2 while Frank Bough slummed it in black and white on BBC1. He also had a long association with snooker, and fronted the World Championships from the first time the BBC showed it every night in 1978 (although for some reason Alan Weeks did the final) until 2000, and on the last night he got the honour of going onto the stage of the Crucible and interviewing the winner, loser and some bod from Embassy.

Of course, these were the days when, if you were a Beeb commentator, you commentated on everything. He was the first host of IT'S A KNOCKOUT, fronting it alongside Eddie Waring before being replaced by the chortling Stuart Hall. He also presented SUPERSTARS alongside Ron Pickering for many years. And in 1974, he commentated on Abba's triumph at the Eurovision Song Contest - "My goodness, she sold that well!" This all meant that Dave managed to appear in Clive James' TV colums in The Observer more times than almost everyone else, thanks to his many catchphrases - this, the man who invented "this, the man". Dave quit in 2000 after the Sydney Olympics, and they've not found anyone who can commentate on weightlifting quite like him.

"If it's brains and beauty you're after, then look no further!" Carol has just graduated from Cambridge in 1982 when her mum saw an advert in the paper for people with a head for figures to appear on a new Channel Four quiz show. She refused to apply, but her mum forged a letter anyway, and hence when the channel opened on November 2nd, she appeared on its' very first programme. In the early days, of course, COUNTDOWN was recklessly overmanned, and as such Carol was simply wheeled in to do the numbers game (introduced as "our vital statistician"). Eventually Cathy Hytner, Beverly Isherwood and the rest all quit, and Carol became Richard's second banana - a job she still holds to this day. Of course, she's also done a lot more extra-cirricular business. In the early days this was of a strictly factual nature - including SO WE BOUGHT A COMPUTER ("...or maybe we haven't, but we're interested") and useless children's cookery show KIDS KAFE, where she was billed as Carol Mather after taking the name of her first husband. On the Beeb there was schools series TAKE NOBODY'S WORD FOR IT (or as the logo put it, Taken Obody Sword Forit), which in 1988 was ludicrously shown as part of BUT FIRST THIS on holiday mornings, and it's Sunday morning spin-off A WAY WITH NUMBERS. So far, so ordinary.

In 1994 she became the new presenter of a radically revamped TOMORROW'S WORLD, but she was dropped within a year when the Beeb complianed about her doing adverts for Ariel that compromised her editorial integrity. In return they let her present virtually every programme coming out of Television Centre for a bit - a vague number-crunching slot on the Midweek Lottery led to her presenting various episodes of the draw, plus there was MYSTERIES, OUT OF THIS WORLD, HOT GADGETS and, for a while, sitting in the POINTS OF VIEW chair. Complaints about overexposure led to her signing an exclusive (apart from Countdown) deal with ITV, and from there she fronted Tomorrow's World rip-off WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT, FIND A FORTUNE, BETTER HOMES and sundry other shows. Of course, by then she'd transformed from frumpy supply teacher to Marilyn Monroe in waiting. She's still on Countdown, of course, and still laughing far too hard to remind everyone she's there, but we don't watch it anymore in protest of it lasting 45 minutes, which is completely wrong.