James O'Hara is a former

Scottish Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...

television continuity announcer. O'Hara, a graduate of

Manchester University The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

and

Aberdeen University The University of Aberdeen (abbreviated ''Aberd.'' in post-nominals; ) is a public research university in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen and Chancellor of Scotland, petitioned Pope Al ...

, worked at

Grampian Television Grampian Television was the original name of the Channel 3 service for the north of Scotland founded in 1961 and which, decades later, was merged with the Central Belt channel STV. The northern region's coverage area includes the Northern Isle ...

as a staff announcer and newsreader. He switched to

BBC Scotland BBC Scotland is a division of the BBC and the main public broadcaster in Scotland. Its headquarters are in Glasgow, employing approximately 1,250 staff as of 2017, to produce 15,000 hours of television and radio programming per year. BBC Scotla ...

during the mid-1970s and became one of their first full-time television announcers. In common with other BBC Scotland announcers, O'Hara also directed transmission and read ''Scottish News'' summaries both in and out of vision. He left the corporation in 1988 and became a freelance for BBC North East and BBC West Yorkshire FM (now known as ''BBC Radio Leeds''). In 1994, O'Hara became an audio describer for ''Audetel'', a trial providing audio description of television programmes for blind and partially sighted viewers. The trial was a success and led to the legislation of audio description for digital terrestrial television within the 1996 Broadcasting Act. O'Hara was the managing editor of the Deluxe's audio description department,ITFC - Audio description
working as an audio describer on television programmes and films until his retirement in 2016.

References

Living people Radio and television announcers Year of birth missing (living people) {{UK-tv-bio-stub