It's 60 years since she jumped aboard the good ship Blue Peter but Valerie Singleton's distinctive voice sounds every bit as no-nonsense as ever.
Except today there's a mischievous edge that is very unlike Auntie Val.
Recalling her introduction to the show in 1962 she says: "I bumped into Chris Trace, an original presenter, who said they were looking for a girl for Blue Peter.
"I said 'What the hell's Blue Peter?' He said 'Oh, 15 minutes a week, mostly about trains'."
Blue Peter set sail in 1958, making it the longest-running children's programme ever and a jewel in the BBC’s 100-year-old crown.
Val, now 85, nearly didn't become its star, but not because of the unenticing introduction.
She says: "I thought there's no harm in auditioning but I didn't get it. Another girl did but after six months she left and they came back to me.
"I was only going to do it for a little while. I was going to go back to acting but I had only just got a flat and I had rent to pay."
If her maiden voyage at the age of 26 sounds inauspicious, it didn't remain that way for long.
Val went on to become part of a "dream team" threesome of presenters with John Noakes and Peter Purves, sticking with the show until 1972.
It quickly became about more than trains and a runaway success – and Val became something of a pin-up.
She recalls: "The attention built up gradually. The first I was aware of it was on a veteran car run from London to Brighton – Chris, me and John.
"When we got to Brighton people were wanting autographs.
"I thought: My God, this programme really has something special. We had to sign so many autographs I was just signing 'Val'. We couldn't even find time to write our full names."
But there were upsides to fame. Val says: "I heard recently that Pierce Brosnan apparently rather liked me when he was growing up.
"I was fancied by James Bond. That’s nice!," she giggles, that mischief again.
But there were downsides, too. She says: "You couldn't terribly misbehave in public if you wanted to."
Not that she did, Val assures me quickly, sounding like strict Auntie Val again for a second.
And, also, she says: "It does get a bit boring in later life when you're chatting to a bloke and thinking he's nice and he says 'I was so in love with you when I was four'. It gets a bit in the way."
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The aspiring actor and voiceover commercials star first arrived at the Beeb in 1961 to work as a continuity announcer.
It was the dawn of colour TV and she was also roped in to help create some of the early test broadcasts.
She recalls: "It was up to me to find a friend to interview who did something colourful, like knitting. They took ages doing make-up."
Through the spiralling smoke in the BBC club you would often find Val playing spoof [a guessing game involving coins] with Jimmy Ellis from Z Cars.
In the canteen at lunchtime Diana Dors might walk in or a string of actors in costume fresh from some drama being filmed live, because back then everything was live.
And Val recalls that over at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush, where Top Of The Pops was filmed, there might "suddenly be Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck at the bar, everyone mingled in".
On Blue Peter it was the male presenters, especially John, who did the action stunts the show became famed for. Val admits: "Looking back I'm really rather sorry I didn't."
However, she concedes: "I think I was asked to do one of those things where you stand on top of an aeroplane but I have a feeling I said no."
Does she regret that? "Not terribly," she laughs. Was it because she was a woman, does she think? "Honestly it's never crossed my mind," she says. "It might have been.
"But if you think about it probably not because who did the baby? Daniel the baby? They gave it to John and Pete and they often gave cooking to the boys, too."
I check my annuals when I draw a blank on Daniel [He was an actual 14-week-old baby "adopted" in 1968 for a regular feature].
But stunts or no stunts, Val had plenty to do instead, including accompanying Princess Anne to Kenya with Save The Children.
"She asked who looked after the Blue Peter dogs, the kind of questions fans ask, which was sweet," laughs Val.
And the presenter adored dressing up, playing everyone from Jane Austen to Marie Annoinette.
She loved her "dream team" too, although she stresses she never thought of them as that. "We got on, we liked each other. John was the slightly mad one who did daring things when we went on our summer trips.
"But we had our spats occasionally," she remembers.
"There was one trip to Mexico, I think, where Peter and I fell out and we didn’t speak to each other, something unbelievably silly."
In recent years she’s admitted a brief fling with Peter between his marriages but the pair chose friendship instead.
She was never very keen on her Auntie Val nickname or her goody-goody image. But she confesses she never hugely overstepped the mark. "Nobody actually said 'You’re doing Blue Peter, you can’t be seen smoking'.
"You just assumed as it got better known that you had to kind of take it upon yourself to behave decently. But I always did anyway," she assures me.
Val is very proud to have been part of the middle years of a BBC, which turned 100 this week. She says: "You weren't really aware you were blazing a trail. But I suppose we were."
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