Career
McKechnie began her career when the British Broadcasting Corporation resumed television broadcasts after the Second World War. On British Broadcasting Corporation Children’s Television she narrated the earliest live editions of Andy Pandy from 1950, in which she told a story as it was acted out by string puppets. The programme was aimed at very young children under primary school starting age of five years at the time.
The programme was broadcast during the school day and part of a series of five known as Watch With Mother, one of which one was broadcast each weekday.
When the broadcasts began, the main British Broadcasting Corporation transmitters only covered London and the southeast from Alexandra Palace, Birmingham and the Midlands from Sutton Coldfield, and Manchester and the northwest from Winter Hill. She was a television in-vision announcer from 1955 until 1960, and later worked for British Broadcasting Corporation Children"s Television as presenter of Foreign Deaf Children, 1956.
Other television work was Focus, 1958 to 1960. Picture Book, 1963 to 1965.
Narrator, Andy Pandy, 1970.
From 1955 to about 1958 she was the main presenter of Studio East, a magazine program for older children aged around 9–14. Studio East lasted around 55 minutes and came from the studio of the same name at the British Broadcasting Corporation"s west London studios in Lime Grove, Shepherd"s Bush, since demolished. After television she became a teacher, spending 15 years at Roedean School and then in Broadstairs, Kent then Street Margaret"s School, Bushey.
