Tele Vision

It was BBC's latest television stunt. A willowy wisp of a girl last week climbed into a 190-lb. diving suit and tangoed around (with a suitably dressed partner) in a tank containing 15 feet of water. The girl: ash blonde Gillian Webb*--the 20-year-old who, with two older colleagues, does all the BBC's television announcing, a job which ordinarily demands only an ability to chat at a battery of cameras.

Unlike many an image projected by BBC's frankly experimental television system (there are 25,000 British television sets--more than twice as many as in the U.S.), Gillian Webb is pretty as a picture. But it took a deal more than a pretty face to persuade sober BBC to give one of its top television situations to a chit of a girl. To get the job, Gillian had to beat 400 other applicants.

But Gillian had long been working up to just such tests. At 17, when her widow-mother could not afford tuition at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gillian won a scholarship, later got a prize for "grace and charm of speech and movement." At 19, after a swing through the provinces as a speechless Shakespearean lady-in-waiting, she toured the Near East with an E.N.S.A. (Britain's U.S.O.) girl show. Last spring, she got her big break in television.

*No kin to hydrophile Matthew Webb, who swam the English Channel in 1875.

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