Pamela Ballantine looks forward to 2024 and retiring Helen the wig

Pamela says she'll be retiring her wig in 2024

It's been a year that Pamela Ballantine is keen to turn the page on.

In her own words, 2023 didn't exactly pan out the way she had planned - after a cancer diagnosis in 2022 it's been a year of treatment and surgery.

But the broadcaster tells BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme that she has high hopes for 2024.

While Ballantine has a few more months of treatment, she's "looking forward to lots more travelling and chatting to loads more people on UTV".

She told William Crawley she still received injections every three weeks, but is doing "really well".

2024 will also mark her 40th anniversary at Ulster Television and while she sees a retirement in the future, it won't be her own.

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"In the new year on telly, Helen will be retired," she jokes.

The Helen she's referring to is the wig she wore after losing her hair through chemotherapy - named after Dame Helen Mirren.

"Helen is pretty much retired, she comes out every now and then when I feel I need to look a bit more like me," she said.

"Occasions when you know a photograph will be taken and you don't want to look back and go: 'That's when I had cancer.'"

Looking back over her career, Ballantine recalls the "painfully shy" schoolgirl sent to Evendine Court School "for young ladies".

"I never wanted to go to university, didn't know what I wanted to do, so I did a year of A-levels and then mum and dad had heard of a school that a friend of theirs had gone to way back - as Julian [Simmons] would say nineteen hundred frozen to death - and it was basically a finishing school.

"I remember sitting there and the first night having a good word with myself: 'You are going to have to go downstairs and talk to people and if you don't, you're going to have a miserable year.'

"A lot of people who are introverted, you just start making up for it and become quite extrovert."

At the end of her year there, it was back to Belfast and a secretarial course at the College of Business Studies.

'I have been so lucky'

Then at 19, Ballantine got her first job as a personal assistant at Downtown Radio.

"I was very happy in the background doing the secretarial work because Downtown was only two or three years old and everybody worked in every department so you helped out, wherever you could.

"They didn't have designated newsreaders as such and one day they went: 'Oh, the journalists are out covering stories - that new secretary, she can speak a bit - read that news bulletin.'

"My contract said anything to assist the smooth running of programming - they gave me a programme at five o'clock in the morning."

The rest, as they say, is history.

"I get embarrassed when people asked me to go to a careers convention - I have been so lucky to be in the right place right time."

You can listen to the full Talkback Special with Pamela Ballantine on BBC Radio Ulster at midday on 27 December and on BBC Sounds.