It was November 1975 when Pam made her first appearance on the talent show, Opportunity Knocks & this proved to be the start of an incredible career for a unique entertainer. There's no other contemporary entertainer whose career was established by writing & performing comic verse.

Pam Ayres always wanted to be a writer. At school she shone brilliantly at English & Art but was pretty useless at everything else. The youngest of a family of six children, Pam was born in Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berkshire during the long cold winter of 1947. After leaving school Pam joined the civil service as a clerical assistant, a job in which she soon lost interest & which prompted her to join the Women's Royal Air Force. It was while Pam was in the WRAF that she developed her love of singing & acting & slowly the wild idea emerged that she would like to be an "entertainer".

On leaving the WRAF Pam set out to achieve her ambition. By this time her poems & verses had become a hobby, written & performed for the local folk club in Oxfordshire to where she'd returned to live & work. In 1974, a friend arranged for her to go to the local radio station, BBC Radio Oxford to read one of her poems. Pam's first broadcast for Radio Oxford in 1974 was selected for BBC Radio 4's Pick of the Week & subsequently repeated on the 1974 Pick of the Year programme, by which time Radio Oxford had asked Pam to return & recite some more of her poems.

In 1975 Pam decided to audition for Opportunity Knocks. Since then Pam has appeared on virtually every major TV show in the UK, has had her own TV series & filmed Christmas TV specials. Other highlights include the BBC televising one of Pam's solo stage shows & her appearance on the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in 1977 to celebrate HM The Queen's Silver Jubilee. Pam has been lucky enough to entertain HM The Queen on no less than three separate occasions & was thrilled to be awarded the MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 2004.

For the last ten years Pam has been a regular on BBC Radio. From 1996 until 1999 Pam presented a two-hour music & chat show every Sunday afternoon for Radio 2, followed by two series of Pam Ayres' Open Road in which Pam visited various parts of the country from Skye in the North to Devon in the South meeting people with interesting stories to tell about their lives & the area where they lived. More recently Pam has become a regular contributor to Radio 4, on such programmes as Just A Minute, Say the Word, That Reminds Me & two series of her own Ayres On The Air.

Pam Ayres performs her solo show in theatres throughout the UK, performing in excess of 50 concerts a year. She has taken her one-woman show to Ireland, the Middle East, Hong Kong, France, Kenya, Canada, New Zealand & Australia.

Recently Pam was featured in a list of Britain's 20 Funniest Women Her poem, "I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth" was also voted into the top ten of a BBC poll to find the UK's 100 Favourite Comic Poems in which Pam was one of the few writers on the top ten who is still alive! In the UK Arts Council's report on poetry, Rhyme & Reason, Pam has been featured as one of the best-selling poets following Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy & Sylvia Plath.