Carl Jones: It's a shrewd move to be heard and not seen

No, this is something quite different. I'm thinking about the likes of Alan Dedicoat, Peter Dickson, Dave Lamb, and Charlotte Green – bona-fide stars you'd pass on the street without the blinking of an eye.

You may think you've never heard of them, but you've certainly HEARD them.

In fact, if you're a TV and radio junkie, they're part of the very fabric of your weekend.

Dedicoat, for example, is the 'voice of the balls' on the National Lottery show – has been since the very start. Don't watch it? Can't quite recall his dulcet tones? Well how about this:

"Dancing the tango, will Brendan Cole and his partner Sophie Ellis-Bextor please take to the floor . . ."

Yes, he's Mr Strictly too, a job which has earned him equal notoriety across the pond, where he's landed the same plum job on America's Dancing With the Stars. Have voice, will travel.

And Peter Dickson? He's the number one Mr Shouty Man on X Factor; announcer of choice for any television show whose audience is hard of hearing. Subtlety isn't in his locker. Cheesy, over-dramatisation certainly is. No prizes for guessing why Simon Cowell picked him, then!

Over on Channel Four, there's only one reason for tuning into the consistently entertaining re-runs of Come Dine With Me, and that's acerbic narrator Dave Lamb. He brings to the programme the same magic the late, great Sid Waddell did to the dart board – biting comment, laced with intelligence and dark humour. The fact that he watches the show like a viewer, with no knowledge of who is going to win, is what makes his asides so honest, and on-the-money.

Slightly less successful – so far at least – is Charlotte Green, the somewhat left-field choice to replace the legendary James Alexander Gordon as the voice of the football classified results service on BBC Radio Five Live.

Now before you accuse me of being sexist, I have no problem whatsoever in seeing this job go to a female for the first time, particularly when the lady's voice has been named the most attractive on national radio.

But she just isn't getting it right. James Alexander Gordon turned the reading of the footie scores into an art form; as soon as you heard the intonation in "Wolverhampton Wanderers 1..." you knew whether they'd won, lost or drawn. Downward inflection if they'd lost, on the level if they'd drawn, and upwards if they'd bagged three points.

Charlotte's clearly trying to do it her way, but it's frustrating the heck out of me at the moment. I keep expecting her to end the dreamy delivery with "Take it easy, with Cadbury's Caramel . . ."

Talking of sport, you've got to love the most famous voices of late-night boxing. Since most of the top battles are now on pay per view TV, it's the job of radio to paint the picture for most of us.

And you know it's not a 'proper' world title fight unless the pantomime is introduced by the unmistakeable tones of either Jimmy Lennon Jnr ("Iiiiiiiit's showtime"), or Michael Buffer ("Llllllet's get ready to rrrrrrumble").

They say children should be seen and not heard. But for Saturday night's longest running stars, it's clearly far more lucrative to be heard, but not necessarily seen.