Christopher Trace was born on 21 March 1933, the youngest of three children born to Edith (née Morley) and Lawrence Archibald Trace. His two older siblings were Ann and David Morley Trace. He was born in Hambledon, Surrey.

Trace was educated at Cranleigh School, a boarding independent school in Surrey, which he left early. After working as a farm labourer, he joined the British Army and trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He received a commission in the Royal Regiment of Artillery in 1953, was promoted to lieutenant in February 1955, but resigned his commission in September 1956.

At the age of 25, alongside co-presenter Leila Williams, Trace launched Blue Peter on BBC One. The programme’s very first episode was broadcast on 16 October 1958, and Trace’s final episode was broadcast on 24 July 1967. He was credited by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with coining the lines “And now for something completely different” and “Here’s one I made earlier.”

In the 1970s he worked as a presenter on BBC East’s daily morning radio programme Roundabout East Anglia. He also appeared on local TV as a presenter on BBC’s early evening news programme Look East. By the mid-1970s, he had retired from the media, and briefly worked behind the bar of a pub near Norwich before becoming general manager of an engineering factory, where he lost two toes in an accident.

In the 1990s, he briefly returned to the BBC to guest on and later host the nostalgia series Are You Sitting Comfortably? on Radio 2. Trace died in 1992 from cancer of the oesophagus while living in Walthamstow.