In 1959, he played a detective, in 'Wrong Number', made at Merton Park Studios; and notably, Charlton Heston's body double in Ben-Hur (1959).

According to the BBC, Trace landed the role after bonding with producer John Hunter Blair over their shared love of model railways.

[11] He became a writer and production manager for a film company named Spectator which failed after two years, losing him his life savings.

[6][12] He was declared bankrupt in 1973,[13] then returned to the BBC, first on local television in East Anglia and then on the network TV programme Nationwide.

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.

[6] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography credits Trace with coining two phrases that have become prominent in British popular culture: the line "And now for something completely different", later taken up by, and usually attributed to, Monty Python, and "Here's one I made earlier", since adopted by nearly all subsequent presenters on Blue Peter.