Thanks for the replies so far. The aerodrome in question is busy with a variety of ex mil types and warbirds, which I think is why more calls than usual are expected. That seems sensible enough to me - I suppose my concern was that being b0llocked by the operator for not announcing I was going to backtrack when calling ready seemed to imply his response might have been different if I had - when in fact all he could do was tell me about the downwind traffic I already knew about (which hadn't even called final when I lined up). There's generally a culture of pilots incorrectly calling up to "request taxi" etc. which as a low hours ppl myself makes it quite a confusing environment to operate in!
The other a/g field I have experience of is Stapleford where the operators seem to say very little generally.