The Voice

We all hate the sound of our own voices don’t we? Well, that is unless you’re Piers Morgan or that bloke at my gym who ruins every quiet read of the paper I have after my workout. But when you are making money out of voiceovers, hearing your own squeaky efforts played back is a professional, and embarrassing, inevitability.

This week I was voicing some documentaries about how eighteenth century travel had opened up journalism (stay awake now) and influenced the writing of fiction. I know it sounds a bit worthy and academic and about as much fun as running naked through a Taliban family barbecue shouting “I’m a serial adulterer”, but it was really interesting. Honestly.

Because Brits had started to go abroad more often with better transport, overseas wars, the slave trade and the like, travel journalism was born three hundred years ago. Now you may think this is up there in the history stakes alongside the evolution of garden gnomes, but I enjoyed it and started to make the mistake of feeling clever, as if the words I was reading were actually my own. However I was brought down to earth by the engineer when we finished. He told me he’d squeezed me in between sessions for two big projects that bring his studio regular money. My extremely erudite and insightful academic prose had just followed a voice session for the new series of Thomas The Tank Engine, and was to be immediately followed by a recording for Peppa Pig. Serves me right.

Voiceovers are a weird and wonderful way to earn a living. You are left sitting behind glass panelling for hours while people next door discuss how you are doing. You sit and watch their faces for signs of whether they like your efforts, but they turn off the intercom so you don’t hear their chat. Various heads will come together, they’ll look sad and let down, various swear words can be lip read, and then they’ll switch on again and ask with a big smile, “could you do it again, this time with a bit less Scottish but more north of the border”, or “a bit faster but sounding as if you are slower”, or as I had on one occasion, “could you try a flatter delivery but with more contoured enthusiasm”.

The best paid voiceover I ever did was for the least successful advertising campaign in British TV history. John Cleese did the visuals, appearing in supermarkets as the very loud Basil Fawlty, and I had to come in saying “Sainsburys, it’s value to shout about”. It ran for several months before we were all put out of our misery, tho’ the cheque helped a bit.

I did a voiceover years ago which is heard over and over again in documentaries and archive stuff, yet I don’t get a penny for it. When I opened Channel Four they made me record the first words in case I made a mistake or went off script. I’m not sure why they didn’t trust me, I mean what were they expecting? “Welcome to Channel Four, and by the way I’m selling my car, call me on 07768 3....”?

For a year I was the voice of a satellite TV station owned by Disney called ABC1. I spent two days each month recording the intros and outros to the shows, the “coming up next” sort of stuff. It’s then put in a computer and sounds, on the night, as if you’re actually sitting there introducing the shows. Problem is that when you record these things you only get to see the end credits which you voice over. To this day I can sing every word of the theme from Scrubs but I have never, ever seen an episode.

But for all of my own efforts over the years, my most prized voiceover is actually one my dad engineered for me years ago. It was preserved on a reel to reel tape in his loft until he recently put it on CD for me. My brother and I were pretending to be Thunderbird pilots and blasting my mum’s hairdryer in to dad’s tape recorder microphone to sound like a spacecraft taking off.

We couldn’t get the hang of the words he had scripted for us so eventually a harassed dad can be heard on tape shouting impatiently “Stand by for bloody blast off”. At five years of age we both repeated it word for word and I’m proud to have it preserved for posterity. It’s the best voiceover I’ve ever done.