Reason for all that TV mumbling
ONCE upon a time the TV sound recordist was king (or queen) of the set and studio. When I interviewed Margaret Thatcher she’d barely begun speaking when my sound man flapped his hands at her and peremptorily ordered the PM: “Stop! Stop! I can’t ruddy hear you!”
No one argued with the sound guy, not even the Iron Lady. She meekly fell silent while my man twiddled knobs and peered at dials before asking her: “Right. What did you have for breakfast?” Maggie obediently began listing her recent full English before he crisply interrupted her again with: “OK, you sound fine now. Good to go, Rich!” And we were cleared for take-off.
How times have changed. I settled down to watch episode one of SS-GB last Sunday night – the BBC’s big-budget dramatisation of Len Deighton’s novel about Nazi-occupied London – and inside 10 minutes I was shouting at the screen.
“What? Pardon? What did you just say? Eh?” The cast’s mumbling was impenetrable. If it had been live theatre they would have been booed off stage.
Meanwhile series star Sam Riley spoke all his lines in a throaty whisper like Humphrey Bogart with a shocking cold. He could have been speaking Icelandic. So why hadn’t SS-GB’s sound guy “done a Mrs T” and shouted: “I can’t hear you!”
Well, whisper it softly (actually please don’t) but that may be exactly what happened. I’ve been speaking to sound techies I know personally and it turns out there’s a war on. Not the one SS-GB depicts but a modern-day struggle between sound engineers and directors.
“We have awful arguments,” one woman recordist told me. “I worked on [she named a well-known BBC drama series] and an actress was really, really mumbling. I politely asked her to speak her lines again and was promptly chewed out by the director, big time.
“‘She’s giving a natural performance!’ he yelled at me. ‘I can hear every word!’
“‘That’s because you’ve got the script in front of you,’ I told him. ‘I’m wearing headphones and I can’t. If she must whisper it needs to be a stage whisper.’” The director overruled her and poor sound carried the day.
Another technician told me that some directors frame their shots in such a way that it’s impossible to get a boom microphone anywhere near the actors. Body mics must be hidden and are often muffled by costumes. “We try telling directors there’s a problem but some just won’t listen. They say they want to ‘go with the shot’ or ‘go with the performance’. What’s the effing point if no one can hear what’s being said?”
Apologists for muffled sound have tried to blame our TVs, saying modern flatscreens have poor speakers. This is blatant nonsense: we can hear lots of other dramas perfectly clearly, can’t we? Not to mention the news, adverts, sitcoms, quiz shows, nature programmes and all the rest.
No. The problem with duff audio on SS-GB and other recent series such as Jamaica Inn, Happy Valley, Taboo and 10 Rillington Place is the casual sidelining of sound recordists’ concerns by directors who have other priorities, priorities which seem to include encouraging the cast to mutter their lines au naturel for the director – but sans sense for the rest of us.
I refer them to the robust five-word career advice offered to young actors by theatrical knight Robert Stephens: “JUST. BLOODY. WELL. SPEAK. UP.”
the case that Refuses to go away
WILTSHIRE’S Chief Constable Mike Veale is said to be “120 per cent sure” that Ted Heath was a paedophile. Quite a margin for error, eh? I would have thought 100 per cent would be more than enough for most coppers. Respected writer Matthew Parris, who worked for Mrs Thatcher before becoming a Tory MP, says: “If Heath was a child abuser then I’m an aardvark.”
Meanwhile Ted Heath is still dead and unable to defend himself.