Blame the artsy-fartsy creative guys and their obsession with realism

After yet another TV drama he can’t hear because of mumbling luvvies GYLES BRANDRETH says . . .

CAN’T hear a word!’ ‘Mumble, mumble, whisper, whisper, what’s going on?’ ‘sort it out!’ on sunday night, the Twittersphere was alive with cries of frustration from infuriated viewers who had tuned in to watch the BBC’s muchhyped new historical drama, ss-GB, only to drop out in despair.

Unhappy licence-fee payers flung down their zappers and picked up their iPhones to vent their ire. My friend and fellow TV presenter, Richard Madeley, spoke for many with his tweet: ‘ REALLY looking forward 2 this — but can’t hear a WoRD of muffled dialogue!’

Yup. Yet again, a multi- millionpound BBC drama looked good, but sounded terrible.

This one is based on Len Deighton’s 1978 novel and imagines a Britain after a Nazi takeover. It stars a fine actor, sam Riley. It should be gripping. It might be if we understood what was going on.

one viewer tweeted: ‘What we’ve learnt from ss- GB, is that, if the Nazis had successfully invaded Britain everyone would whisper everything.’ Another dubbed Riley ‘the hoarse whisperer’.

on Monday morning, the BBC happily announced that it had received fewer than 100 complaints about ss-GB. I’m not surprised. That’s because most of us can’t be bothered to complain. We’ve better things to do — like read a book.

Besides, we don’t believe complaining will make any difference. We’ve complained before. ss-GB is just the latest in a long line of audibility challenged offenders.

only the night before it aired, Tom Hardy had mumbled his way through BBC1’s saturday evening drama Taboo — he has grunted 98 times in the first seven episodes, some bright spark calculated yesterday.

Before Christmas I started to watch To Walk Invisible, a series about the Bronte family. I quickly abandoned ship. To Walk Invisible was to follow impossible. Ditto the earlier mumble-fest that was Happy Valley, an unhappy listening experience for the Brandreth household.

Are we cloth-eared where I live? If we are, we are not alone. When the BBC gave us its adaptation of my favourite Daphne du Maurier novel, Jamaica Inn, in 2014, I was one of two million who struggled gamely to follow proceedings but eventually gave up and switched off.

What’s the problem? According to a senior BBC sound engineer I know it’s definitely not the quality of the sound recording — apparently, the technology has never been better — so, he says, it’s either a matter of my age (me and my mate Madeley are both in our 60s) or that we have modern flat-screen TVs with poor inbuilt sound systems.

Well, I don’t buy it. In that case, if I’m going deaf and my TV can’t deliver the sound adequately, how come I hear every word that Huw Edwards utters when he is reading the news? And every commercial that blasts out of the screen is indisputably audible. No, IT’s not my ears. It’s not my TV. It’s not my friend the sound engineer, either. It’s the artsy-fartsy creative guys who are to blame — the directors and actors who are striving for what they perceive as naturalism above all else.

For some bizarre reason, they equate inaudibility with authenticity. If you mutter, it’s more meaningful. If you whisper they think, somehow, you will sound more sincere. The rule seems to be: the more incomprehensible an actor’s speech, the more truthful his performance. oh, dear.

I can tell you where it all began: in the Fifties in the United states with the influential American director Lee strasberg, who pioneered ‘The Method’.

This school of acting requires the performer to ‘become’ his or her character, digging deep into their own psyche and experience to bring out ‘the truth’, and behaving as they would if they were the person they are pretending to be. With The Method, mumbling seems to be part and parcel of the deal. Marlon Brando was the great exponent of both The Method and the mumble — and, with his memorable Don Corleone in The Godfather, set the mumbling bar high.

Where he led, others — from Dustin Hoffman to Al Pacino — followed. Think of Robert de Niro in Raging Bull, Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies, Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and you get the idea. The muttering never stops.

They do it because they believe in it and because, in Hollywood, as often as not, it pays off. The aforementioned have all grunted, slurred, mumbled and murmured their way to oscars.

But what the Hollywood greats can get away with on the big screen, does not necessarily work when essayed by lesser mortals in a TV drama on the box.

And even if it’s fashionable, is it a good idea? one of Hollywood’s most noted exponents of The Method is Hoffman.

Famously, when he appeared with the great English actor Laurence olivier in the 1974 movie Marathon Man, olivier asked him one day why he was looking so utterly exhausted. Hoffman explained he had been playing a scene in which his character had stayed up for three days and so he, too, had not slept for 72 hours to find the truth of the situation.

‘My dear boy,’ replied olivier smoothly, ‘ why don’t you just try acting?’

olivier belonged to a generation of actors for whom good diction was not a problem. It was a matter of pride. When actors of the vintage of olivier, Michael Redgrave or Alec Guinness spoke, on stage or on screen, you understood every word every time.

The fruity-voiced sir Donald sinden (than whom nobody spoke more distinctly) used to say: ‘If the audience can’t hear what you’re saying, what is the point? It is all about communication.’

I remember going to the cinema to see sir Richard Attenborough as the serial murderer John Christie in the film 10 Rillington Place. I was held by every line. I watched the recent BBC retelling of the same grim tale and because of all the muttering wasn’t quite sure whodunit. WHAT’s to be done? Let me tell you. Give the directors and producers a kick up the backside. They are the chief culprits. They are so hell-bent on making everything ‘real’ they have made much of it unwatchable.

(Literally, in some cases. I know everyone loved Wolf Hall. I heard most of it, but much of it I didn’t see. It was filmed by candlelight, apparently. I spent four weeks with my nose pressed to the screen trying to decipher what Mark Rylance was up to.)

Until then, until the awardwinning creative geniuses responsible for these dark dramas give a thought to their viewers, moderate the mood music, tone down the atmospheric background sound effects and tell the actors to sPEAK UP, do what I do and turn on the subtitles.

With most of the TV I watch these days I’m not listening to the sound, I’m reading the words. Quite often, I turn off the sound completely. It’s less confusing.

With drama, the subtitles are good because what you see on screen is the scripted dialogue. This, for me, is really helpful, because, if I am honest, as well as having problems with the muttering, I sometimes have problems with the regional accents, too.

I love Brenda Blethyn and I have watched every episode of the series Vera in which she plays Geordie detective Vera stanhope. It’s good I love her because, until I started using the subtitles, I watched every episode at least twice.

Truthfully, I had to replay almost every scene to understand what the characters were saying. some scenes I watched a dozen times and still had no idea what was being said.

With live programmes, the subtitles, of course, are not so reliable because there is no script. The subtitles are generated by a computer that types up what it believes it has heard.

I recall watching the funeral of Margaret Thatcher four years ago and being somewhat startled suddenly to read on the screen the words: ‘ There will now be a moment’s violence.’

I was just recovering from this outrage when suddenly I read: ‘The arch-bitch will now speak.’

on investigation it turned out that what the commentator had actually said was, ‘There will now be a moment’s silence . . . the Archbishop will now speak.’ It’s still going on. Watching Andy Murray playing tennis last year I read the mindboggling subtitle: ‘Andy Murray has become Midge Ure.’

Anything is possible, but when I made enquiries I discovered that the commentator’s line had been, ‘Andy Murray has become mature’.

on sunday, I abandoned the BBC and found something that I’d be saving up to watch for months — The Durrells, ITV’s six-part adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s trilogy about his childhood on the island of Corfu.

It was beautifully made and I understood every word — which was impressive, since half the actors were Greek and performing in English.

It can be done.