The Daily Telegraph

Peter Sallis’s voice was to be enjoyed like vintage wine

- MELANIE MCDONAGH read MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

We’ve had the Last of the Summer Wine for good now that Peter Sallis is dead. Of all the captivatin­g things about it – the three old men who never really grew up (like Three Men in a Boat); the elegiac theme tune; the subversive­ness of Compo – the most disarming of all perhaps was the voice of Sallis as Norman Clegg, the widower with the crumpled face and deceptivel­y meek demeanour.

It was one of those voices that goes with a cloth cap: a bit downbeat, always wry and funny – almost regardless of the script. There are some voices that make for comedy, before you even catch the gags, and there is no better accent for it than a Yorkshire one. Peter Sallis’s voice – a bit nasal, a bit apologetic – expressed both a low expectatio­n of life and a capacity to see the funny side of it.

His lugubrious voice was his fortune, which was why it carried him into animation and the character of Wallace as in Wallace and Gromit – which was handy when he became too old for active work on television.

Wallace, the inventor who liked cheese, didn’t talk much – he wasn’t the type – but when he did, it was with a self-deprecatin­g Yorkshire accent: a voice that conveyed stoicism and fortitude even when it came out as a wail rather than speech. Which was funny, because Sallis was born in Twickenham.

Perhaps because ours is such a visual age, we don’t quite realise how potent voices are. But for an actor they’re the essence of character.

I remember a friend, the fine actor Jonathan Cecil, recalling playing the Third Messenger in King Lear,a character who had just the one, unpreposse­ssing line: “Edmund is dead, my lord.” He did it five ways, each with different emphasis and expression – declamator­y, conspirato­rial, stoical, sad and upbeat: it was like a pianist playing themes on a tune, only with the human voice used as an instrument.

We don’t perhaps give voices their due. Social media is pre-eminently visual – the selfie usually doesn’t come with speech – so people’s aural characteri­stics get lost in contempora­ry interactio­ns. You don’t get voices on dating websites, which is a pity, because it’s hard to imagine being drawn to someone with an irritating voice, or anything more captivatin­g than a mellifluou­s one (think Cyrano de Bergerac).

I worked for a time with Peter Utley, the former deputy editor of this paper, who was blind from a young age.

One of his most disarming qualities was that, because he couldn’t see you, he judged you by your voice and could tell instantly if you were upset. And voices, for him, were a giveaway of character.

The equivalent for sighted people of being blind is hearing people only on the radio: we invest them with the qualities that their voices suggest.

Quite often it can lead you astray: try matching Evan Davis’s offbeat looks with his authoritat­ive radio diction. And I could never entirely take the acerbic critic AA Gill seriously once I’d heard him speak on radio; it was the squeaky voice.

As for Peter Sallis, he lives on, immortal as the voices of Wallace and Cleggy. As he observed late in life: “I realise now, though it’s taken me nearly a hundred years, that my voice is distinctiv­e. I’m very lucky indeed.” So he was.

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