Bespoke intonation of the radio days
IDON’T know about you, but voices have always fascinated me. As a boy I was enthralled by the vocal gymnastics of Peter Sellers in The Goon Show. Sellers could do any voice, so much so, that it was said even he didn’t know what his real voice sounded like. I’d listen to cricket commentary by John Arlott, Alan McGilvray and Iain Gallaway, as much for the rich voices as for the action they were describing.
A good voice can lift even bland content. Famously, actor Sir Michael Redgrave with great theatrical aplomb once read A List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen, compiled by Beachcomber (J B
Morton), for a Spike Milligan television show.
The names themselves provided fun (“Whackfast, E W., Fodge, S., and Nurthers, P L.”), but it was Redgrave’s voice which provided the magic. Redgrave solemnly walked to a lectern, donned his reading glasses, and read the names in alphabetical order with great seriousness, as though reading the names of the dead at a memorial service.
Thus, when it came to getting a job, I gravitated to radio where playing with voices was all in a day’s work.
Working for the NZBC meant that some subterfuge was needed. Out went the Kiwi accent and on came a weird amalgam of a pseudoBBC posh and clergymansermon delivery.
Broadcasting when I hit the air waves in the 1960s was riddled with failed actors and people who had taken speech lessons as children. The archives hold a recording of my 18yearold voice which I was once tempted to permanently erase.
“Pompous prat” would be the general comment, but the authorities encouraged that sort of thing. As early as the 1950s the NZBS had hauled in its head of drama, Bernard Beeby, to teach budding announcers how to speak properly.
Dunedin announcerincharge George Speed is remembered for presenting each of his staff with a cork and some people still have their cork. The theory was that by reading a script aloud with a cork in your mouth you would be forced to use your tongue and your teeth, important elements in speaking clearly.
Announcers were sent to a training school founded by chief announcer Ken Green (“The Ken Green Academy for the Sons and Daughters of Gentlefolk” was its irreverent nickname). There, Kiwisms like “foin” for “fine” and “ashfelt” for “asphalt” were expunged from your vocabulary and you learned the arcane skill of transcribing your words into phonetics. What you sounded like dictated what you would be paid, so we followed the rules rigorously. How well you were communicating with your audience was of less concern, so that the NZBC voice became something of an object of ridicule. It took the success of private radio, which even used Australians on air in the 1970s, for the gurus at the announcing school to ease off and realise their audiences were New Zealanders, not genteel matrons from the Home Counties.
The NZBC training was actually more useful overseas and many European broadcasters actively pursued New Zealand talent for their shortwave services. The Dutch, for instance wanted Radio Nederland to be free of BBC and American English and so the New Zealand radio voice was much in demand.
In the 1970s, despairing of getting any work with the BBC, I was snapped up by the Dutch and found their Hilversum studios to be awash with New Zealanders.
NZBC news reading was for many years a male job. How could a woman be expected to bring authority to an announcement about an outbreak of swine fever?
I wonder if today’s media voices could handle announcing a really big story.
Only an NZBC voice could do justice to: “And just to hand, reports that large rocks are falling from the sky over Auckland and a 7.8 earthquake has rocked the Wellington region. The South Island, apart from the top few metres of Aorangi, has been submerged in a gigantic tidal wave. The Prime Minister has announced that this is the end of the world and we must go early and go hard. In other news, a cat missing for more than two years has turned up at its home in Geraldine. Owner, Olive Musgrunt, told 1 News that . . .’’
There are still a few oldies with NZBC voices around, retired and grumbling about the slovenly speech of today’s broadcasters.
We doddery veterans, even when chatting about the weather, often continue to sound as if we are addressing a public meeting or solemnly reading the prices from the Temuka Weaner Calf Sale.
My own plan is to book the town hall, rip out a few pages of the Otago telephone directory and have the magisterial Dougal Stevenson, garbed in academic regalia, read them out to an audience who would then understand what I’ve been on about. Watch the “Entertainments” column during the next few weeks.