by Rob Brydon
‘Brentford? I spent my honeymoon there.’
A few weeks later, this uncharacteristic moment of thinking on my feet resulted in the arrival of a cheque for many several thousands of pounds, although I never set foot in the voice booth again.
During this stage of my career I would pick up the odd corporate job, and it was around this time that I won an engagement that must surely rank as one of the most embarrassing. No easy feat, given the competition.
When interviewing me, journalists often bring up my time as the voice of the television commercial for Toilet Duck as representing a low point for me, but it’s really not the case. (It was an ad that ran and ran for a long time and was very lucrative indeed.) No, the low point was my booking, as an actor, for a corporate event in Glasgow centred around thrush. The condition, not the bird – fungal, rather than feathered.
I was flown up from London and took to the stage at a shiny new hotel by the docks, a conference planner’s heaven. In front of an audience made up of employees of Bayer, the makers of Canesten, I brought to life a plethora of roles – doctor, salesman, pharmacist – and bravely acted out a range of situations in which Canesten promises to make all the difference.
I remember little of the event, beyond the sense that my career was a boggy marsh and I’d arrived without wellies. But the slogan of the night has stayed with me all these years. It refers, in this instance, to inconvenience in a lady’s special place. But it could so easily be applied to life in general.
Treat the cause, not the itch.
Wise words.
14
The thrush job had come through my new agent, Ashley Boroda at Noel Gay Artists, who also began to put me forward for corporate videos and a few small television roles. More importantly, in the short term I had, after much pestering, been taken on by the voice department at Noel Gay. After putting together a new demo tape, I slowly began to pick up some work voicing radio ads.
My agent at Noel Gay Voices was Bernie Gaughan, who also represented Chris Barrie, star of Red Dwarf and The Brittas Empire. Chris had been one of the voices on Spitting Image and was in great demand for commercials. Sometimes this demand outstripped supply, and that was where I came in; many of my early voice jobs were ones that Chris was unable to fit into his schedule. My schedule at the time was less than packed, and I jumped at the chance to get a foot in the door.
I usually played a character role, as opposed to the silky-smooth voice at the end of the ad (the ‘end voice’, as it is known) who speaks the ‘tag line’. This is usually something along the lines of: ‘Thickly, creamily … you won’t find a better butter.’ The end lines are easier and quicker to do, but the character roles are more fun. In those days, the early to mid-nineties, it was not uncommon for the ad agency to have brought in three or four actors to play a scene together. This would change in the years that followed, as budgets tightened and everything became scaled down, but back then there was a very enjoyable social aspect to the job. You’d run into friends in the studios, and then hang out in cafés afterwards.
Another perk with this kind of work was that I’d sometimes find myself working with well-known actors, the celebrities of the day. I acted in ads alongside Martin Clunes, Neil Morrissey and Caroline Quentin (huge at the time with Men Behaving Badly), with comedy stars like John Thomson and Graham Fellows, and once with the actor Sir Donald Sinden when I played Noddy to his Big Ears. It was a radio commercial for an insurance company and the gist of the ad was a tea party hosted by Martha Monkey, here played by Pauline Quirke, at which Noddy and Big Ears enjoy Martha’s mushroom soup. All is well until Big Ears realizes the reason the soup tastes so delicious is that it is made from the biggest mushroom in the forest, which also happens to be Big Ears’s house.
Before beginning the recording, we all sat in the control room while the director of the ad, Steve Bendelack (celebrated for his work on The League of Gentlemen) went through the script. Sir Donald leaned forward in his chair, listening intently as Steve likened the moment that Big Ears realizes he’s eating his own house to something from Titus Andronicus.
‘It’s a dawning realization,’ explained Steve.
The great thespian’s eyes narrowed in agreement, and he nodded his approval.
‘I mean, it’s Titus fucking Andronicus, Donald!’
This was music to Donald’s ears.
‘Mmm … Titus Andronicus!’
Satisfied that we’d got to grips with the complexities of the script, the actors gathered in the recording booth and we began the session with my line as Noddy: ‘Mmm, great soup, Martha!’
The ad then continued until Big Ears reached his moment of truth: ‘Was it a large mushroom? In the middle of the wood? With a white picket fence all around it? Noooooo!’
We stepped back from the microphone and awaited the response of Steve and his team.
‘That was great. Just one thing … Could you make it a little bigger please, Donald?’
Sir Donald Sinden’s eyebrows raised ever so slightly as he noted the request, and he whispered to Pauline and me, ‘Bigger? Mmm … He doesn’t know what he’s asking for!’
The next take was very big indeed.
I was getting bookings for radio commercials for quite a while before I landed my first television job. I was beginning to think that it might never happen when along came my debut, playing a Ribena berry in an ad celebrating the advent of an exciting new kind of Ribena – a Ribena with no added sugar. I’d long prayed for the arrival of such a product, and now here I was, an integral part of its launching to the general public. I was a hard-working little berry, slaving away on the production line, where my job involved remembering not to put the sugar in. I accidentally did just that – I put the sugar in the No Added Sugar Ribena. This was when my first line in a TV ad came: ‘Oh! I must remember to forget to put the sugar in.’
It might sound odd to you, but I really was terribly excited at the prospect of finally getting my first TV ad, although I would have to wait some time to witness the fruit of my labours. It’s worth remembering that this wondrous product was new – it didn’t exist in the shops when I recorded the voice – so I knew that I wouldn’t see the ad on the television until the cartons started appearing on supermarket shelves. With this in mind, I would slope off to Waitrose in East Sheen and casually stroll down the fruit-drinks aisle while casting a sly glance in the direction of the Ribena. It was months before I spotted the object of my desire; when I did, I gave a little yelp of delight and bought two. I had broken my duck and the ad was soon on the television with alarming regularity.
From here on in, the voice-overs just built and built. I realized that what producers were looking for was, first and foremost, someone who could give them a good read of their script, although there were very many other factors that came into play and dictated whether you would pick up repeat business with individual agencies. These included how quick you were (how soon you could get to the good read) and how well you could take direction (that is to say, to what extent you could listen to what they were telling you they wanted to hear, and then say it back to them, just as they’d envisaged it).
It’s surprising how many actors can’t take direction. There was one chap I used to do quite a few ads with in the early days who, on being given the note, ‘Could you do it a little quicker?’ would reply, ‘Yes, well, you did ask me to do it a bit slower last time.’
My approach was always just to give them what they wanted.
‘Could you time the read to half a second …?’
‘Could you shave a second off without sounding rushed …?’
‘Could you stretch the read out, without sounding stretched …?’
The third request is far less common than the first two; ads are often overwritten, and the challenge is to get everything in without sounding speedy. There are tricks to reading quickly – perhaps the most helpful one is to stop trying to project your voice (you can fit far more words in that way).
&
nbsp; The final tip for getting more bookings was, quite simply, to be pleasant to work with. I’d always try to make the producer and her team laugh at least a couple of times during a session, for no better reason than that people like to laugh. I figured they would probably choose the voice-over artist who made them laugh over the one who didn’t, all things being equal.
In my heyday, at the height of my powers, the mid-nineties onwards, I must have recorded zillions of commercial voice-overs. It would be silly to list them. But if I did they would include Sainsbury’s, Somerfield, British Home Stores, Tesco, McDonald’s, Tango, Toilet Duck, Nivea, the Sunday Times, the Sun, Daily Mail, Subway, Domino’s, Nationwide, British Gas, Sky, ITV, Wild Bean Café, Kit Kat, Hula Hoops, The TrainLine, Bounty, Renault, Ford, Fairy, Crunchy Nut, Philadelphia, Raleigh and Pot Noodle.
I was a voice-over machine.
In addition to the commercials, I also found work lending my manly tones whenever a voice was needed. Had you visited Beaulieu Motor Museum in the nineties, you may well have heard me telling you all about the history of motoring. I did a similar thing for a canal museum, and also provided voices for prank phone calls of the sort found advertised in the back pages of lads’ mags (a tenuous arrangement with a chap in Wales, for which I was never paid).
Another area to offer me gainful employment at this time was the relatively new world of computer games. While I love computers and all things Mac (I’m looking at a lovely MacBook Air right now), I’ve never really been a big fan of games, though that hasn’t stopped me adding my voice to them when the opportunity arose.
Discworld was based on the hugely popular books of the same name by the hugely popular Sir Terry Pratchett. The lead role of Rincewind was voiced by Eric Idle, and I played an assortment of other characters. It was deemed a success, and so a few years later I was asked to do a follow-up, Discworld Noir, this time playing the lead character Lewton and many, many, many others.
Voicing video games sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun, doesn’t it? It isn’t. Perhaps, if you’re an aficionado of the games, it can be quite pleasurable. But, to the disinterested money-motivated layman like myself, it’s far from a walk in the park. Number one, in common with most animation, you record your bits in isolation, alone in a little booth. My excitement at the prospect of meeting a real-live Python was a little premature; at no point did I come within ten miles of Eric Idle. I would go on to eventually meet one member of Monty Python some years later at an awards do, when the excellent Michael Palin spotted me and made my night by saying, ‘Oh, if you’re here, it’ll be good!’
The second problem with recording voices for video games is the size of the scripts. In my experience, video-game scripts are almost unbelievably large – huge, slab-like, telephone-directory-dwarfing tomes that take several lifetimes to read, let alone perform. Something like Discworld, set in a bizarre universe from the imagination of Terry Pratchett, is full of the most peculiar lines of dialogue.
‘Behold, the goram-jewelled anti-husk of Grint, once belonging to Aaangrin, son of Pottywretch and Nim. See how it glistens under the shimmering light of our three moons. Eh, Lolfop?’
The script didn’t actually say that, but it might as well have done; in fact, reading it back, I think it’s quite good. I might give it a go myself.
From the voice artist’s point of view, the main problem with the scripts is that, given the nature of game play, they have to contain a ridiculous number of options and reactions for and to whatever the pale, lank-haired, social-skills-lacking player does. This leaves the voice artist stranded for hours in his padded cell delivering mind-crushingly dull variations on a theme, so as to be able to deal with whatever the player chooses to do.
‘So, you’ve opened the cursed casket of Minge!’
‘Ooh! You haven’t opened the cursed casket of Minge!’
‘Why haven’t you opened the cursed casket of Minge?’
‘Can I interest you in the cursed casket of Minge?’
‘Behold, the cursed casket of Minge!’
‘What’s that? It looks like the cursed casket of Minge!’
‘Hmm, a cursed casket … I wonder where it’s from?’
‘If you like caskets and you like Minge, you’ll love …’
It feels as though I spent years recording the Discworld games, though in reality it was probably just a week or so. I believe they were successful, and the people at the games company couldn’t have been nicer, but I think it’s safe to say they’re probably my last attempt at the oeuvre.
I believe it was Sean Connery who said, ‘Never say never again.’
He obviously wasn’t referring to voicing video games.
I was becoming a regular fixture at the more lucrative voice-over studios scattered around Soho. This small area of London’s West End contains a mind-boggling number of recording studios and at my busiest I would spend whole days schlepping from one to another, from Zoo on Wardour Street to Jungle on Dean Street, up to Saunders & Gordon on Gresse Street then across to the Bridge on Great Marlborough Street, finishing off at the Tape Gallery on Lexington Street. The studios were all in competition, not just in having the best technical equipment and engineers but, more importantly to me, in how luxurious they could make their reception areas. There would always be plush sofas, with acres of magazines and drinks being offered on arrival, and most also had overflowing bowls of sweets and chocolates that were constantly being refilled. I got to know the girls on reception at all these places; we would chat while I stuffed my face with sugary delights. Those sweets that wouldn’t fit in my mouth would always find a temporary home in my pockets.
There would be gaps in between bookings, sometimes of several hours, and I soon became a leading authority on the fine art of killing time. My destination of choice would be HMV on Oxford Street, their huge store near the top of Poland Street, where I could easily while away several eternities, browsing through the CDs, the books and the videos. I remember something the broadcaster Danny Baker once said about record shops, and how he was quite happy to look at records he already owned. I understood that completely; it was like checking in on old friends and seeing how they were doing. I had a little routine.
On the ground floor, I’d visit Elvis, Bruce, James (Taylor) and Paul (Simon). The Bruce section rarely had anything new to offer in those days, maybe a Japanese CD EP with an odd track listing. The same was true of James Taylor and Paul Simon, but the Elvis section was always a potential treasure chest that might throw up all manner of curios (although even the most fervent fan would have to concede that, at the end of the day, he was unlikely to have recorded any new material – it was always essentially old Coke in new cans). But, ‘Hey, now,’ as Hank Kingsley once said to Larry Sanders, ‘that’s good enough for me!’
After I’d satisfied myself that the ground floor had no more to offer I would make my way to the escalator and head upstairs, maybe pausing on the way to wave to Rod (Stewart, who else?) and Billy (Joel). Oh, there’s Barbra Streisand – sorry, Barbra, didn’t see you there. Upstairs was video, and DVD. I spent absolutely acres of time here looking for Pacino films, or Simon and Garfunkel television specials that might feature the brilliant Charles Grodin. If I’m being horribly honest, I also used to loiter by the comedy section and look to see where I’d live, if I ever managed to get a DVD out. It was a nice neighbourhood, not far from Blackadder, Bill Cosby and Billy Connolly. I would picture my face staring out from the racks of the people who had already made it. Coming back to reality, I’d search for Marlon Brando or Richard Burton movies and odd videos collating Elvis’s 1950s spots on the Ed Sullivan or Milton Berle shows. These were the dark days before the instant access of YouTube; the vintage clips still had great rarity value, which could give their lucky discoverer a sense of Indiana Jones-like adventure.
I would usually have to buy something, anything, just to have the satisfaction of going up to the till and walking away with an item in a bag, which would then be carried down
to the basement and the exotic, subterranean world of film soundtracks, opera, classical and jazz. The soundtracks were always a good place to kill a few hours, hunting for films remembered from childhood. I would search out old James Bond – Marvin Hamlisch’s Bond ’77, the soundtrack of The Spy Who Loved Me, seen at the Royal Playhouse in Tenby that titular year – or John Barry’s score for the rarely celebrated Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour weepie Somewhere in Time. I’d watched it on the television as a teenager and been left in floods of tears. I could get it now on DVD, but I’d be afraid to spoil my memory of it as being an excellent film (it’s noticeably absent from the endless lists of the ‘100 Greatest Movies’ compiled by busy editors to fill their magazines and papers).
It was on this basement level of HMV that I’d find a rotating stand of specialist magazines: Sinatra fanzines; glossy spreads devoted to Barbra Streisand; and, best of all, a little publication called Elvis: The Man and His Music. This came out quarterly, I think, and although I would sometimes splash out and buy it, more often than not I would just stand there for as long as it took to read from cover to cover.
My departure from the store would always include a forlorn glance towards classical and jazz, and a moment’s wondering if I would ever be sophisticated enough to walk amongst the serious-looking types browsing the Shostakovich and Coltrane. I have since come to appreciate both these art forms, but back in my voice-over days they were still another country to me. While at school in Porthcawl I had once gone to the home of a friend, Jason Chess, a very bright, academically gifted boy. He lived in Cornelly, just west of Porthcawl, and I was shocked on entering his bedroom for the first time to find his shelves lined with classical and opera records – no space here for my buddies Bruce and Rod, not even Elvis. He’d gone straight to sophistication, not passing ‘Go’ yet still managing to pick up £200 on the way.