This Much Is True

As with radio, there is an art to commercial voice-over work. When you’re creating with your voice alone, the focus has to be absolutely tight. I always ask the director to specify age and class. If you can centre your character accurately in a class category, it will be authentic. Then comes the geographical region. I always like to offer several readings to give them a choice. I believe I was easy to work with; I enjoyed a joke and loved to shock — I would change my tights in John Wood’s foyer if Maureen would look out for me. Sometimes, if annoyed with stupid directors, I’d pull up my jumper and frighten them with my bra. But when I was in the booth and working, I was totally focused. The skill is in the timing, which was usually thirty seconds — the duration of most TV commercials. I was famous for my accuracy. I could shave four seconds off if required.

Of course, commercials aren’t live, so the engineers can help you a lot. My tips for doing voice-overs, are not to speak directly into the mike and to breathe quietly (although with advertisements, the sound engineers can cut out the breath so that it doesn’t get in the way). I always made friends with my sound engineers. They are as skilled as I am and their expertise can help me in so many ways. They can clip your take to make it fit the time, they can make you sound amazing. We are a team, the engineer and the voice.

I have always relished the detail needed in voice work for commercials, because you only have your voice to create a whole world. You have to pick out the words in the script which sell, and you have to colour them, lean on them, elongate them, or make them suddenly stand out in a certain way: words like ‘free’, or ‘you’, or ‘love’ — these are words that have bubbles of excitement in them. You use that emphasis and nuance when you’re delivering your text. I was also renowned for being ruthless with the scripts; if I thought that the grammar was bad, I would say so: ‘I’m sorry, I’m not saying this. It’s incorrect — can we alter it, please?’ Those advertising chaps always said yes.

I liked working with the creatives and directors, but every now and again, somebody thought that they would show off a bit and give you a bad time. There’s a famous tape of Orson Welles losing his temper at an inane session director who was mucking him about: the product was Findus frozen peas. Only once did I not complete the recording session. I said to the director, ‘I’m sorry, you’re asking me to do something that is undoable, and, frankly, not worth doing.’ And then I walked out of the booth.

When there were a few of us working together on a voice-over, it was in a larger studio, and each of us had a mike; or sometimes you had one for all of you, and you had to be sensitive and withdraw — or ‘recede’ as it’s called — i.e. you back away from the mike in order to let your colleague have it. But, more and more, it’s just me on my own these days. I go into a little separate booth, put on my headphones, they close the soundproof door so I’m sealed away from the world, and I begin. It’s lonely, but you can keep the pencils.

From about 1978 all the way through to the mid-eighties, I recorded a good number of the famous PG Tips adverts with the chimpanzees. I was Dolly, who had a charlady voice, while Ada, the other chimp (whose real name was Choppers), was Stanley Baxter. Nowadays you couldn’t do it because they used real chimpanzees from Twycross Zoo, who were dressed up and filmed drinking tea and so on. In one of our ads, Dolly was at the sink up to her elbows in suds, when she says, ‘I’m fed up with this washing up. My Phil always calls me his little dishwasher.’ Then Stanley, playing Ada, replies, ‘What do you call him, then?’ and I reply, ‘Bone idle!’ At the end of each commercial, Dolly would have a swig of Brooke Bond’s PG Tips, and say, ‘It’s the taste.’ I loved doing it and we were working with all the award-winning advertising chaps. Alan Copp, the producer, for example, was also responsible for the famous dried mashed potato SMASH advertising campaign, and the director, Bernie Stringle, was the top TV commercial director at that time.