Small Man in a Book (29 page)

The whole room was geared around selling environmentally friendly industrial cleaning agents and each seller was given a list of contacts, or ‘leads’, and a script to follow once contact had been made. It went like this.

‘Hi, is that [insert name of lead]? Oh, hi there, I’m calling from [name of company selling environmentally friendly industrial cleaning agents] and I just want to say thanks for helping us out with the survey –’

‘What survey?’

‘That’s right. And I just wanted to let you –’

‘I’m sorry, what survey?’

‘Oh, the survey. We just had the results back and it makes pretty amazing reading –’

‘I don’t know about –’

At this point we were encouraged to have noticed something personal about the poor soul at the other end of the line and to comment on it, so as to make some kind of connection. I remember noticing that one of my leads had a German accent, and so I asked him where he was from. On hearing that he hailed from Düsseldorf, I professed delight at the mention of a town so dear to my own heart.

‘I don’t believe it! I spent my honeymoon there!’

I know. It’s appalling, isn’t it?

From here the script took us through to enthusing about the product and how, by ordering now, the customer/victim/new best friend could benefit from a fantastic deal etc., etc. All the time I was talking on the phone, if I got past the first paragraph without the lead hanging up, a supervisor would notice my progress and wander over to listen in and make encouraging faces and hand gestures. The aim was to get an order number – that was the Holy Grail. Once it had been obtained, the call could end and the triumphant salesperson got to ring a bell that would be heard by all the other salespeople. A little moment in the sun.

I managed one bell ring before coming over all peculiar. I suppose it was a panic attack of sorts, but after spending much of the day trying to force people into buying something they didn’t need I suddenly felt quite peculiar, stood up from my desk, walked out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building. Standing in the bright sunlight on Kensington High Street, I reached something of a nadir. I really couldn’t believe that things had come to this. I went to Barnes to see Martina, still feeling shaken up by the whole thing. I sat in the garden of the house where she was working, and played with Fraser and Will, the two little boys in her care. It helped to calm me down and wash away the day.

That night, back at the flat, I had an epiphany of sorts. It sounds stupid, but it was this. I can do funny voices. Probably nobody else in the telesales office could do them. I can do something that most people can’t; it’s crazy to be trying for a telesales job when I can do something that pays good money – if I could just get an ‘in’. I decided that the following morning I would go all out to get voice work. I would call every contact I knew, and see what I could get; there must be something.

And I would try again to get a voice agent.

It took me a long time to get an agent, but I still managed to find some bookings as a voice artist – thanks largely to my old college friend John Golley, who was now a promo producer at recently set-up Sky rival, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB). I called him that evening, after I’d got home, and told him about my experience and how bad I’d felt at hoodwinking Helmut with my bogus honeymoon. He arranged some sessions almost immediately and also secured me an introduction for some continuity work at the station.

The continuity announcing on BSB was not the same as continuity announcing at BBC Wales, where the incumbent was responsible not only for making the announcements, but also ‘driving’ the fairly complicated desk, resulting in a job somewhere between a DJ and an astronaut. At BSB, everything was new and computerized; all that was required of the failed actor sitting behind the microphone in the windowless room was to lean forward in his or her chair every half an hour and say, ‘And now on BSB … it’s
Mrs Pepperpot
.’ The shifts were eight hours long and dull beyond belief. But (and it was a big but) they were well paid – especially the evening shifts, which also came with a chauffeur-driven car to take you home. It was no wonder that the station didn’t survive when it was throwing its money around in this manner. I had been there for a short while, working the odd shift on a freelance basis, when I was offered a six-month contract. Although I didn’t want to be working as a continuity announcer – it was most definitely a step backwards – we desperately needed the money, and so I intended to accept the offer and sign the contract, which arrived in the post one Saturday morning.

As I opened the envelope, on the radio the newsreader was telling the nation the breaking news – that Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television was to merge with BSB. ‘Merge’ was a rather soft, fluffy and altogether too friendly word for what was about to happen to BSB – it was really only a merger in the sense that Germany once merged with Poland. I realized it was highly unlikely that my soon-to-be-accepted post would survive this ‘merger’ and, as I did so, the phone rang. It was my soon-to-be boss at BSB, asking if I’d heard the news and explaining that there was obviously no longer any point in signing the contract, given what was going to happen to the company. Perhaps it was my recent experience with the telesales, but I’m afraid I didn’t hesitate to lie straight back down the phone, saying that I’d already signed the contract and popped it in the post. I might even have asked him where he was calling from and then claimed to be unusually fond of it.

‘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).

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.