When bookings started to increase, and my friends were as busy as I was, a group of us clubbed together to rent a little flat in Broadwick Street. Sharing the flat were me, Tony Jackson, Ray Brooks (who was mainly a television actor); Martin Jarvis; John Baddeley; David Tate (best known for his work in the original radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy); Patrick Allen, who was probably the most well known; and Geoffrey Matthews, another gifted pal from radio.
On any one day, there was a lot of time hanging about in between jobs, and having the flat meant instead of having to go backwards and forwards from Soho to home, we could wait there. It was Tony Jackson’s idea. He was a working-class boy from Birmingham, with black hair, black eyes, massive sexual energy and he was a terrific voice-over artist with intelligence and artistic flair. As one of the major male-voice success stories in the early seventies, Tony was making about £50,000 per annum; that was a lot of money then. If he hadn’t taken to drink, he would have been a big star but, sadly, died too young.
It was a small world and we were much envied by other actors because everybody knew that we were making money and having fun. We weren’t all in the flat at the same time, of course, because sometimes someone would have a job in theatre, or film, but we chipped in and paid our share regardless. I suspect some of the men may have used the bedroom for an afternoon fuck. It was tremendous fun to be with my fellow actors and so convenient; I used to have a swim at Marshall Street Baths, and then did my shopping at Berwick Street Market. There were lots of little restaurants and places to go. One of my favourite shops was Andrew Edmunds in Lexington Street. Every time I got a good job, I bought a nineteenth-century political cartoon from Andrew. Rowlandson, Gillray and Heath were my favourites. The spur to purchase came from the size of the ladies depicted. They are all remarkably fat, stout, portly, roly-poly, substantial, heavyset, weighty, blubbery — you get the picture? Well, so did I. It isn’t the politics that grabs me, it’s the fecundity. They are the classical equivalent of the seaside postcard, breasts and appetites barely contained, the full panoply of Georgian excess in glorious colour.
We were getting so many bookings that Wendy Noel made us have little pagers, and she would page us the details of the next job. We sat and chatted in the flat waiting for our pagers to buzz; every buzz meant money. We would have tea, coffee and pastries from Cranks, the famous vegetarian restaurant next door to the swimming pool. We’d bring in all the food and laugh and wait for the money to roll in. It was an amazing time.
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.
Often it was just me, Stanley Baxter and Bernie Stringle together in the studio. It was difficult doing lip sync for a chimp, because the mouth of a chimp doesn’t move in the same way as a human mouth. They had somehow made the chimps’ mouths go up and down, open and close, open and close, and we had to synchronise our voices to that. So, we had to make sure that the words opened and closed, exactly in time with their mouths. Normally, how it works — and this is the same for doing lip sync for a chimp, or dubbing a foreign language film — is that they run the bit of film which you are to voice, and something called a ‘wipe’ goes across the screen. It’s like a finger, and when this finger hits a certain point, in the middle of the screen, that’s your cue to start to say your lines. But Bernie didn’t depend on that: the moment you had to start to speak, he used to touch you on the shoulder. He told me once how an anxious actor had worried about getting the sync right. Bernie had said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you a tap on your shoulder when you need to start.’ The moment came, Bernie tapped his shoulder — and the actor fainted dead away.