ABSTRACT
By now you will have realized that I approach the question of voice from two directions – what’s happening in your body and what’s happening in your head. The two are often interlinked and I find it helpful to switch back and forth between them. So, after all that notso-hard work improving your physical approach, it’s time to think again about this business of mind-set. If you watch or listen to the best broadcasters, the overwhelming feeling is that they are communicating with you, even if you know perfectly well that at least some of the words they use are coming off an autocue or a piece of paper. But why do others – and maybe this includes you – sound wooden, flat, bored even, delivering the words with all the impact of a piece of wet cardboard? The answer often lies in what is happening in their heads; are they reading, or telling? Some otherwise talented broadcasters have huge difficulty with this. You occasionally hear them on local radio magazine format shows.They may have a lovely warm personality that comes across wonderfully on air so long as they are chatting ‘ad lib’ to the listener,
introducing records, nattering about last night’s TV. But sooner or later, they have to pick up a piece of paper and read out a weather report or the lead-in to the next interview. And my goodness, you can hear the join. Suddenly that lovely warm personality falls flat and dead. It is as if they have been replaced by a robot. They gabble through the script, clearly trying to get it over with as soon as possible. As a listener, you’re left to pick up as best you can the sense of what they’re saying, because they’re certainly not thinking about helping you by using their intonation to point up the key ideas in it. Words get stressed totally arbitrarily, and you know immediately they are reading something, not talking to you. In fact, they have totally forgotten you – all they’re thinking about is that piece of paper. So in this chapter I want to concentrate again on the difference between reading and talking. In an ideal broadcasting world, we should not be able to hear the ‘join’ where you stop ad-libbing and start a scripted piece. Everything you deliver on air requires what some broadcasters call a ‘conversational’ tone.
