The other day, I
recorded my first podcast. Since I had not been in a recording studio for many
years, the sound engineer suggested that I make a sample recording - just a few
minutes long - and then listen to the playback before returning to my
soundproof booth to do the real thing.
I sat down with the
engineer and he pressed Play on my sample. What
do you think? he asked at the end. I
sound a bit posh is what came out, immediately. He was surprised (maybe he had
heard no poshness) and puzzled, Is that a
bad thing?
Well, yes and no. Yes,
because it may give listeners the wrong idea about me. I didn’t start life with
a posh voice; I acquired one as a result of succeeding educationally and
thereby becoming socially mobile. But I’ve always liked to think that my voice
has not been quite so mobile. I still recall once meeting a university
acquaintance from a similar background but a decade after we had both left
Oxford. I was appalled by his accent, Oxford and affected. But it probably
wasn’t affected at all; it’s likely that he had just assimilated more easily.
Now here am I, someone
who hasn’t taught a university seminar or been to a middle class dinner party
for twenty years, placing myself in front of a microphone and immediately, to
my own ear, sounding posh. Maybe the subject matter explains it: I was reading
something I had written about Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel. Maybe if I
had been talking in a less scripted way about my childhood or a pet hate I
would have sounded different.
I had other criticisms
of my first attempt. My voice was too high pitched - first night nerves; I
spoke too slowly - I was afraid of stumbling over words, an age-related hazard.
And when I listened to the final product, I thought I sounded a bit camp. The editor
of Booklaunch (Stephen Games) who had
requested the podcast picked up on the last two aspects, asking that in any
future recording I should be a bit faster (but not less dramatic).
But there is a case to be made for the poshness. The voice in
which I read my piece about the novel was appropriate to the subject matter. It
was full of words I never learnt as a child, only much later from
teachers and friends. If I had read it in my original accent, it would have
sounded false because a listener would realise that those words being spoken in
an identifiably lower class accent would never have been spoken in a lower
class home. That falseness would have been more distracting than the poshness.
In contrast, if someone who had grown up speaking with a Scottish or West
Indian accent had read my piece for me, it would be less distracting or not
distracting at all because those accents are not in themselves class-related.
In middle and upper class Scots and West Indian homes, one also talks about the
novel.
To hear the finished podcast, go to
