0220 – What A Carry On! Kenneth Williams On How His Comic Voice Caused Serious Injury

0220 – What A Carry On! Kenneth Williams On How His Comic Voice Caused Serious Injury

Forcing your voice to do anything unusual is not good, as the British comic actor Kenneth Williams recounted about the over-the-top ‘cowboy drawl’ voice he adopted, together with a misaligned jaw, when he played the part of Judge Burke in ‘Carry On Cowboy’ (1965): (AUDIO)

“…and I was doing all this on the first day of the film, and at the end of the day I was in agony. And my jaw… it had strained all the ligaments of the jaw. And so I went back on the set the next day and I said the Gerald Thomas ‘well I’m not going to do that voice, I’m going to do another voice’ and he said ‘You can’t change! We’ve shot a whole mass of film and continuity demands that you do it all again, you’ve got to keep to it!’. So, for six weeks …! Eventually I was very ill and had to wear a special thing, a bandage thing, and the surgeon got the jaw back into realignment. It was agony.”

Kenneth Williams, (Interview on Australian TV with Mike Walsh c.1983)

Through these around-5-minute episodes, you can build your confidence and competence with advice on breathing and reading, inflection and projection, the roles played by better scripting and better sitting, mic techniques and voice care tips... with exercises and anecdotes from a career spent in TV and radio studios. If you're wondering about how to start a podcast, or have had one for a while - download every episode!

And as themes develop over the weeks (that is, they are not random topics day-by-day), this is a free, course to help you GET A BETTER BROADCAST, PODCAST AND VIDEO VOICE.

Look out for more details of the book during 2021.

Contacts: https://linktr.ee/Peter_Stewart

Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

The podcast title refers to those who may wish to change their speaking voice in some way. It is not a suggestion that anyone should, or be pressured into needing to. We love accents and dialects, and are well aware that how we speak changes over time. The key is: is your voice successfully communicating your message, so it is being understood (and potentially being acted upon) by your target audience?

This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo