Losing your voice
The perils of leaving a long time between parts of a series
At the time of writing I still haven’t started recording series 2 of my audio sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays and I confess to some trepidation. What if I’ve forgotten what Lee-Ann sounds like and I read it wrong? What if I’ve forgotten how to write the quirks and reported dialogue of the residents of Upper Wheatley?
We’ve all watched, listened to or read a series that changes tone or has an unexplained character shift. Blackadder from series 1 to 2 is the first sitcom that springs to mind, and though it made it better it was probably still a bit disorientating for the first viewers of series 2 episode 1, when all they had for reference was the previous series.
The same can happen with book series; I wrote in 2010 on my blog about the difficulties of a long series when I’d just read a Discworld novel featuring a character that jarred a bit (Ridcully in Unseen Academicals, if memory serves):
Characters change and develop, that’s only natural, but sometimes they become someone else, and you can’t see any plausible path that got them from their first appearance a dozen books ago to where they are now. Modes of speech, opinions, habits are suddenly at odds with what the reader expects… Even if the author can get back into the skin of a character, they might not want to, writing instead the character as they would write it from scratch were they to begin today, perhaps with more complexity. But a revised version of the character is not what hooked that reader in the first place…
As I don’t generally write recurring characters, this is not a problem I’ve come up against as a writer before. I wrote the first series pretty much one episode after another so it was more like writing a novel over the course of several months and having to hold the characters’ traits and habits in your head until the draft is done.
With Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays I not only write it but perform it so I have to get the ‘voice’ in both senses right: does the script contain words that Lee-Ann would use and scrapes that she would get herself into, and does the performance sound like the way I previously portrayed Lee-Ann? It’s six months since I last recorded an episode, though I did do a live performance of a five-minute extract in July at the Purple Room (where I’ll be reading again in May 2024, hopefully with a specially-written Lee-Ann short story but we’ll see how much time I have).
Lee-Ann is not me
Although I perform a monologue from Lee-Ann’s point of view, she is not me. As I told James Cary a few months ago, “I set about rewriting the pilot script as a monologue from the point of view of the character with the voice closest to mine”
Closest to, but not identical — again, in both senses of the word ‘voice’. There are words and phrases that Lee-Ann uses but I don’t, and vice versa. For instance Lee-Ann’s mild swear-word of choice, for when she’s vexed or needs emphasis, is ‘sodding’ whereas I would use ‘bloody’. There is also a difference in pronunciation of some common words which possibly falls somewhere between accent and dialect. Partly because I didn’t want her to sound exactly like me and partly because she’s got a different background, not least the influence of her older sister Gina who has ‘bettered herself’.
Speaking of different background, I’m from about as far to the south-east of Bradford as Lee-Ann is to the north-west of Bradford. You might think a difference of 11 miles between my origins in Drighlington and Lee-Ann’s fictional upbringing in Bingley (a town I used to live in) is hardly worth mentioning. Accents in England are said to change noticeably every 25 miles, but noticeably to whom? Locals can often discern differences on a smaller scale, and though nobody from Bingley has yet contacted me in disgust at my travesty of an accent, that might be because nobody from Bingley can bring themselves to listen beyond the intro.
Dialect
Even though Gina thinks her sister is embarrassingly working-class Yorkshire, whereas I went to university (three times) I use more dialect than Lee-Ann. Except maybe when I’m at the day-job, but you’d have to ask my colleagues about that.
Lee-Ann always says ‘something’ whereas I almost always say ‘some’at’1. Similarly with ‘owt’ and ‘nowt’2, which I use constantly but Gina tells Lee-Ann off for on the one occasion she slips up:
Gina said the word was ‘anything’, not 'owt', ‘Honestly Lee-Ann, you don't live in a terraced house in a mill town now.’ Strictly speaking Upper Wheatley had a mill long before Bingley ever did. And technically the building in which my over-priced attic conversion sits is a house sandwiched between two other houses, which sounds a lot like a terrace to me.
episode 3, Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays by JY Saville
Lee-Ann always says ‘yes’, never ‘aye’, whereas for me it depends on my mood and situation. Words like ‘by’ and ‘my’ in standard English would always rhyme with ‘aye’3 but it’s fairly common across the north of England (including Yorkshire) to sound them in some circumstances as though you’re a Knight That Goes Ni. Or with a y like in ‘many’, if you want a more prosaic explanation. Lee-Ann never pronounces them the northern way, I often do. There are undoubtedly other examples I haven’t thought of — feel free to ask.
Getting it right
I don’t tend to write dialect except in text messages or occasionally on the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter. So in terms of the script it’s mainly that in the first draft I’ll have used ‘bloody’ for emphasis or let one of my phrases slip past, and I realise as I’m going over it that Lee-Ann would never say that.
However, I don’t stick rigidly to the script at all times. As I’m reading it into the microphone I miss bits out or add a word, change the order to make it flow better. There is always a danger of my phrasing or pronunciation creeping in as it’s easier or more natural for me to say, but I do my best to resist.
Before I started writing series 2 (in August, so not that long after I’d last been immersed in the characters) I re-read sections of each script from series 1 to try and get the rhythm and phrasing back in my head. Listeners will soon be able to judge if I managed it. Now to find out if Parkin can remember how to mew as Lord Salisbury…
For those unfamiliar with Yorkshire, many of us use a contraction of the old-fashioned word ‘somewhat’ where others would say ‘something’. It is usually written ‘summat’ but I’m trying to change that.
‘Ought’ and ‘nought’, i.e. ‘anything’ and ‘nothing’. Again we go the old-fashioned route around here. Sometimes pronounced to rhyme with ‘oat’ and sometimes ‘out’. Although that depends how you pronounce oat and out, I guess.
Which sounds exactly like ‘I’ in my accent.