I felt like doing the Ode to a Nightgale today.
It's one of the first poems I read, using a cheaper microphone with a poor lower register and making an mp3 file before uploading. I know now that these things make me sound different from the way I really sound. My wife tells me so. Note that I didn't say they made me sound worse - just different. This recording sounds more like me, so my wife says. I know of no higher authority.
In fact, the first time I met my wife she was surprised that I knew the "Nightingale" by heart: she knew it too. We recited it together, perhaps because we weren't entirely sober. Poetry is a very good way of gaining points in a girl's estimation, if she's that sort of girl: whether it counts as a dirty trick I don't know - all I know is that, as tricks go, it works pretty well. Anyway, she's still here and she still listens to me reciting poetry.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I don't sound like John Geilgud, Peter O'Toole. Orson Welles, Alan Rickman or Kenneth Branagh, not usually because they care about poetry but because, in general, they are of a spiteful nature and want to annoy me.
They are mistaken in thinking that I will be annoyed. In fact, they might be surprised to learn that I deliberately avoid sounding like any of those great actors. They all have characteristics that I don't like nor have any wish to emulate: I just want to sound like me, for better or for worse.
Not that these actors do not have wonderful voices. The problem is that they also have characteristic faults. And imitations are no use anyway: lots of people can sing like Al Jolson.
Orson Welles, particularly when he was older, became more fruitily bass than was appropriate: it's wrong to sound too self-aware. Geilgud wasn't macho enough for my liking, he sounded too effete, dear boy. Kenneth Branagh sounds like the Head Prefect playing the leading man in the school play. Peter O'Toole sounds like a world-weary reprobate half-cut shakes-pher-herian ac-tor. Alan Rickman reads everything, no matter what it means, like he's trying to get into some girl's knickers.
I don't sound like any of these guys. The trap I have to avoid is sounding like Tom Baker who was Dr. Who, the one with the curly wig, and who did the blissfully offensive voice-over for Little Britain in the USA. I really love Tom's voice but he lays it on like icing on a wedding cake. He revels in self-parody, like Bill Shatner, doing commercials for china plates and other voice-overs that really sound like he's taking the piss.
Now, it's not me who applies these critical standards, it's my dear wife. She says - do that bit again, you sound too fruity like Tom Baker, or too sexy like Alan Rickman and so forth. And I say "Yes, dear, you're right," and I humbly obey. It pays well to know on which side your bread is buttered.
So if you want to piss me off, you'll have to think of something better than comparing me unfavourably with famous actors. As John Donne said, comparisions are odious. And you wouldn't want to displease my wife, would you?
