Word Service

Voice of an Actor

The British broadcast media's tactic of getting an actor with a funny accent to speak over the silences in interviews with Gerry Adams is a reasonably successful way of making fun of the government-imposed ban on the broadcasting of his voice.

Making fun of a government of such disreputable wallies gets you nowhere towards getting the regulations lifted though. Perhaps the time has come to have a campaign, perhaps a single day would be enough, in which the voice of every minister of the Crown was suppressed and voiced over by an underemployed thespian with a suitably silly voice.

Of course, there would be no compelling reason to go back afterwards to the boring unimaginative tradition of self-spoken speech that had been heretofore conventional for everyone except bomber Adams and his cronies. In this way perhaps a whole new technique of public rhetoric would be established where one relied on the same runner being used whenever one batted on the radio or telly.

A new profession of political speaker, as opposed to politician whose lips are moving, would gradually come into being: perhaps there would be a new type of permanent civil servant whose job it would become to enunciate the words of politicians of the party in power, without any colouring of them by their own political views.

Eventually it should occur to some bright spark that an actor could do the silent mouthing bits as well. There are those who claim that this has... never mind.