If you’ve always loved audio books but never stopped to wonder how they are made, then give yourself a slap and continue reading.
Maggie Ollerenshaw described her world to a modest audience at the Guildford book festival, revealing the production process with some of the anecdotal colouring-in that makes listening to veterans talking about their particular fields so enlightening. With over 50 audiobooks to her name, she cheerily played down quite what hard work this voice-acting really is. Recording at a rate of a 150 pages a day, each page-turn is meticulously planned to fall into an editable pause. Clunky jewellery is to be avoided and the highly sensitive microphones require the actor to sit incredibly still. Although this could seem limiting for an actor, it is actually an increasingly popular job. For one thing, you can control every character, and influence the finished product to a tyrannical extent. Catching a cold halfway through the production used to be disastrous but remarkably the nasal bung can now be edited out.
Maggie seemed to be describing a cosy industry that basically amounted to sitting in comfy chairs, having tea, and reading books. But where was the raging debate that embroiled Audiobookland? Abridgement! To abridge, or not to abridge, that is the question Maggie put to the audience. We all agreed with her ‘not’. She recalled a friend who, when landed with the unenviable job of abridging the Count of Montecristo, resorted simply to replacing the middle 600 pages with the phrase: ‘for the next seven years, he toured the Mediterranean in various guises’. Horrendous abridgements, legendary spoonerisms, misinterpreted details of characterisation: these are the sorts of stories traded around the audiobook world.
One nugget that made me feel quite proud to be British was the discovery of the BBC Pronunciation Unit, a valuable source for voice actors dealing with difficult words.
Finally, we retreated to a passage from Chapter 13 of David Copperfield, Maggie’s original audition piece. I closed my eyes and it was blissfully similar to the “real” thing’. And her own favourite voice actor? Martin Jarvis of course.
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