This Much is True: 'There's never been a memoir so packed with eye-popping, hilarious and candid stories' DAILY MAIL by Miriam Margolyes

Author:Miriam Margolyes
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781529379914
Publisher: John Murray Press
Published: 2021-09-15T23:00:00+00:00

To Dub or Not to Dub

The BBC provided the perfect training and diving board into the world of voice-overs. My voice, thanks to all those years of elocution and radio acting, is my not so secret weapon, but even I was surprised at the lengthy list (stretching across several pages!) of all the parts I’ve played. The Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny and PG Tips’ chimp are just the tip of the iceberg, as my voice is there embedded in literally hundreds of TV series and films, many of which I’ve now forgotten. Dubbed voices are never credited, and this anonymous artistry and skill are known only to those of us who stood in darkened studios years ago and tried to recreate, as best we could, the passion and flair of the original performance.

My favourite adventures in audio all started with ‘Sexy Sonia’, of course, after which I decided that, really, I preferred a script with words, rather than panting and moaning. After the dubbed version of a Japanese series called The Water Margin (I played all the female roles except Princess Titicaca, who was my old Cambridge friend Elizabeth Proud) became a surprise hit in 1976, I was booked again to perform most of the supporting female characters in another dubbed Japanese action TV series, Monkey, in 1978. We were a voice cast of about seven: there was Burt Kwouk; along with Andrew Sachs, of Manuel in Fawlty Towers fame; David Collings; Maria Warburg; Peter Woodthorpe; and Gareth Armstrong. When I went to Australia, that was one of the things that most impressed the technical crews that I worked with: the camera and lighting and all the gaffers and so on. They would say, ‘You did Monkey! Bloody hell! I used to watch that every day when I came back from school. That was my favourite programme!’ They were all just thrilled with it, but the tragedy is that I don’t remember it at all.

When you’re dubbing, you don’t watch the whole thing; only the scene that you are voicing. You go into a darkened room with a huge screen, like a cinema, and you stand there, maybe five or six of you behind your own individual mike. They play the loop, and we look at it, though I always prefer to listen to the guide track, and then you record your lines. I’m always so intent on getting the wipe, and starting exactly on cue when the wipe goes across, that I don’t really have time to think about the film itself. I just do my job, and then we go to the next scene.

I don’t really approve of dubbing. I believe in subtitles. I never go to a dubbed film: they always sound dead to me, because they don’t have the acoustic of the original action. Although they do try to reproduce it, and a great deal of time is spent doing that, in my opinion it never works. I don’t like animation either, and I would never go and watch a cartoon movie in the cinema.

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