What first got me interested in Voice Acting?

How did I first come to love all things about Voiceovers, Voice Acting, Narration, and whatever else you can do with Voices?

For starters, I feel i need to point out I have the memory of a Goldfish. Yes, I'm aware they have recently been proven to have better memories than we originally thought, but still the old stereotype gets the point across.

Unfortunately I have retained few of the memories from my childhood, unless they were particularly poinient moments that get repeatedly brought up over and over at family gatherings, or times where the event scared me silly, or moments where my life was in danger for whatever reason. Fortunately a few of these dramatic memory moments just so happened to be memories that are linked to Voiceovers, Narration and Voice Acting. Since I was removed from my dear mum (a memory that I actively decide not to remember...), I have been listening to stories. Dad always made a point of reading to us at bed time, and on the nights when he needed a rest, he would put a cassette into the multifunctional player, and we would hear some strangers' disembodied voice in our bedroom narrating whatever popular kids stories had been released in the local Waterstones or WHSmiths that month.

There were classic stories such as [insert name here if you ever remember the name of it Matt], and [insert another generic famous kids book title here], narrated by somebody that wasn't Dad.

I can vaguely remember feeling on edge whilst listening to an audio drama of a 'Famous Five' story, in which the titular characters get trapped on some evil chaps' farm, and one of the five attempts escape by hiding in the boot of the car that was heading out to the local town...there was also Roald Dahls' 'Danny Champion of the World' with its all too creepy section where Danny (a small child) goes for a midnight drive in his fathers car in the pitch black of night.

As I've said, the scary memories tend to stay in my limited memory bank, and bear in mind that we would almost exclusively listen to these cassettes in bed with the lights off, which only added to my mental scarring. Although I can recall listening to these stories, none of them ever actually made me think about the talent behind the cassette. I think the first time I ever actually thought about and admired the voice behind the story was when we heard the cassette called 'KrindleKrax'.

Now to preface this, the memory of this cassette has not only stuck in my head because of what I'm about to detail momentarily, but also due to the fact that I decided to almost get run over whilst crossing the road on the way to the book shop to collect the aforementioned cassette.

I remember looking at the cool graphics and display in the window on the other side of the road, and I simply walked straight ahead towards it without a care in the world. A car screeched to a stop, beeping its horn to my right...a noise that was certainly shocking, and yet it was very quickly drowned out spectacularly by the noise that emenated from my fathers mouth as he yanked my arm backwards onto the pavement.

Imagine a giant disgruntled penguin, that has just trodden barefoot on a sharp lego piece. "WAAAAAAARGH.....WAAAH WAAAAAARGH"

I had to then pretend to be ashamed of my mindless decision to stop a car with my body, whilst desperately trying not to laugh at the crazy noise dad had just made, as the angry penguin man reprimanded me for my poor attention skills at the side of the road.

**Memory storage activated thanks to near death experience and comedy gold dad noises**

So anyway, back to KrindleKrax. It was a novel written by popular childrens' story writer Phillip Ridley, and was essentially the story of an easily bullyable 9 year old school child called Ruskin Splinter. He saves his street from an overgrown sewer-dwelling crocodile, and a window-smashing bully, all whilst trying to land a lead role in the school stage play. The story was instantly relatable to me, due to the fact that my home town in the West Midlands of the UK was at that time riddled with sewer dwelling monsterous creatures (or so i childishly believed at the time).

Now the plot and characters in this story were memorable in themselves due to the characters having certain quirks such as the caretaker Corky Pigeon, who was obsssed with Chocolate Biscuits, however...it was the narrator that made the story so memorable.

The audio cassette that we had was narrated by none other than comedy legend and personal hero of mine, English actor and comedian Rik Mayall.

The vast majority of the cassettes we had listened to prior to this were straight reads that clearly weren't interesting enough to remain stuck in my grey matter, but for the first time in my life, Rik Mayall had made this quirky story come alive in his trademark wacky and completely revolutionary way.

Each character had a different sounding voice, each memorable in their own right, not only that, but Rik had also vocalised some of the sound effects throughout the story. His vocalisation of a bouncing basketball on the street; "Ba-doing, Ba-doing, Ba-doing" is something I oddly recall any time I accidentally drop something on the floor.

In the weirdest possible way, Rik Mayall immitating a bouncing ball has imprinted on my whole life. Quite profound some would say...more like a bit weird! It was listening to this memorable narration that I vividly remember thinking "Hey, that was so cool...how did he do that so much better than everyone else I'd listened to?".

Not only did this particular audio cassette spurn my first proper interest in narration and voice work, but it changed my entire perspective on what actually went into recording such a thing as a story.

"Did he actually sit there and read the story and do all of the voices all in one sitting?"

"How did he learn how to do all of those different accents and voices?"

"How does it feel like I can see what the characters are doing in my head when all I can do is hear a strange man talking to me in the pitch black?"

"Where did he record this? Was it on a TV set when he recorded his comedy shows that dad liked to watch?"

Almost sounds like the kind of questions that form the recipe for a future voice talent if you ask me.