I’ve lost my voice. Well, not all of it, but I have misplaced a lot of it. The bit I haven’t lost I’m not using, for fear of losing it. It’s called full vocal rest; you might know it from off of the X Factor. It is the most boring thing that can happen to an overly talkative, verbose bore and I have at least another day and a half of it left.
While being deprived of my shrill screeches will thrill many of you, I remind you that I still type loudly and unrelentingly, so no respite there. But it is a rubbish situation, because I had to do a voiceover today and I let the client down. A really long-standing, valued client who needed something out there urgently for Christmas. They don’t let you type in voiceovers unless you’re Stephen Hawking. You pretty much have to turn up and speak. I tried. Not only did my head sound like it was fit to explode from being gunk-filled, but my voice cracked every time I modulated it, or just got to the end of a sentence. The engineer was lovely, and we did lots of pick-ups, but it still sounded like I was ill. I was embarrassed and frustrated and breathy. In other words, it was a delight.
My rule of thumb re illness and voice work is to always give the client the option to reschedule or re-cast. There was no such luxury this morning: I’d already been told that later in the week would be too late for some of the announcements to be posted, so it had to be today. I got up an hour early, dosed myself with cough syrup and hummed and hummed to try and warm the voice up. It was better than yesterday, so I hoped it might be ok. But when I got in front of the mic, it was clear that it wasn’t ok. It was crap. Every pop and crackle was picked up by the fancy equipment and I knew there was nothing I could do but offer a free re-record. I did that, client was lovely, but I know they’re left with inadequate recordings they can’t use in time for the deadline. Curse this being human lark! It’s so unde-flippin’-pendable.
On Sunday, I did Comedians Theatre Company’s Scratch Event – lots of new plays being read by comics. Great fun. I was in two. During one of them, old Dr. Footlights saved the day, and I sounded halfway audible. During the second, where I had to read in some gruff director “Next!” type lines (think Simon Cowell with breasts) from the back of the theatre: I got a coughing fit about 3 lines before my cue. I tried to stifle it with one of those swallow-coughs, where you keep your mouth closed and heave your shoulders. I thought that might do. But no, nothing would do my body but full-on, distracting, dry, loud hacks. People looked round at me as if to question my odd character choice: it didn’t say anything in the script about dying from consumption. Tears dripped (dramatically, if I do say so myself) onto the page so I could barely see the lines, and as soon as my part was over, I legged it out of the theatre and indulged in a good old coughing session. Cough-ola. Cough-o-rama. Cough-a-doodle-do.
There was a minor reprise of this scenario yesterday on the Tube. Nobody looked at me then – I think they thought I had plague or was some kind of organic stealth bomb. But I coughed so hard I thought my ears would fly off and I’m going to take some convincing that they didn’t. I was going to meet a friend to do some 2010 business-plotting, and we met somewhere nice and quiet and fancy. No music to shout over. Just as well – I knew the coughing would have taken its toll, so I had had to start whispering. The whole evening was spent with my pal going “What?” and it was quite funny to hear everyone dropping to a whisper, just to make me feel comfortable. It didn’t work. Not being able to speak makes me deeply uncomfortable and no amount of shusha-shusha will fix that (even if it does make everyone sound like they’re imparting some vital and exciting secret).
Better shut up now. Blogs for the next few days will probably be long: it’s the only way for me to be heard. Roll on Thursday, say I. Can you hear me?
Come to the Pigalle on the 21st to hear my brand new returned voice with the marvellous Lenny Beige, and at the Phoenix on the 30th for the London Comedy Improv Christmas Thang.
