It's been a while since I edited together a collection of audio samples and I thought it about time to update the audio section of my Spotlight page, just in case anyone in the industry might take an interest and immediately offer some work. Well, that's how it's supposed to happen!
Anyway, after much delving and rummaging through my audio archives, I've put together this latest series of untreated character voices from audio drama and from audio book narration. It's quite tricky to find sections of audio drama that don't have someone else's voice chipping in. That is the nature of audio drama of course, the interaction of characters, but it does reduce the options for this particular purpose. I now have hundreds of hours of recorded material to choose from, but finding a passage that has just my voice and makes some kind of internal sense is more difficult than one might imagine. Not much from the latest Sherlock Holmes stories, not much from Survivors, or indeed from The Avengers or Counter Measures; even a long narrative from Ragnus Lang in Andrew Smith's brilliant Blake's 7 story, Retribution, is constantly interrupted - outrageous I know!
The actual Spotlight upload is limited to 5 minutes and in all probability, no casting professional is going to spend anything like that amount of time checking out a voice reel; maybe 30 seconds tops. However, because that time constraint doesn't apply to this web site, I've left in a couple of odd clips which don't now feature in the original and, for clarification, they have been asterisked *. The reason I ditched them was to have room to include a bit of Daniel Connor from Survivors. It's not the best clip I know, but as I've just mentioned, extracting anything like a reasonable length speech is very difficult and as I am very proud of the work everyone did on Survivors, it just had to be included somehow. By the way, Survivors Series 2 is out in June and I'm really looking froward to hearing it - Daniel and his companions' journey into their 'Heart of Darkness' gets very much darker in series 2...
So, below is a slightly longer collection of clips than that which was published on Spotlight and if you decide to give them a listen, as always, I hope you will find something to enjoy and perhaps also whet your appetite for wanting to hear more.
The tracks in order are:
1) Mervyn Stone from The Mervyn Stone Mysteries: The Axeman cometh audio-drama
2) Hermit from Doctor Who: Trial of The Valeyard audio-drama*
3) Black Venus audio-book
4) Allat from Doctor Who: The Sleeping City audio-drama
5) Lucius Correl from Blake's 7: The Liberator Chronicles: Jenna's Story audio-drama*
6) Gabriel's Angel audio-book
7) Jimmy, Mervyn & Mervyn as Phyllis from The Mervyn Stone Mysteries: The Axeman Cometh audio-drama
8) How to be Both audio-book
9) Baron Pteratrark from Doctor Who: The Widow's Assassin audio-drama
10) Half Life from Thirteen audio-book anthology
11) Mona, Sarah & Douglas from Traveller's Duty audio-book
12) Mr Mac And Me audio-book
13) Roger from Roger Munroe Remembers comedy sketch*
14) Daniel Connor from Survivors Series 1 Episode 1: Revelation audio-drama
There are details and synopses for all these samples in postings throughout the site, including full cast lists and writing credits, both for audio-drama and audio-books.
I'm back in the recording studio very soon, so... more news just as soon as it happens!
