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Also on Voices
Elsewhere on BBCi
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What do you think about your local accent?
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'Twirlies' is the name given to pensioners by Liverpool bus crews. Their free bus passes become effective at 9am but if they arrive before this, they enquire 'Are we too early?'
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Page 3 of 6
 Accents: An actor's approach
Writing accents
Directing with accents
Ep1 scene 7 pt1
Ep1 scene 7 pt2
Ep1 scene 7 pt3
Street and Lane: Accents and radio drama Directing with accents
by David Hunter
(Director of Street and Lane) Voices are so very different in curiously subtle ways. Judging the annual Carleton Hobbs acting competition several years ago I remember having to invent an entirely new vocabulary, like a pretentious wine critic, to annotate as precisely as I could the qualities and colours of a particular voice - 'smoky', 'crunchy', 'hard-soled with a hint of sunshine'.Accents themselves are a little easier, defined largely by a geographical place, and I still find that an actor's native conversational accent gives me the most information about the possibilities of their voice. Street and Lane is located in South Yorkshire and it was important to give it a rock-solid regional base and cast largely native actors. But drama is not necessarily tied firmly to realism. The great freedom is that one can play with words and their delivery and comedy often has it roots in this playfulness. As a kitchen fitter's mate back in the early 1980s, I too drove a white transit van around the thatched and moneyed villages of Essex, sporting a slight residual Birmingham accent over an RP delivery, modified by several years in Yorkshire. Now as a radio drama director I have the privilege of being able to play for a living. The toys at my disposal are words and beginnings of characters provided by the writer (or writers in the case of Street and Lane, Dave Sheasby and Ian McMillan) and the 'voices' that I choose when casting. In Street and Lane the central comic and 'human' spine is the relationship between the two, very different, builders and the vernacular Yorkshire banter that bounces between them incessantly. Curiously native Yorkshire actors Nick Lane and Fine Time Fontayne have known each other since their schooldays. (Invariably if a writer has to write an extra scene or two during the recording process, having heard the actors in character, then that scene is usually one of the best, the sharpest. The writer has been writing for that particular voice).With the character of Great Northern Man we were able to take the use of language and voice one stage further, nudging right up against absurdity but maintaining a sense of truthfulness to the music of South Yorkshire speech. "Nathensquireose, ahve hit a spot of cobblers on yon tranklements". There is great comedy in this extrapolation and great instinctive skill on the part of the actor Gerard McDermott. There is further comedy in the fact that Arthur Lane translates for the more 'educated' Johnny Street.We (or Johnny) may not understand every single word, or even sometimes be able to define where one word begins and another ends, but the collision of sounds and half-heard meanings make a different sort of sense - a sense that is diametrically opposed to the middle class fussiness embodied by the warring client couple, Christine and Tom, "There's a chap at the door for you. I think he's from Mars". It is social comedy and comedy of class. The final joke is in Great Northern Man's parting remark rendered in clear straightforward language - he has been putting it all on after all. In subsequent episodes of Street and Lane we have fun with further extrapolated characters - a strong man, Ben Nevis (Scottish accent played by Kenny Blythe) is brought in to apply muscle but is equally at home with the academic analysis of Karl Marx; a music teacher of the old school, Mrs Priam-Rhodes (Margaret Robertson), whose educated and elevated tones are mixed with a conscious effort to absorb the 'hip' terminology of her student lodgers - "Awesome" "wicked" "cool"; a hard-edged Australian businesswoman (Bronwyn Lim) with a sharp line in business terminology who is single-handedly regenerating the economy of South Yorkshire; and a former Barnsley miner, Shafto (John Banks), now given to risky "free climbing" and talking about his newly acquired Thai wife in an absurdly gruff delivery.In this particular case the 'voices' of Street and Lane undoubtedly owe much of their fluidity to the working process, a pair of writers vocalising the lines in their collaborative method.
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