Peter Oborne: the finest voice in broadcasting
Sound can be crucial to our experience of screen: it can extend textures and meaning, deepen space, enhance or question the sense of what we see. As a regular radio listener (although it has to be said my consumption of radio is mostly non-broadcast radio: that is downloaded podcasts of radio programmes), it often seems strange to me that the issue of radio aesthetics has not been as prominent as it might be. This is not to say radio has been ignored in, say, academia as there are a number of fine works of scholarship on the topic. It was rather that I wouldn’t be sure where to go in order to find something that might provide a critical model for what I want to say about Peter Oborne’s voice.
Oborne is a British journalist, political commentator and author, as well as a regular presenter of the BBC’s Radio 4 political round up The Week in Westminster (aka Weekly Political Review). It was listening to this last December when I first heard his remarkable voice. Its deep bass is available to a surprising variety of modulation, as if it was tyring to surprise or pattern itself in the most interesting ways for the listener - I say ‘itself’ because the striking character of it is precisely the sense of being unwilled or unbidden. There appears to be - although I cannot quite believe it is true - no striving for its effects. Is this more than just another distinctive broadcasting voice - another Janet Street-Porter, or David Attenborough or (a voice that underwhelms my ears), Richard Dimbleby? It is not great in the sense of its range - this is not Sinatra or Welles - but I suspect because of its inventiveness. What that means I’m not sure.
Here is a clip from one of his TV documentaries.
On listening to Oborne’s voice I think it needs to be described through the musical quality of “timbre”. It has a gravelly edge which seemed to me like a kind of “tired authority” even though as you say it also seems to have spontaneous and naturalistic modulations. There is definitely an aural aesthetic quality that could be taken into account when analysing the effect of such reporting.
Comment by Wendy — September 10, 2008 @ 7:18 am
Wendy that is a brilliant comment which provides the very words that had eluded me when I tried to capture the nature of his voice.
Comment by admin — September 19, 2008 @ 12:37 am
Thanks! I’m glad my comment was helpful. I always think it is far more difficult to describe sound than visual images…because of their very nature. What I mean I guess is that it’s harder to describe something you can’t actually “see”. (that’s a bit of a circular argument I suppose - and probably not very insightful!). But I think in cultural studies (or whatever discipline we choose to call ourselves) we lack a sustained vocabulary for talking about sound - in comparison to the visual.
Or maybe I’m just unaware of it…
Anyway I think the site is great and look forward to reading more.
Comment by Wendy — September 19, 2008 @ 6:04 am