Samuel's Blog

2UE’s New Voiceovers

January 27th, 2007 at 09:35am

Last weekend I wrote John Kerr an email about 2UE’s new voiceovers, stating that they sounded rushed and didn’t do the new voiceover lady credit. I also asked John to pass it on to management, and it looks like he did, because the voiceovers have improved dramatically.

Before I give you a sample of the voiceovers, I’ll briefly explain the back story. Up until January 14, Ken Sparkes was 2UE’s voiceover man, and had been for nearly nineteen years. For whatever reason, 2UE decided to replace him with two people, one male, one female, they also seemed to leave production of all the replacement promos until the last minute. It is always going to be hard to replace the voice of a station, especially an incredibly long-term one, but leaving it to the last minute just makes it worse.

When I emailed John, I had heard the promos from the new voiceover lady for about a week, and they were driving me up the wall. At that stage I hadn’t heard the new male voiceovers. Since then, the female voiceovers have improved considerably.

So, here we have a collage of 2UE voiceovers. Click here to listen or download.

1. Ken Sparkes – Back to Clive Robertson
2. New female VO – Back to John Kerr
3. New Female VO – Nights with Glenn Wheeler
4. New Female VO – Back to Glenn Wheeler

Now for the voiceovers produced after my email.
5. New Female VO – Stuart Bocking
6. New Female VO – Back to Stuart Bocking
7. New Female VO – Peter Ford Showbiz (Not sure if this was produced before or after my email, but it’s a good one)

And the male voiceovers for comparison
8. Ken Sparkes – John Laws Promo
9. New Male VO – Tennis Update
10. New Male VO – Tim Webster

I think, apart from being rushed, the first lot of voiceovers 2UE got the new lady to do were just re-reads of scripts written for Ken Sparkes, and like most people, she can’t do a good copy of a Ken Sparkes voiceover. They sounded rushed, cold and stilted. It’s always a good idea to write promos with the target voice in mind, and where that has been done, she comes across well, sounds warm, and sounds like she cares about what she is reading.

As for the male voiceovers, he seems to do a good job at reading his own variation of voiceovers written for Ken…I’m sure he’ll sound even better with voiceovers written specifically for him.

Overall, 2UE have a great new voiceover team, and I’m sure they’ve learnt their lesson about rushing large amounts of new voiceovers.

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Samuel's Editorials,TV/Radio/Media

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