If you thought doing voice over is easy, well, you’d be mistaken. It’s amazing how, as soon as you focus on it, speaking can become difficult. But at least with a voice over you get a second chance. Presenting live you don’t. Commentating Live on Eurosport you voice the shows live to footage you have never seen before. Now, I’m not talking about commentating on a live game, where no-one has seen the footage before, that is another skill entirely. And anyone who knows me will know that this would be beyond me. Despite being brought up in a household of two sports broadcasters, I have managed to keep my brain sports-knowledge free. (Apologies to my mother, who produced sport for Radio 2, 4, won a Sony award for Sport on Radio 5, and who later on became a Sony judge). So, it came as some surprise to most people who knew me, when I got the job of co-presenting (voice only) a show in the Winter Olympics of 2006. Until, that is, you hear what kind of show it was…
Ok, so there are two types of shows that Eurosport do. Firstly. the aforementioned live sports commentary, where knowledgeable experts run commentary on a live game. And secondly, magazine shows. Magazine shows are pre-written, pre-recorded, except that the voices go on live, as the footage goes out. And whilst I, in my booth in the UK, add the English voice to the script, someone else in a booth across the channel is adding the French and someone else the Spanish etc.
You might still be mistaken for thinking this is easy. Just reading right? Wrong.
1. the script comes in Franglais and needs re-writing 2. If you speak too much or too little or in the wrong place – the footage and script won’t match. So you must speak to time and follow time codes of when each section starts and finishes. Knowing my average talking speed (I speak about 3 words a second) I count the words in each section of the script and ensure I have enough but not too many, and then I make notes about where I might need to speed up or slow down. I can do 4 words per minute but this is only recommended for those really annoying commercials where someone speed reads the small print in the hope that you’ll miss it!
The first magazine show I did for Eurosport was called “Daring Girls” which tracked two reality TV winners, one French and one German, as they tried to complete missions in Torino, during the Winter Olympics. The goal was to win the most challenges and be crowned The Daring Girl. It probably had the worst review of anything I’ve ever been involved in, but as far as working on it was concerned, my co-presenter (the very talented soccer commentator, Tim Caple) and I such a riot! The script was an hilarious combination of outdated cheekiness and Eurotrash. It also came in very last minute as it had been filmed and edited that same day. This meant that we didn’t have much time to interpret the script from Franglais into comprehensible English. especially as the challenges were often obscure and we didn’t have the footage to make sense of it all. For example, one day my script read that the daring girls challenge for that day was to bring 5 doughnuts down the piste in Olympic ring formation. I was totally baffled until mid-show I saw that the ‘doughnuts’ were actually inflatable rubber rings in the Olympic colours. But you get a sense from that of what a fun show it was to work on.
Success on this show led to me doing another show for that winter Olympics, called Mission to Torino, which followed several athletes through their journeys from training to competing I got into sport for the first time ever, because I understood the dream, the focus and the sometimes heartache of it all. You can LISTEN to a brief clip of me introducing the show here.
I’ve since done other shows and its quite an adrenalin rush, presenting live. I’m hugely grateful for the work I get at Eurosport, that Winter Olympics paid for me to make my first trip to LA. And as anyone will know if you can get paid to be challenged and have fun – that’s the holy grail.
If you liked this article please like or share it.And if you want up-to-date football news I suggest you follow Tim on twitter @timcaple
To read more advice on enhancing your acting career chances buy my book here Talent Isn’t Enough.
