When Did Salty Talk Get So Sour?
Karen Hayley recalls her time working as a voice-over artist for Playboy
One day, a few years ago now, I got a call from my voice-over agent asking if I’d be interested in doing voice-over promos for Playboy TV. I’d always assumed that the adult channel was made by and for people who loved sex, so it seemed only natural to say yes.
Thinking this was going to be terrific fun, I skipped off down the Victoria Line to the recording studio in Soho where I was met by three Playboy women who offered me a glass of whisky at the eye-watering hour of 9.30am in the morning and then handed me a bunch of promo scripts. Scripts asking the viewer to stay tuned for programmes like: Dogging me, Dogging you; Smut-Swallowing Slut Junkies; British and Gagging for it; British Office All-Night Goer Bitches; Pushing Forty and Frigging Fucking It; and (last, but by no means least) My Uncontrollable Wife Slut.
Not so much the playful sexual banquet I was expecting then, really. More of a half-eaten sandwich, swallowed dryly and in a hurry in a hospital car park.
I sat myself down in my voice-over booth and pulled the microphone into my favourite position. ‘I’ll just think about sex,’ I thought. ‘I’ll just get a bit turned on. I’ll try my sweetest, erotic, damnedest...’
They liked my style of reading, but they didn’t seem too impressed. Then it became clear: they didn’t want me to read like this at all. ‘You know why we asked you in?’ they said, ‘We heard that Sex Pistols ad you did for Never Mind the Bollocks, and we wanted you to sound like that. You know the one where you sound really rough, edgy and hard? We want it much more street. Much more matter of fact. Forget being turned on. At the moment you sound too... too...’
‘Sexy?’ (Was that the word that dare not speak its name?)
‘Yes. Sexy. You sound too sexy. It’s not what we want. That’s not why we asked you in.’
Chewing my pencil, I tried desperately to see the connection between webcam wives and the winter of discontent; between Anarchy in the UK, and Lusty Lorna from Lewisham... but I just wasn’t getting it.
So you want me to sound like I’m complaining about the fascist regime that made you a moron? (I thought). To think about looming economic crisis, political unrest, water shortages, no future, DIY rioting? I tentatively read the script again trying to put all this into my voice. You want surly London gloom and grime, misery, rage, disaffection and disappointment. You want all that aimed at Lucy for loving it? Spattered at Sally for getting it? Chucked over Karen for creaming it?
‘Great,’ said the Playboy woman, beaming. ‘When you sound really hard, and gritty and aggressive, that’s BANG ON!’
I was slightly concerned that she was going to ask me to imagine snatching a glimpse of Marie Antoinette as a pre-revolutionary French Jacobin, and cram just a soupçon of social struggle into our next whack of promo scripts. The whole thing started to make me giggle. This wasn’t salty talk, this was sour. Bitter, even.
There was nothing wrong with the girls, they all looked really nice. They were just girls having sex. Juicy, lovely, gorgeous girls, they were, joyful and smiling... some of them pretty disarming, from where I was sitting. Still with all the resolve I could muster, I managed to chastise these girls for being so damn attractive! Damn it! How dare they, how dare they cavort and play and be natural? How dare they have breasts? SLAGS!’
Yes. Lusty Lorna from Lewisham really was getting what she deserved, and she must have really done something to deserve this. I was in character, inside the head of an angry bloke, cursing and -blaming everyone else around me as if it was their fault: Angry Ted from Teddington; Stiff Sullen Steve from Salisbury; Pumped Pete from Plymouth; Randy Andy from Redbridge. Drowning and vomiting on my own self-hatred and twisted up in the vines of my own Bacchanalian, effing pleasure, DAMN IT!
Before I knew it, I had a bottle of champagne’s worth of giggles fizzing inside of me. Frothing, heaving, foaming, exploding giggles I wanted to pop out and spray out all over the place. That’s right. I wanted to squirt and spurt my lovely, dirty giggles all over that bloody studio: the Playboy girls and Steve the engineer, because they were asking for it!
Filthy.
I suppose I must have believed my own aggressive publicity a bit, because when I got home, I took up the subscription to the adult package myself: £19.99 a month from ntl.
At that time (c.2003) it came in three flavours: Playboy (the acceptable face of unacceptable TV); Spice – the alternative channel, (although alternative to what never became quite clear); and Television X (for anyone who likes wondering whether Jodie Marsh needs to loosen those two belts after she’s had a curry).
It was rarely honey-tongued. In fact, so disparaging was it about its own material, about sex, that at times it seemed almost puritanical. And as much as the programmes were about desire, and pleasure and sex, they were even more about how complicated and kinky our attitude to all that ‘sex stuff’ really is.
We do live in a world where our relationship to pleasure is often complex. Where instead of just simply being called chocolate cake, we call chocolate cake ‘sinful’, ‘wicked’, ‘devilish’ and ‘naughty’. The implication being it’s the cake’s fault.
It’s so easy to feel confused and aggressive towards those things that stir up desire: ‘I mustn’t, but I will’; ‘I shouldn’t, but you made me’.
And I thought we were supposed to be living in a permissive society.
