Why do so many younger TV actors mutter their lines? For dramatic effect? Listen up, directors. It … doesn’t … work.
And no, I’m not deaf.
Take a recent episode of Silent Witness. Chris, having been possibly wrongly convicted of murder, is released from prison but then shot. As he’s dying, he whispers something. Sam the pathologist bends over him and I lean forward to hear. Did he confess? Who knows? I felt so cheated that I found the script online. His final two words were ‘I have…’
‘Turn the sound up,’ hubby yells, ‘and keep it like that!’
I’m especially cross when two cops shout at each other at the same time. The so-called background music battles with the muffled dialogue – a full orchestra bashing away with an endless cacophony of deafening drums. Really? I think we realise when we should be excited or frightened. After five minutes, I have to scrabble about to find the remote to set up subtitles.
Why do actors, both male and female, blub or howl when detectives interview them after a death? ‘Dawa mo … it,’ they explain. What? Someone hands them a hanky or hugs them. And I give up. Why can’t they have a quick snivel and then say something we can hear?
Programme producers should stop showing two police swapping ideas with thundering noise nearby. Law & Order: UK and other programmes obliterated most conversations by staging them beside the M25, in Heathrow Airport and on a packed Oxford Street.
Please, directors/producers – take every auditioning actor to an empty theatre and sit at the back. If you can’t hear them making a speech, don’t give them a part. They must learn to project their voices beyond their chins. In the meantime, I’m switching to American crime programmes, where these problems don’t happen so often.
