Well, nearly! Gordon Griffin, the speaker at the May meeting of the Society, held us enthralled with his talk on life as a reader of audio books. To date he has clocked up almost a thousand recordings with more to come.
His talk charted the path to this interesting career via acting, his first role after drama school being Mrs Dale’s son in the radio series Mrs Dale’s Diary.
He has done much television, radio and theatre work but, he told us, reading books could not be more different. We were interested to learn how much preparation goes into a recording. Gordon does not just sit down in front of a microphone and read. He studies the book in depth, learning the correct pronunciation of foreign words, highlighting passages he might stumble over.
Gordon punctuated his talk with excerpts from some of the books he has recorded including a very moving passage from ‘Billy Eliot’, the story of the miner’s son who becomes a ballet dancer, and in complete contrast, a hilarious extract from the autobiography of the late chef Keith Floyd.
We could have gone on listening for a lot longer.