Farewell to the voice
Locked in a tiny studio at Broadcasting House with Brian Perkins is a terrifying experience. Clad all in leather, his chiselled features and gimlet eyes make him look like a hired killer. He snaps out barbed, expletive-filled answers to my questions, pours hot coffee over my notepad and roundly abuses everyone he’s worked with in his 40 years at the BBC. Behind the honeyed voice that has launched a thousand news bulletins lies a monster: cold, callous, calculating. No wonder he was able to read the details of wars, famines, hurricanes, apocalypses and English Ashes defeats with such a lack of emotion.
Well, OK, perhaps I exaggerate slightly. Dead Ringers likes to portray Perkins as a Mafia godfather intent on global domination and, when you meet him, you can understand why. He is so gentle and unassuming, so solidly suburban, so haltingly self-effacing that you feel he must have a sinister side. Surely, there’s a touch of grand guignol in this apparently quintessential Guildford man. If there isn’t, what the hell am I going to write about for the next 1,000 words?
Perkins, in case you missed the story, is retiring. He has just reached 60 and the BBC has yet to hear about the new moves to make everyone work until they are 90. Staffers have to step down, though he plans to continue on a freelance basis. His retirement made the front-page of the Times and induced laments for the end of an era: his basso profundo, the Cassandras moaned, would give way to incomprehensible women from Darlington or, worse, Liverpool. The BBC would never be quite the same again.
But then, according to Perkins, it never was. When he arrived at the BBC in 1965, fresh off the boat from New Zealand, old hands complained about these Kiwi upstarts “coming here and ruining everything”. Forty years on, the Kiwi is being hailed as a national treasure for his perfectly modulated English. His only serious rival as voice of Radio 4, upholder of Reithian traditions and speaker of the Queen’s English is Peter Donaldson, and he was born in Egypt.
Perkins has been hooked on the BBC since boyhood, when growing up in Wanganui (pronounced Wong-gan-oooee), he used to hear the news on the World Service. “I grew up in the 1940s and 50s and was very aware of the radio. My father used to listen regularly to the 6 o’clock news in the evening, which came live from the BBC … swerrrrrrrrrrrrshssssssshhhhhhshshshswerrrr [this is a very good impression of the static you get when you listen from 12,000 miles away, though it may lose something on the page]. These people were my heroes.”
He had done some broadcasting in New Zealand and when he reached the UK – having got married during the boat’s two-day stopover in Melbourne – immediately applied to the BBC. He got through the audition, passed the “beer test” – demonstrating an ability to drink three pints at lunchtime and still be able to make cultured conversation with the assistant head of presentation – and joined on a six-month contract, working among his heroes. “For a long time – and perhaps it’s never really left me – I was overawed by working here. I couldn’t believe it.” (Dead Ringers would, of course, see this mock modesty as a front.)
Perkins joined the BBC just as the grand old generation of wartime announcers were on their last legs. It is the fact that he worked alongside newsreaders such as Alvar Liddell and John Snagge that gives him his iconic status. He is the keeper of the flame, the hander on of the baton, part of the furniture at Radio 4. There is much to be said for longevity.
He is also a bit of a stickler. He retains his boyhood faith in the BBC and thinks it should stay true to its traditions. “The BBC should not adopt the streetwise approach you hear on some other networks,” he stickles. “This estuary-speak that is the way a lot of people talk. The BBC has gone down that road on some TV channels, but I think the majority of people who listen to Radio 4 and Radio 3 don’t want to hear people talk like that. There should be something special about it listening to radio or watching television. When you turn on the radio you don’t want to hear someone who sounds like the next-door neighbour.”
He’s pleasingly rude about the tabloidisation of TV, a disease from which the BBC is by no means immune. “If you want to watch absolute drivel go and watch it elsewhere, but the BBC should uphold what it was established for in the first place.” Nor is he too keen on the growing tendency to emote in news broadcasts. “You try to read with sympathy but I don’t think you want to overdo it. So many dreadful things happen in the world on an almost daily basis, but you can’t get emotionally involved or it would sound too sentimental.”
Radio, unlike TV, has professional announcers rather than journalists to read the news – a system which he believes provides some critical distance. “We haven’t written the material; we are there to relay it to the listener. If you listen to other radio stations where the journalists are more involved, in many cases a journalist will inflate the news out of all proportion and sound rather manic. We’re two or three steps back from the material. It’s a curious kind of chemistry, a curious kind of role; it’s like an actor making something of other people’s material.”
Peter Donaldson used to be an actor and Perkins, too, has dabbled on the stage. It helps. “It is a performance,” he says. “In the case of reading the news, the light goes on and you have to perform. There’s no stopping and no going back. You are centre stage. There are moments when you feel lonely and isolated. Everybody’s listening, everybody’s focused on what you’re saying, but mostly it’s mind over matter. You have to get on with it.”
Perkins is an amateur actor but in 1969 he returned to New Zealand to become a professional musician, playing double bass in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Music had always been a passion – his mother played violin and viola – and while in London he had studied part time at the Guildhall School of Music. He stayed with the orchestra for six years but headed back to Britain and the BBC in 1978, to discover that the old guard had all left Radio 4 and he was now the veteran.
Since his return he has played an unlikely dual role at the BBC – simultaneously, the symbol of authority on radio broadcasts and its subverter on other programmes. His voice became so representative of BBC values that it became a satirical vehicle – on Noel Edmonds’ Radio 1 show in the early 1980s, on The News Quiz, in Richard Ingrams’ and John Wells’ radio adaptation of Beachcomber, on Dead Ringers, and later this year in a film called Churchill: The Hollywood Years, in which he plays a wartime newsreader of the type he met back in the 1960s.
As early as 1994 the critic Tom Lubbock was complaining about the “cult of Brian Perkins” and blaming it on the end of the cold war. The BBC no longer needed an ur-voice ready to announce armageddon, so he was allowed to indulge himself on light entertainment projects.
Perkins says that he has rarely enocountered opposition to his extra-curricular pursuits. “Sometimes I would read the 6 o’clock news and that would be followed immediately by The News Quiz with me something reading something slightly risqué in the first half-minute of it,” he says. “But most people realise it’s me wearing different hats.” The BBC even let him make a commercial for the Foo Fighters, who professed to be members of the Perkins cult, though he had never heard of them.
Amazingly, he has never corpsed on air, though he did have problems with President Banana of Zimbabwe. “I used to really have to put blinkers on when I read that name,” he says. Then he frets about whether it’s un-PC to admit that. To mark his leaving, his colleagues put a tape together of choice moments from his four decades at the Beeb. Frankly, it doesn’t sound as if it’s in the Brian Johnston class: the highspot was when he had a fit of the giggles once on the midnight news.
The consummate pro, then, and a man so upright, decent and Guildfordian that it will be almost impossible to reach a resounding conclusion about him. And yet it all seems too perfect. That name, Brian Perkins, surely too ordinary to be true. The strange story of his stopover marriage. The sudden decision to leave the UK and join the “New Zealand Symphony Orchestra”. Who among us has ever heard the New Zealand Symphony orchestra play. The equally sudden decision to abandon the double bass and return to the UK, instantly filling his old position at the BBC. There is surely some untold story here, some mystery at the heart of the cult of “Brian Perkins”. One day, perhaps, we will know the grisly truth.
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