Ian McMillan: Unique voices that make a good impression

But then I bumped into a comedian who said that he’d heard Rory Bremner doing an impression of me and it sounded nothing like me, which of course begs the question that if it was nothing like me then maybe he was doing somebody else. John Shuttleworth, perhaps. I didn’t let that negative thought enter my head, though. I just thought “Blimey, I’ve arrived”.

If somebody is doing impressions of you then that means you must exist in some kind of odd celebrity universe. It’s like having your handprint in that pavement in Los Angeles or your statue in Barnsley town centre or your fuzzy face on a CCTV image on Crimewatch; you’ve become an image or a voiceprint, and one that lots of people recognise and that’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it?

Then I thought about it a bit more and I got a little uneasy; does it mean that I’ve arrived somewhere exalted or does it mean that I’m not the unique individual I think I am? Let’s face it: I’m easy to impersonate in the same way that Tommy Cooper was or Michael Crawford is. I’ve got a distinctive voice, what somebody who thought I wasn’t listening once called a “thick Yorkshire brogue” like I was a casual shoe.

When he meets me, my mate Gary always says “Hello; I’m Ian McMillan!” in a voice that sounds quite a lot like mine; I once walked past an office in the BBC and several senior chaps in suits were doing an approximation of my voice.

“No, he sounds like this…” one of them said before launching into a sentence that sounded like a cross between Brian Clough and an extra from Emmerdale. Their besuited shoulders shook violently as they laughed. They stopped when I shouted “Hello chaps!” through the open door, mind you. That all means that the voice I thought was mine and mine alone is public property, easy to identify and easy to parody.

So the voice becomes the person in a very fundamental way. Think about politicians and how it’s easy to identify and therefore satirise them from just a couple of words. Neil Kinnock’s Welsh lilt, Margaret Thatcher’s Grantham modulations, Gordon Brown’s dour locutions; and in the contemporary arena, David Cameron’s smooth PR phrases, Ed Miliband’s pebble-mouth.

Then, once you enter this odd world of the voice-as-person, you begin to see examples everywhere: for instance. As well as tribute bands grinding out the works of Queen and Oasis, I’ve seen posters advertising tribute comedians. “So and So is Peter Kay!” it would say and I find that very strange. Being a covers band is one thing, but a covers comedian, parroting routines like somebody learning conversational Spanish from a CD? Surely that can’t be right?

But we remember people from their voices like we remember their faces and I find that sometimes when the face fades away the voice remains. I can’t remember much about my Scottish granddad but I can remember him saying “Don’t sit on that hot water bottle; you’ll burst it!” in his Lanarkshire lilt and although he’s been dead for many years his voice hangs around in my head like a song that simply won’t let you go.

I always listen carefully to people’s voices whenever I’m in a public space and I’m enchanted by them all even when the voices aren’t beautiful. I like the mumblers and the hesitators and the repeaters and the ones whose Yorkshire accents are pure and the ones whose Yorkshire accents are corrupted by the 21st century or by a few years living on the outskirts of Basingstoke. And then sometimes, when I get home, I try out their voices in the comfort of my own front room.

So maybe what we should do is, at appropriate times of course, impersonate people we know because that way we can get to know each other better. They do say it is fundamentally impossible to really get to know another human being but maybe trying to speak in their voice, doing impressions of them that are as accurate as you can manage, can really insert you into what some people call their mindset.

Let’s all try it! Everybody reading this should have a go at impersonating their husband or wife or somebody close to them: I’ve got a feeling it’ll lead to Yorkshire-wide peace and understanding. Or at least we’ll all have a good laugh. Just like that!