Um, I’m on Feedback

You can hear my honeyed RP tones on Radio 4’s Feedback this weekend.   Just a few seconds. 

I wrote congratulating Paul Gambaccini for his Radio 2 tribute to Michael Jackson last Friday.   (Listen again here, for 7 days)

I thought the programme was a lovely mix of extemporaneous speech and in-depth knowledge of the subject, and I said so in my email.  It’s a very hard trick, sounding knowledgeable while at the same time making it up as you go along and not um-ing or ah-ing. 

The producer rang me, asking if I’d say it over the phone, so I did. 

But because long words always sound a bit more  pretentious when spoken, and because I didn’t want to sound scripted and stilted myself, I stumbled on ‘extemporaneous’ and used ‘off the cuff’ instead.