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.
[Update: What a let-down. One sentence ended up on air! ]
Oh dear. They cut you a bit short didn’t they!