Gave an Improve Your Voice by 90% workshop today, which is always a good experience.  There’s nothing more rewarding than hearing people’s voices blossom.   This workshop is based on Grotowski’s research into the voice.  I studied at the Grotowski Centre in Italy for which I received an award.   Today we had an observer, who is [...]

For some time now I’ve preferred going on to the Financial Times page to look at the videos, rather than to listen or to watch the regular news channels.   Not only is the journalism understandable, succinct  and really interesting, the speech of the journalists is clear and easily understood.  The voices of the journalists are [...]

I was speaking to a client who now has an excellent English accent.  They said that when they first arrived in England from Poland over 8 years ago they didn’t go to an English language school to learn English, but instead opted to learn English by taking exams. They took degrees in business and law.  [...]

  My thanks to Paul Carroll for sending me the following from the Daily Telegraph: “Pupils at Cherry Tree Primary School, in Basildon, are being taught to ditch their Essex accents during weekly lessons from a private tutor. Teachers say they have seen a vast improvement in their pupils’ spelling and writing since the lessons [...]

  A really scary movie with more hooks than M&S.  Beautifully shot and edited.  Once you make the jump into the flashbacks of the main character played by Elizabeth Olsen, you’re hooked in and always on edge wondering what is going to happen next! It feeds on the Manson cult terror story and the preying [...]

Frances Parkes of  Max Your Voice is giving a one day course for Interpreters and Translators on February 17th in the Interpreters Conference Suite at the London Metropolitan University. This course  has been recommended by the Institute of Interpreters and Translators. A few years ago I was asked  to give a talk for Interpreters at [...]

  Earlier this year Bryony Kimmings gave a one woman show called “7 Days Drunk”, at the Edinburgh Festival, when she explored the effects of alcohol on creativity. “The material for the show was taken over a 7 day period when she was cocooned in a studio being filmed drinking copious amounts of vodka and [...]

According to New York Daily: The Gothamist, the New York accent is slipping into neutral and sometimes through choice: “Over the last year, there has been a lot of discussion about the death of accents around the city; people in Queens are fretting about it, people in Brooklyn are defiant about it. But what happens [...]

Richard Ingrams, a man of few words said with a drop dead gorgeous bear voice (who wouldn’t want a bedside story read by him), has been writing about female voices: “I find it odd how few women on TV pay attention to the all-important voice factor.  I recently instanced the distressing case of Janet Street-Porter, [...]

Another plus for being a voice and speech coach, is when you’re a voice and speech coach to a comedian, especially when they’re funny.  So this was why the other Sunday, I found myself in Brixton wending my way through Coldharbour Lane towards the railway bridge and the Dogstar.   How the late Josephine Hart would [...]