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SPEAK UP! Or why mumbling actors are ruining TV drama

By Leo Mckinstry
UPDATED: 06:20 EST, 30 January 2012

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Unconvincing: Eddie Redmayne, right, from the TV drama Birdsong is unimpressive

Unconvincing: Eddie Redmayne, right, from the TV drama Birdsong is unimpressive

At first, I thought something had gone wrong with my hearing. Having sat down to watch the BBC’s much-hyped period drama Birdsong, I found myself struggling to understand the dialogue.

As one incomprehensible line followed another, I quickly began to lose the plot — and my patience. Then my wife, whose aural sense is so acute that she could hear a bat squeak at 300 yards, turned to me and asked: ‘What on earth did he just say?’

A temporary sense of relief came over me. So it was not my advancing decrepitude that was responsible.

Nor was it our TV set. We fiddled with the volume and the settings on the remote control, to no avail — the actors remained inaudible.

Our frustration mounted. Like millions of others, we had eagerly looked forward to this drama, a love story set against the backdrop of World War I.

But our enjoyment was ruined by the dismal sound quality. Even the Glaswegian comic character Rab C. Nesbitt at his lager-fuelled worst is not as difficult to follow as some parts of Birdsong. After less than an hour of this auditory ordeal, we switched it off.

Critics lavished praise on the two-part drama, which finished last night. Some expressed their delight at its sensitivity and authenticity; others swooned over the looks of its stars. Well, you can count me out of this orgy of admiration. In my view, what really let the show down was the lack of subtitles.

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The remarkable moment the BBC were forced to pull plug on World War II birdsong broadcast as bombers flew overhead

Eddie Redmayne, who has the central role in the series as an emotionally tortured officer, may have become the nation’s new heart-throb — but to me, his performance was about as intelligible as a post-match interview with a monosyllabic Premier League footballer.

He seemed to be permanently open-mouthed, his lips never moving, as if someone had injected Botox into the lower half of his face. His love interest, played by Clemence Poesy, was almost as difficult to understand, but at least she had the excuse of being French.
Enlarge Unclear: The BBC’s Great Expectations lead characters Vanessa Kirby and Douglas Booth are unclear with their lines

Unclear: The BBC’s Great Expectations lead characters Vanessa Kirby and Douglas Booth are unclear with their lines

Despite the critics’ acclaim, I’m not alone in my exasperation. In fact, a large number of viewers have complained about the poor diction in Birdsong. ‘I couldn’t hear what the main two were saying 80 per cent of the time. They barely moved their mouths,’ one told the Radio Times.

‘A potentially gripping drama spoilt by the curse of the modern actor — the inability to enunciate their lines. When did it become fashionable for actors to mumble their way through the script?’ asked one contributor to an internet forum, while another said that the programme comprised ‘a lot of muttering — and I’m not deaf’.

What makes the Birdsong experience all the more regrettable is that it isn’t unique. It is just one of a number of recent TV shows that have been marred by the actors failing to deliver their lines clearly. The BBC’s Christmas adaptation of Great Expectations and the legal drama Garrow’s Law are similar examples.

Another legal drama, Silk, about life at the Bar, was attacked for being full of ‘mumbling female barristers’, while Doctor Who has been criticised for the same failing.

David Tennant, who portrayed the errant Time Lord before handing over to Matt Smith, was said by one viewer to have ‘a clear voice normally’ but ‘as the Doctor he is in a permanent fit of the mumbles’.
David Tennant, left, was described by one viewer as ‘in a permanent state of the mumbles’ as Doctor Who

David Tennant, left, was described by one viewer as 'in a permanent state of the mumbles’ as Doctor Who

The same is true of the cinema nowadays. It is a rich irony that the most successful British film of recent years, the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, had as its central theme the need for clarity and fluency when speaking — yet our screens are full of mutterers.

Indeed, John Cleese recently said he had given up going to the movies because he couldn’t understand what the actors were saying. The other night, I tried to watch Ben Affleck in The Town, but had to give up after 15 minutes in bewildered incomprehension.

It’s a strange paradox that TV and cinema bosses lay such emphasis on clearness and depth of visual images, hence the fashionable obsession with high-definition screens and 3D projections.

All the while, clearness of sound is becoming worse. Indeed, it may be that the sound experts have become so enthralled by high-tech wizardry that they have neglected to concentrate on getting the right balance between background noise, music and vocals.

Much of the blame must also be attached to the actors, some of whom almost seem to revel in their lack of intelligibility, as if it were somehow more authentic — more cutting-edge. This represents a huge change from the past, when actors prided themselves on their clarity of diction.
Colin Firth’s performance in The King’s Speech is symbolic of a condition many thesbians are struggling with

Colin Firth’s performance in The King’s Speech is symbolic of a condition many thesbians are struggling with

In an age before microphones and cameras, the ability to project one’s voice was an essential part of the classical theatrical repertoire. Any actor mumbling would quickly have been booed off the stage.

Even on the cinema screen and in television, the consequences of that rigorous theatrical training were reflected in the precision of speech. But all that has changed as the theatre has declined, with actors earning their living more from TV and commercials than from the stage.

As the renowned director Sir Peter Hall said in 2008: ‘Most actors under the age of 40 are struggling to be heard. It is the most regular complaint. Theatre directors will tell you the same. Actors now think that if they raise their voice, they are being “unrealistic”.’

It is also a view shared by the Hollywood legend Ernest Borgnine, star of Marty, who is still acting in his 90s. His pet hate in modern movies, he says, is how actors ‘get all mumbly. You can’t make out what they’re saying. And you’re only 6ft away from them’.

The modern thespian enthusiasm for mumbling can be seen as a perversion of the hugely influential technique of method acting, which was popularised in the U.S. in the Forties and Fifties by theatrical director Lee Strasberg, the founder of the Actors’ Studio.

The aim of this process — in contrast to the traditional histrionic style — was to provide a more truthful portrayal by enabling the actor to get inside the emotions of the character. James Dean, Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando are among the many Hollywood giants who used this approach.
Robert De Niro
Marlon Brando

Hollywood greats Robert De Niro, left, and Marlon Brando, right, used mumbling techniques for effective portrayal

But sadly, in recent years, it seems at times to have been twisted into a determination to impose a form of muffled incoherence on audiences.

This wilful embrace of inarticulacy reached a nadir in the U.S. during the last decade with the creation of a new genre of independent, low-budget movies dubbed ‘mumblecore’ by an American journalist, with mundane plots featuring actors whose most prominent gift was for swallowing their lines.

In modern Britain, where politically correct victimhood has become a key theme of civic life, the celebration of verbal awkwardness is regarded in progressive circles as a political statement, a blow against the narrow elitism of proper pronunciation. But this is all counter-productive. There is nothing anti-elitist or realistic about mumbling. It is just aggravating.

The world of acting is, by its very nature, unrealistic. It is meant to transport us to different planes, to take us out of humdrum existence. And it can do that only if it aids our understanding of the narrative rather than obscures it. We don’t expect absolutely realistic dialogue in novels. Indeed, any book that contained the halting, repetitive, jumbled speech patterns of everyday life would be extremely boring.

It is perhaps telling that the most enchanting movie of the moment, nominated for ten Oscars, is The Artist, set in the world of the silent cinema. With just one punchline of dialogue right at the end, it is far more appealing than a host of mumbled efforts.

omg I couldn’t understand the town either. i thought my english hearing comprehension went downhill bc alli’ve been listening to is japanese but it turns out not. not to mention tha tmovie sucks balls lol. you don’t have to catch all the lines to reach that conclusion.

I think it’s worse with japanese stuff but… i haen’t seen much american/english movies in a while ( or at lesat not many… yes very FEW) but I do watch my american dramas…

and i just checked out the trailer for birdsong… i see what that person means… very mumbly… it’s like they don’t want  you to understand what they’re saying.

lol i checked it out the bird song trailer of this article about actors mumbling therefore getting rendered incomprehensible.. and wow this was mumbly! and what the f did that guy say at 0:50 I HATE IT WHEN ACTORS TALK LIKE THAT REGARDLESS OF THE CHARACTER OR SCENE. unless he has some condition/disesae that only allows him to speak like that there should be no talking like that unless the intention is so that the audience can’t understand the actor!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNXw2ZjvEdU

(出典： Daily Mail)