I’ve been in the business since 1979, but have never had a personal agent or been on the books of a voice agency — not because none of them wanted me, I hasten to add! I just didn’t cross their radar — and I never contacted any of them until now. Coming from a background of working in commercial radio as both a presenter and commercial producer, I’ve been happily working in the field of local radio commercial VOs all my professional life and never felt the need for an agent to find me work. Along with many other commissions I’ve completed over the years for independent producers — such as corporate DVDs and promotions, web videos and a few regional TV commercials — I’ve had enough regular work to sustain me as a full-time professional voiceover artist for over 30 years.

However, times are changing; there are now many more people in the VO industry compared with when I first started — but there’s still only so much pie to go round, and with such a huge number of artists sitting at the table trying to grab their slice, the time is right to try and make sure I don’t start going hungry.

Being represented by BigFish, a voiceover agency well-respected throughout the media industry and with connections I could never hope to establish on my own, provides an opportunity to widen the scope of my work to cover areas I’ve always found difficult to crack. I’m hoping that with their help, 2013 might prove to be something of a breakthrough year!

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On the short journey up from Somerset, my friends and I were discussing how none of us had experienced any Fortean events during the ten years since Val had died — I commented: “I can’t say I’ve had any ‘emails from the grave’, or anything like that.” My friends agreed. Nothing untoward had happened to them in the past decade either. I reflected quietly to myself how Val would have adored Facebook and Twitter and all the other social networking sites we now have — they weren’t around when she was alive, and she was a person who loved to communicate.

We met my daughter in the car park and wandered off into the woods, where we found a lovely little glade amongst the trees for our ceremony. (Val and C often used Westonbirt as a place for their “office” meetings when they worked for the same organisation years ago, so it was one of Val’s favourite locations.) We each wore one of Val’s lovingly hand-made waistcoats — it was a hobby she was developing as an internet business before she died. Preparing to play the music tracks on my iPhone via C’s mini-amplifier, I switched it to Airplane Mode to prevent it playing any other unwanted sounds, and the others either switched their phones off or put them on silent.

After the first track I haltingly said my little piece, and we began chuckling as we recalled (amongst other things) what a wicked sense of humour Val had in life; another track was played and my daughter then began reciting some poignant words she’d found on the internet, becoming more tearful as she tried to struggle through it.

She hadn’t read more than a few lines when she was interrupted by Yoda’s distinctive voice saying jauntily:

“Arr! Message from the Dark Side, there is!”

It was C’s phone — her Yoda ringtone is set to play when it receives a text. She hurriedly pulled it from her pocket, very embarrassed at being the cause of the interruption at such a delicate point in the proceedings. “But I turned it right down!” she said. And sure enough, she showed us the volume was, indeed, set to zero.

We all had a good laugh about it and joked that the coincidence of a text arriving just at that moment was pretty amazing. (We’d kind of dismissed the fact that the volume was set to zero.) Val certainly didn’t want people to feel overly sad at her passing — her final song choice for the humanist funeral service she arranged not long before she went was Monty Python’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” — and Yoda’s quirky voice, piping up just at that moment, lightened our mood and raised our spirits, so Val would have heartily approved at that. My daughter picked up from where she’d left off, reciting with much more confidence, and the rest of our little ceremony passed without further interruptions.

Later, travelling back home, C had a chance to examine her phone more closely: there were no unread texts. Her phone hadn’t received any — and the volume was still on zero.

So what — or who — managed to set Yoda off? And bypass the volume setting?

We like to think we know.

Perhaps it was the favoured location, along with with our collective heightened emotional state — and the waistcoats that she’d handled, and into which she’d woven her own creative life-force, stitch by stitch — that combined to provide a psychic bridge strong enough for Val to influence the phone’s electrical circuits and achieve the mischievous effect she wanted to let us know that she was there with us, in spirit (and in fine humour), in that bright summer glade.

Whatever the explanation, it’s an event that’ll certainly stick in my mind as an example of a truly Fortean moment!

Yoda Image Credit: starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Yoda

A variation on this post was published at the Fortean Times Message Board, in the It Happened To Me section.

UPDATE 2nd April 2013: Fortean Times were kind enough to select my item for inclusion in “It Happened To Me!” in the 300th edition of their magazine, published in March 2013!

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Aluminosilicate glass, to be precise. That’s “normal glass doped with aluminum oxides to make it stronger and more scratch-resistant than normal glass”, according to Tested.com. The British Glass web site describes it thus: “A small, but important type of glass, aluminosilicate, contains 20% aluminium oxide (alumina-Al2O3) often including calcium oxide, magnesium oxide and boric oxide in relatively small amounts, but with only very small amounts of soda or potash. It is able to withstand high temperatures and thermal shock and is typically used in combustion tubes, gauge glasses for high-pressure steam boilers, and in halogen-tungsten lamps capable of operating at temperature as high as 750°C.”

Is it Corning‘s famous Gorilla Glass? Corning provides the glass used in a host of smartphones, but there’s no mention of the iPhone at its web site — though it adds that “Due to customer agreements, we cannot identify all devices that feature Gorilla Glass. Your favorite device may include Gorilla Glass, even if you don’t see it listed.” I rather like to think it is Gorilla Glass in my iPhone, because a) I like gorillas, b) Corning is a global expert in this field, and c) Apple likes to go with the best it can get. (The jury is still out for many reviewers because Apple is so coy about its products and processes, but according to AppleInsider, it seems the iPhone 4 does have Gorilla Glass — at least on the front — while the back is aluminosilicate glass, but not the Gorilla brand. Whether that’s the same for the 4S, I don’t know. This Mashable article discusses the use of Gorilla Glass in the iPhone 4S, too.)

So what’s this got to do with the title of this piece? Well, when I arrived home with my new iPhone 4S the other day, I parked it on the arm of my leather sofa and went to another room. About five minutes later I heard an ominous clatter — and returned to find my iPhone on the floor (a hard laminate floor, I might add). I was sure I’d left it safely cushioned on the top of the wide arm — and yet, I supposed, I couldn’t have done, because there it was on the floor. Fortunately, no damage had been done, so this time I put it on the seat.

Fast-forward to last night. Watching TV while sitting on the sofa, and forgetting what had apparently happened the other day, I put my iPhone next to me on the leather arm, alongside the TV remote and my cigarette lighter (obviously, I can’t photograph the phone in place on the arm, because I used the phone to take the photo — you’ll have to use your imagination). About five minutes later, while engrossed in the programme, I suddenly became aware that the phone had slipped down the arm and landed next to my leg on the sofa seat.

I found this very curious. With the phone at rest on the arm, a fair amount of friction is present between the two, meaning that to move it, a substantial push with a finger is needed to overcome the phone’s inertia. Stop pushing, and the phone immediately returns to (apparent) rest once again. One would expect this inertia and friction to keep it in place until an outside force (e.g. a nudging finger) acted upon it — the phone weighs about 4.9 ounces (140 grammes), and the leather of the arm is matte, not shiny.

I tried a simple experiment: with the phone at rest on the arm, I lightly rested my index finger on one side of it and my thumb on the other (being careful not to press down on the leather of the arm), and left a small distance between finger/thumb and phone. I waited, making sure I sat completely still so as not to cause any vibrations through the sofa. After a few minutes, I felt the phone gently nudging my thumb — it had begun to move, seemingly of its own accord. I did this a few times, and proved that even if the phone is placed only slightly off-centre on the arm (and I do mean just a tiny amount), the inertia is slowly but surely overcome and the phone proceeds from what appears to be a standing start to gather momentum and slide down the arm, gathering speed until it falls off. Even when I thought the phone was dead centre on the arm (which, admittedly, is not flat but slightly curved, as you can see in the photo), if I waited long enough, it moved. It was as though a poltergeist was having fun with me.

I’ve concluded it’s a property of the aluminosilicate glass and the completely flat back of the iPhone 4S (the 3GS was curved — I don’t know if this would make a difference, but I don’t remember my 3GS behaving in this way). It’s so smooth, there are virtually no impurities on the surface area, or lumps and bumps, presumably even at the molecular level, to provide sufficient friction to help keep it in place.

Which, to my mind, begs the interesting question: when placed in such a position, is it always moving from the moment my fingers leave it supposedly at rest? Working backwards from the point of most movement, i.e. slipping down and off the arm, is there a point where it isn’t moving? (Halve the distance travelled from one measured point to the next, working backwards — does one ever arrive at point zero?) I’m no expert in physics, quantum or otherwise, but something in my hazy instinctual grasp of these things suggests to me there’s a strong possibility that my iPhone is constantly on the move no matter where I place it, and on whatever surface.

Well. Putting all the flakey physics to one side, it’s nice to finish with a bit of sound advice, so the upshot of this is: don’t leave your iPhone on the arm of your sofa (or anyone else’s) — especially if you’ve got laminate floors. iPhones are tough and can stand a clatter or two, but they’re not impervious to shock. Leave it somewhere where it can’t fall!

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“TRADE DEALS” Radio Commercial, September 2011 – 788KB, 50sec.
(Courtesy Simon at GMG Radio.)
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The newspaper article continues: “HMRC told Lunn today that it would no longer recognise any returns filed through his East Sussex-based firm. The taxman is pursuing Lunn and his 7,000 clients for what it believes is £117m in unpaid tax. In a court judgment published in February it emerged that HMRC believed there were systematic errors in tax returns filed on behalf of clients by Lunn’s firm.”

HMRC “raided Lunn’s offices in June last year, with Lunn and his son Jonathan arrested and interviewed under caution. The taxman is pursuing a criminal investigation into the firm and a separate civil inquiry into Lunn’s clients to claw back unpaid tax.”

“Permanent secretary for tax Dave Hartnett said: ‘HMRC decides to stop dealing with tax agents only in exceptional circumstances, where we have reason to believe there may be serious irregularities in tax returns and accounts.’”

This is the same Dave Hartnett who, last year, (allegedly) ‘negotiated’ a deal with Vodafone to let the company off a tax bill of £4.2 billion. The Guardian also covered this story in October 2010 — and Private Eye magazine has been banging on about it for even longer.

Private Eye issue 1293 (22 July – 4 August 2011) says that “A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) on HM Revenue & Customs’ ‘resolution of tax disputes’ — prompted by the Eye’s revelations of the dodgy Vodafone deal — confirms that all is not as it should be among the department’s top brass and in Britain’s largest companies. … In four big cases” (almost certainly including the Vodafone case, says the Eye), “the proper procedures were ditched in favour of ‘specific governance arrangements’” — which involved “sign off by the commissioners without prior reference to the programme board”. In other words, says the Eye, “Vodafone-style deals were done privately by Dave Hartnett without correct clearance.” Hartnett is one of those commissioners, and the Eye alleges that in three of the four big cases investigated by the NAO, “the commissioner who negotiated it himself [is] again almost certainly Hartnett!”

Hmm. So HMRC are chasing £117 million in allegedly unpaid taxes by soft targets like “TV stars”, against the £4.2 BILLION Hartnett allegedly let a corporate giant avoid? (Never mind all the others.) This apparent tax avoidance, allegedly achieved with the help of the permanent secretary for tax, may of course be speculation, hence the word ‘allegedly’ scattered liberally throughout this item — but little people like us will never know for sure because, as the Eye reports: “The cosy deals … remain immune from scrutiny to protect ‘taxpayer confidentiality’…” Which only adds insult to taxpayers’ injury.

Seems to me that if we are truly “all in this together,” as we keep being told, there are “serious irregularities” within HMRC that the ConDem government should be investigating urgently.

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