I’d been acting for a couple of years by this point. It was 1994, I was 19 years old and Channel 4 were about to replace their iconic Friday night show, The Word with a new programme called Passengers, which would have no on screen presenters. It would be a series of articles being voiced alternately by a female and a male voice. The legendary Jo Whiley was the woman and they needed their dude. They were searching for their dude…

There was a guy who lived one floor up on the estate where I grew up and he was a television producer and isn’t that just a perfect example of what makes London such an incredible city? I’d dropped out of school when I was 16 with no qualifications. Grown up broke as hell, usually getting by on benefits and panic and yet someone from a completely different strata had bought a flat upstairs and had done it up all nice and he was a producer and a lovely guy and his mate, well she was a producer on this new show and the guy upstairs put my name forward for it. So I made them a demo, then another and another and somehow, after jumping through a lot of hoops, by some miracle, I got that job. I was their dude.

 

That was so amazing to me, to be working on that show. Going into Soho every week to record was magic. After that I got an agent and started working more broadly though it took a while to really get going. When the legendary Eddy Temple Morris was hired in to reinvent the sound of Radio 1 around 1996 I think, he wound up making me the station voice, He patiently mentored me and taught me how to harness what talent I had. That guy has had such a pivotal role in so many careers you wouldn’t believe it. Anyway, I was incredibly lucky to have gotten into it so early and to have found such a wonderful mentor and now to have been in the business so long. I’ve been a small part of many awesome projects, narrated documentaries, voiced award wining adverts and have met so many incredible people along the way and honestly after all this time I love it more than ever. There is something about having only your voice to work with that is so pure and after the slog of some of the super long term projects I work on like taking a film from an idea through the script stage and then financing, shooting and editing it which is literally years spent on one thing, after all that, the speed of turnaround and the immediacy of being the last element to be slotted in to something is just wonderful for me, and it still amazes me how much of a difference you can make to something when you go the extra mile to get that last element just right which I always do because I just so love working with the creatives and the producers and all pulling together to really get it right. It’s strange but think I take even more pride in it now than I ever did before.