Is there any actual evidence that she is deaf?
In interviews she doesn’t sound it, and to be honest, I don’t hear her as being loud as opposed to speaking clearly.
Any idea where “the actor is going deaf” came from, and is it possibly the original Barwick Mondegreen?
Offhand I can find no evidence for this.
In my experience, people who go deaf late in life tend not to change their speaking style all that much anyway; they may be inappropriately loud, but this is a recording, so they fix that as a matter of course.
No they bluddy don’t, Hedgers. That’s the trouble.
The sudden hoots and shrieky patches of Jill’s remind me very much of a deaf woman I knew in my childhood. She’d been deaf since she was quite young - 20s or 30s - though. Maybe that’s why I was a believer in the ‘Paddy G is going deaf’ explanation.
As there’s something massively amiss with her delivery, imo, I propose the alternative explanation, namely: ‘Paddy Greene is going potty’.
Fair enough, Gus. All the speech I edit gets a light pass through the compressor before I let it out to the public.
Hedgers, am I being incredibly dense? (Probably. Ed) Specifically about what it is you do.
Yrs, potentially chastened,
Gus.
I still maintain P. G. sounds potty, though.
I’d suggest things about the competence you display as opposed to that of the BBC techs at this point, were I unkind, Hedgers.
Perhaps it is just that you have a little self-respect and don’t want to send out something substandard.
But, you see, I don’t hear Jill as being particularly louder than any of the other characters, and strongly suspect that she is heard as louder because the expectation that she is louder has been put forward on the board and taken as a fact, while I am by no means sure that it is a fact.
I’d be very interested, if anyone has some way of testing this objectively. A decibel meter of some sort, or perhaps those things like a nit-comb with many many lines which wiggle up and down, just to see whether Jill talking makes them go higher than, say, Lilian talking or Brian talking. Or Clarrie, who was definitely louder than Jill when she was whinging about the B&B labour that she does not have to do if she had not volunteered for it.
Eppur si stride
Gus, I do Many Things, most of them for fun.
Not sure if it’s that she consistently louder, rather that there’s a scattergun approach to emphases. She sounds as if she’s being repeatedly goosed (so it’s probably the Borefeathers’ fault).
I have a report from someone playing with tech, who says, “I’m listening to what I think must be a Jill/Kirsty scene, about 3-4 minutes in, and J is coming out louder - but I think that’s because her vocal tones are purer, as if she were singing, and with this analysis that will make the numbers go up (an individual frequency is higher). I wonder whether some people hear her that way too.”
That is the episode from 28th March, and 3-4 minutes in is indeed Jill and Kirsty.
“I can’t get a useful overall amplitude that’s separate from that, and I think it’s enough of a distorting effect to invalidate the results.”
Apart from there, there seems to be little or no difference in actual volume among any of the women in that episode, from what I can see looking at the wiggly line thingies. (Technical term, m’Lud.)
Does the wiggly line thingy in question calibrate for hootaciousness, though? It’s not the volume per se most of the time*, it’s the delivery (a line which would earn a midwife few friends).
*get them to try it on 27 March’s offering (if that’s the one with her with Pip and the flapping chequebook), though. I’m sure she was both hooty and loud then. I was quite irritated after the beginnings of this thread that she didn’t do all her narsty irritating tricks yesterday, when I somehow knew you would have been listening like a hawk. Oh, you know what I mean. Like a bat or one of them spiffy moths or something. Like one of the above with added tech support. I’m not using the word unsproting, mind. Well, I am, but not its less confused cousin. Yet.
It’s very exclamatory, her style, isn’t it? I think that helps give the impression she is shouting.
Irene of Peet’s once commented on Jill’s manner of congratulating herself that she hadn’t got wet one day even though it was raining because she “had her coat and hat!!”, saying it sounded as though the coat and hat had suddenly materialised in front on her. Joe described it as always sounding as though someone had just goosed her.