You’re watching the closing credits of “Baywatch,” hoping for one more glimpse of your favorite lifeguard or lifeguardette. Suddenly, you hear a mysterious, strangely compelling voice. “Kane must battle an evil gourd for Peter’s soul on tonight’s `Kung Fu: The Legend Continues,’ ” the voice tells you. “But next, Mitch plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with a giant sea monkey on `Baywatch Nights.’
You have no choice: You must stay tuned to what the voice tells you is “UPN Power 50.”
But who is this siren of the airwaves? What does she look like? Does she do anything other than synopsize TV shows in 15 words or less?
Every television station in town has one of these voices. Some are cheerful and friendly. Some are deep and fatherly. Some are a little scary. And some just tell you to shut up and watch. But each belongs to a voice-over professional who has figured out how to make a comfortable living by persuading folks not to turn that dial.
In the old days, those voices would have belonged to people Scott Chapin describes as “bored announcers sitting in booths drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and waiting for something to happen.” Today they usually belong to entrepreneurs like Chapin, a former Wisconsin deejay who provides promotional voiceovers for more than 20 TV stations across the country, including Chicago’s WFLD-Ch. 32.
Thanks to new, broad-band digital telephone lines, Chapin can phone voiceovers directly to his clients from a guest house behind his home in rural New Mexico. Among the other out-of-towners dialing into Chicago’s airwaves are Miami-based Nick Michaels (the commanding voice of WBBM-Ch. 2 and about 20 other TV and radio stations), Atlanta-based Doug Paul (the boisterous baritone associated with WGN-Ch. 9 and more than a dozen sister stations), and Charlie Van Dyke of Scottsdale, Ariz. (the very, very busy voice of WMAQ-Ch. 5 and almost 90 other radio and TV stations).
“There’s Charlie, Scott, Doug, me and a few others (doing station promotions nationally),” says Michaels, who can also be heard on CNN. “Ten or 15 people do 95 percent of the work.”
Not that Chicago doesn’t have a few home-grown voices doing things the old-fashioned way. Don Ferris and Marty Robinson of WTTW-Ch. 11, Carol Gallagher of WPWR-Ch. 50, and Hector Lozano of WGBO-Ch. 66 all head into the studio from time to time to record promotional tracks for their stations. But Lozano and Gallagher are far from full-time announcers: He puts much more time into his job as WGBO’s sports anchor, and she spends four out of five weekdays as a stay-at-home mom.
“Don and I are dinosaurs,” says Robinson, whose 25 years with WTTW have made him a Chicago institution. “No station in this city employs full-time announcers. It will all be per diem after we’re gone.”
“It’s not really cost-effective for stations to have announcers sitting around eight hours a day,” agrees Jim Marketti, vice president of creative services at WFLD. “You don’t need eight hours of work from them every day.”
A changing business
Lori Terwell, WBBM’s director of advertising and promotion, says that’s because the TV announcer’s role has changed. “Back in the old days, advertising was nowhere near as huge (an industry) as it is today. TV stations were doing more commercial production,” she says. “As stations have come to be less involved in commercial production, they’ve put more and more emphasis on (self-)promotion. Promotion has grown so much and so rapidly that it has created this incredible pool of (voiceover) talent spread out across the country.”
Not everyone in the business finds that pool of out-of-town talent to be enticing–or appropriate. Although he stresses that he won’t be stepping down any time soon, Robinson says the next generation of WTTW announcers will be “local people who understand the station” and its “dignified but friendly” personality.
Van Dyke concedes the importance of knowing a client station and the image it’s trying to project. But he maintains that out-of-towners have their own unique advantages.
“Using non-local talent doesn’t mean there aren’t great local announcers available. But the best people are always very busy,” he says. “The idea is that a station can own a voice in their market the same way they own a logo or a (catch phrase). That’s hard to do if the voice is (plugging other products) all over town. When you hear that voice, you should immediately think of the station.”
What that voice should project, Van Dyke says, is the station’s carefully chosen marketing position. “It’s the voice guy’s job to talk to the marketing people so he can sound like how they define themselves,” he says. “Some of them will want you to sound warm and fuzzy, like you’re (the viewer’s) best friend. Others go for more of a tabloid approach. They almost want to scare people into watching.”
In at least one case, Van Dyke couldn’t be as scary as his client wanted. “WBBM was extremely tabloid when I was there (in the early ’90s),” he says. “They kept wanting more and more of that and it was getting too far out of my range, so we ended up going our separate ways.”
Michaels, WBBM’s current voice, says the station has toned itself down. “I try to be intelligent and a little bit more insightful,” he says.
This softer approach reflects what Michaels says is his voiceover philosophy: “In an overcommunicated world, a whisper becomes a scream.
“What’s scarier? `STEVE, I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!’ Or `Steve, I’m going to kill you,’ ” he asks with disquieting conviction.
Air of excitement
“Intelligent” and “dignified” might be OK for established stations such as WBBM and WTTW. But Chicago’s younger, hungrier stations are opting for “exuberant” or “intense.”
“(Promotions manager) Luis de la Parra told me he wanted the station to have a young sound, with energy,” says Lozano of WGBO, a Spanish-language station for three years. “It’s a little different from what Marty Robinson does. He sounds real calm. We go the other way. We’re excited.”
The equally youthful WCIU-Ch. 26 has a similar sound, albeit in English. “They wanted to push `The U’ (the station’s nickname), so in the beginning it was real `in your face,’ ” says announcer Richard Malmos of Kansas City, Kan.
On 12-year-old WPWR, shows like “Highlander: The Series” and “The Sentinel” are promoted in warm, conversational tones. “The way I look at it, I’m kind of an everyman telling people, `Hey, this isn’t a bad show. Why don’t you look at it?’ ” says Gallagher, who started at the station as a full-time assistant program director before being drafted into voiceover duties. “I’m the viewer’s bud.”
WFLD’s Marketti thinks Gallagher’s approach is going to become more common. “There’s a real push to use female voices,” he says. “People are accustomed to listening to the same male voices reading the same old lines, and at times there’s a tuneout factor.”
WBBM’s Terwell agrees that femme is in. “When I started in promotions, we never used a female voice. We never even thought about it,” she admits. “Now more stations are trying to go after women (viewers), so we’ll start to hear female voices more. It’s a matter of being smarter about who we’re trying to reach.”
Most TV stations already have female announcers who step in when a booming male voice won’t do. WBBM uses Suzy Nelson, a freelancer from Denver. “It depends on the mood,” Terwell says. “I think it creates more warmth. It’s less hard-hitting.”
“If you’re focusing on trying to grab female viewers, there are certain topics that a man does not sell best,” says Marketti, whose station dropped WCKG-FM radio personality Patti Haze in favor of New York-based Sara Kreiger last week. “You don’t want some deep male voice hollering out something about PMS.”
Announcers as actors
With so many varied approaches and styles to be heard in Chicago, it’s clear that the age of “rip and read” TV announcing is long past. “Back in the old days, there was the Gary Owens school of announcing that basically read everything the same way,” says Chapin. “I think we’ve seen announcing go through a lot of big changes. Today if you’re really going to nail something, you’ve got to know where you’re taking it and try to get yourself into a certain frame of mind.”
“Some of the guys in my business call it `voice acting,’ ” says Van Dyke. “I call it `a concept read.’ You have to understand the concept (your clients) want and let that determine your reading.”
“Every announcer is an actor. It’s just a different form of acting,” says WGN’s Doug Paul. “The stage is a microphone and I have to paint pictures with words and emotions. That’s why some people excel at it and others struggle.”
Malmos is less philosophical about his craft, perhaps because of his background. While Paul, Van Dyke, Michaels and Chapin all got into the business as teen deejays at tiny radio stations, Malmos started out as an actor.
“As any actor or actress knows, acting doesn’t pay. Voice work is a much easier way to put bread on the table,” he says. “I’ve got two kids–one in college and one graduating from high school. So all I’m trying to get across to people (when recording a promo) is, `It’s a job.’ I just read it however they tell me to. It’s a great way to make a living.”
TALK, TALK, TALK . . .
Think announcers just hang out watching TV all day, turning on microphones from time to time to share television viewing advice? Think again. The world of TV announcing is a dense, crowded, “Soylent Green” kind of place jam-packed with different responsibilities. These are just a few examples of what a busy announcer might be faced with in a typical session.
Promo: Promotes an upcoming program. “Tonight at 7, Robert Goulet guest stars on a very special `Mama’s Family.’ “
Overcredits: Promotes upcoming programs while the end credits are still rolling for the previous show. “Later tonight, a slip of the tongue leads to wacky misunderstandings on `Charles in Charge.’ But coming up next, a slip of the tongue leads to wacky misunderstandings on `Three’s Company.’ “
Open: Directly precedes a program. “Welcome to the 7 o’clock movie. Tonight’s feature is `Gas-s-s-s,’ starring Bud Cort and Cindy Williams.”
Bump: Precedes a commercial break. ” `Gas-s-s-s’ will be back right after this.”
Close: Follows a program. “Thank you for joining us for `Gas-s-s-s.’ “
Topical: Promotes the evening news. “Chocolate milk: Delicious snack beverage . . . or liver-eating menace? WFAK reveals the truth . . . tonight at 10!”
Cluster buster: Run during a newscast commercial break, promotes news reports that will appear later in the show. “Yesterday we got to the bottom of chocolate milk. Later tonight . . . food poisoning a la mode: What you need to know about apple pie.”
