Back to results Gruff enough What drives Barry Jenkin? Bryan Staff profiles a voiceover artist. By Bryan Staff Barry Jenkin has been the voice of a thousand distinctive radio and television commercials in his 30-year broadcasting career. Trained as an NZBC announcer, he spent three years behind a microphone at 2XS Palmerston North until Auckland's 1ZM lured him back to Auckland in 1972. From 1ZM he joined Radio Hauraki, just back on land after its pirate days, where DJ Fred Botica (now in Perth) christened him "Dr Rock", a moniker which stuck when Jenkin began hosting television's Radio With Pictures. These were the years when punk was making its presence felt, but as the '70s became the '80s the style of Radio With Pictures broadened, and Dr Rock was replaced. There had to be more to earning a living than pushing the proverbial up the incline, Jenkin figured. There was Ñ and it was called voice work. Advertising agencies, film companies and corporate video-makers discovered that Jenkin's gruff tones and measured delivery had many uses. Suddenly he was in far greater demand than he had ever been in radio. "I actually think I've been very lucky in the work I've been asked to do. The people who want me want a matter-of-fact approach; they don't want a ?hey gee whizz, look at this and get some today!' sort of thing. You do get a bit frustrated with the young things who come in with their yellow suitcases and their purple glasses and tell you ?there's not enough green in the read'." Contrast Jenkin's Stirling Sports TV ads with those of Rebel Sports voiced by Nick Brown. "That's the complete antithesis of what they're doing at Stirling. I don't know which is better, but I do think I'm easier to listen to. I don't like to be shouted at by commercials. "It's common for agencies to cut down a 30-second commercial into a 15 using the same words but you don't even have to read it again. That is another track and you're paid accordingly Ñ about $350 for a 30-second ad for television and $250 for radio. But having said that, there's an awful lot of radio work that you do when they just wander in with a pile of 42 radio commercials and you get paid by the hour. Radio's got very cheap. So unless you're working through an agency, you don't get $250 for a radio ad." Voice agencies have a chequered history in Auckland, coming and going over the years. Yet they grew from the desire of professional voices to be represented Ñ actors and models Ñ in an unregulated industry. "The voiceover business is very strange in that everyone plays their own tune. There's very little cooperation. You only ever see other voices when they are coming in or going out of the studio. The people who do voiceovers are the Cinderellas of the industry. They don't get invited to the Christmas parties. The agencies invite their clients; the studios invite their clients, but nobody invites the voice people. You just don't meet socially. "Vivienne Bridgwater and Julia Cameron started out with The Other Network in the late '80s but the ad agencies didn't want to know back then. Now with CDs of voices and stuff, they're gaining acceptance. "There was a certain amount of resistance to them from the advertising agents because voice agents try to inflate the prices Ñ albeit in their clients' interest. Ad agencies don't like that. They also don't like paying a booking fee and a loading on top. There was no real price for a commercial before Ñ or it was open slather and you did your own negotiation. I would say that the voice agencies were responsible for the fee standardisation, and advertising agents now live with the voice agents." One could argue that an established voice like Jenkin shouldn't need an agent. "I've never been good at office work. I figure it's worth it to have somebody else do the accounts. Also, I'm poor at negotiating prices Ñ for an hour's voiceover for a television doco you would probably be looking at somewhere between $1500 and $1800. It can take anything up to a couple of days and you sometimes have to fly there ... to Dunedin or whatever. But sometimes you can do it with the new technology down the phone. "Mostly they cut the pictures to the voice rather than the other way round. Before the emphasis was always on the pictures and you saw where the gaps were for the copy. Now I'll do the read and they'll cut the pictures around that." What kind of voice earns more money Ñ the type that is distinctive or anonymous? "I think the latter. Warren Thomas does extremely well and people like John Sweetman too. You hear maybe two or three commercial breaks on the telly and they're doing 20% or 30% of them. You wouldn't notice it unless you were in the industry. And that seems to be their strength. My problem is my voice sticks out like dog's balls Ñ I get hired a lot less frequently." In the late '80s Jenkin tried his luck in Australia. Sydney loved his manly-but-mellifluous tones. "I rang an agent and they said the usual stuff about full books and not taking on new people, so I dressed up in a motorcycle suit and helmet, and took my folder and tape in, dropped it on a desk and left again. I figured they would be curious enough to open it. They were. They called me and I was in. "I remember sitting in [Sydney voiceover agent] John Scott's office; I had just managed to convince him to take me on his books and we had sort of shaken hands on the deal when the phone went. It was a BMW dealer wanting a voice John said: ?we've got the perfect bloke for you ... name of Barry Jenkin'. Well, the fellow didn't pause for breath Ñ apparently there was a bloke in Brisbane Ñ an old actor and a complete shocker to work with Ñ whose name was Barry Jenkin. So they called me Barry Howard!" The Aussies managed to do something few New Zealanders had been able to achieve Ñ get Jenkin to appear on TV in a suit: "I did this 30-second radio commercial for TNT Couriers. Peter Abels was walking past the door and asked who the voice was. They said it was ?some new bloke from New Zealand'. Abels said: ?Get him here', and that was that. I was the voice of TNT from then on Ñ on radio and their presenter on telly. Thirty seconds for 20 grand! It was a futuristic, Star Trek kind of thing. There was a booth, like a shower box, and a young bloke with his courier uniform and a parcel under his arm appears in the ?transporter'. I say: ?One day in the future we may be getting parcels like this. In the meantime, there's TNT! Standing there in a $1500 suit that the agency bought for half price from one of the outfitters. It was to be used once and returned. I liked it so much I bought it from the agency for half of the half-price, knocked off my fee! "Within two weeks I had 25 grand so I moved into a place with the mobile phone and soon I was making $8000 a month." Jenkin moved to the Sydney's North Shore and found himself neighbours with New Zealander Brent Eccles whom he had known from the Auckland group Citizen Band. Eccles was drumming for the Angels as well as managing the band, and running a booking agency. He wanted to come back to New Zealand where he could see a gap in the tour market. Jenkin was back first, and received a phone call: "Eccles put a NZ tour of Bic Runga, Dave Dobbyn and Neil Finn together and it was incredibly successful. He put the acid on me to do the publicity for that. "I thought, well they're all high-profile, hardworking people, why the hell not? And that's when I started publicly endorsing music again after 20 years. For a hell of a long time I had knocked back every voice job that had anything to do with the music industry. I had been pretty pigheaded and denounced everything that I thought was crap Ñ and had lost a lot of jobs in radio as a result. Well I still think my stand actually did mean something, but lately I've been relenting, mainly because of Brent Eccles being a mate. Besides, you look at things a bit differently when you're older. "Lately, I've been listening to new music. When they fired me from all the radio stations I couldn't afford to buy everything new so I got further and further out of touch until MP3 came along. MP3's only been available for two years. Stunning really, when you think you can get seven hundred-odd songs on a data disk. The quality's fabulous. My old ears can't tell the difference between CD quality and near-CD quality. When I got the new machine I just could not believe what you can get down a telephone line! I listened to the net for eight months. Out of the 6500 songs I listened to, I downloaded 50 and I got those down to 16. My son Geoffrey helped me a great deal; I thought it was good to have some young ears on it as well. I emailed all the bands and told them I was going to put a CD together and that they would just have to live with the company they would keep. Most agreed immediately. Very few of them wanted to know name, rank, serial number, bath night, who the review copies were going to, etc. You can get them at Real Groovy Records, or just email me direct. "I guess you could say I'm semi-retired nowadays. I am still with an agency [he declines to name it] so I don't chase the work." Jenkin is currently the corporate voice of Radio Hauraki. "At the moment I'm building a gyrocopter here in the garage. I said I'd give myself a year and I'm four months into it Ñ but there's a long way to go." Suddenly, I'm reminded of the first morning Jenkin and I met Ñ at the NZBC training school in Wellington in 1969, when he'd drawn me aside and said: "I don't know how long I'll do this announcing stuff Ñ I'm actually more interested in flying; I'm building this plane, you see, and I've given myself..." Bryan Staff is a freelance writer, photo-grapher and broadcaster. His email address is wordstaff@xtra.co.nz. Barry Jenkin's is wendabari@xtra.co.nz. © Copyright AdMedia magazine February 2001 All material appearing is copyright and cannot be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. Please contact the copyright officer: Ph 0-9-845 5114, Email copyright@mediaweb.co.nz.	Username Password Keep me logged in on this computer Forgotten your password? Enter your email address and we will email your password to you:

Gruff enough

What drives Barry Jenkin? Bryan Staff profiles a voiceover artist.

By Bryan Staff

Barry Jenkin has been the voice of a thousand distinctive radio and television commercials in

his 30-year broadcasting career. Trained as an NZBC announcer, he spent three years behind a microphone at 2XS Palmerston North until Auckland's 1ZM lured him back to Auckland in 1972. From 1ZM he joined Radio Hauraki, just back on land after its pirate days, where DJ Fred Botica (now in Perth) christened him "Dr Rock", a moniker which stuck when Jenkin began hosting television's Radio With Pictures. These were the years when punk was making its presence felt, but as the '70s became the '80s the style of Radio With Pictures broadened, and Dr Rock was replaced. There had to be more to earning a living than pushing the proverbial up the incline, Jenkin figured. There was Ñ and it was called voice work. Advertising agencies, film companies and corporate video-makers discovered that Jenkin's gruff tones and measured delivery had many uses. Suddenly he was in far greater demand than he had ever been in radio.

"I actually think I've been very lucky in the work I've been asked to do. The people who want me want a matter-of-fact approach; they don't want a ?hey gee whizz, look at this and get some today!' sort of thing. You do get a bit frustrated with the young things who come in with their yellow suitcases and their purple glasses and tell you ?there's not enough green in the read'."

Contrast Jenkin's Stirling Sports TV ads with those of Rebel Sports voiced by Nick Brown. "That's the complete antithesis of what they're doing at Stirling. I don't know which is better, but I do think I'm easier to listen to. I don't like to be shouted at by commercials.

"It's common for agencies to cut down a 30-second commercial into a 15 using the same words but you don't even have to read it again. That is another track and you're paid accordingly Ñ about $350 for a 30-second ad for television and $250 for radio. But having said that, there's an awful lot of radio work that you do when they just wander in with a pile of 42 radio commercials and you get paid by the hour. Radio's got very cheap. So unless you're working through an agency, you don't get $250 for a radio ad."

Voice agencies have a chequered history in Auckland, coming and going over the years. Yet they grew from the desire of professional voices to be represented Ñ actors and models Ñ in an unregulated industry.

"The voiceover business is very strange in that everyone plays their own tune. There's very little cooperation. You only ever see other voices when they are coming in or going out of the studio. The people who do voiceovers are the Cinderellas of the industry. They don't get invited to the Christmas parties. The agencies invite their clients; the studios invite their clients, but nobody invites the voice people. You just don't meet socially.

"Vivienne Bridgwater and Julia Cameron started out with The Other Network in the late '80s but the ad agencies didn't want to know back then. Now with CDs of voices and stuff, they're gaining acceptance.

"There was a certain amount of resistance to them from the advertising agents because voice agents try to inflate the prices Ñ albeit in their clients' interest. Ad agencies don't like that. They also don't like paying a booking fee and a loading on top. There was no real price for a commercial before Ñ or it was open slather and you did your own negotiation. I would say that the voice agencies were responsible for the fee standardisation, and advertising agents now live with the voice agents."

One could argue that an established voice like Jenkin shouldn't need an agent. "I've never been good at office work. I figure it's worth it to have somebody else do the accounts. Also, I'm poor at negotiating prices Ñ for an hour's voiceover for a television doco you would probably be looking at somewhere between $1500 and $1800. It can take anything up to a couple of days and you sometimes have to fly there ... to Dunedin or whatever. But sometimes you can do it with the new technology down the phone.

"Mostly they cut the pictures to the voice rather than the other way round. Before the emphasis was always on the pictures and you saw where the gaps were for the copy. Now I'll do the read and they'll cut the pictures around that."

What kind of voice earns more money Ñ the type that is distinctive or anonymous? "I think the latter. Warren Thomas does extremely well and people like John Sweetman too. You hear maybe two or three commercial breaks on the telly and they're doing 20% or 30% of them. You wouldn't notice it unless you were in the industry. And that seems to be their strength. My problem is my voice sticks out like dog's balls Ñ I get hired a lot less frequently."

In the late '80s Jenkin tried his luck in Australia. Sydney loved his manly-but-mellifluous tones. "I rang an agent and they said the usual stuff about full books and not taking on new people, so I dressed up in a motorcycle suit and helmet, and took my folder and tape in, dropped it on a desk and left again. I figured they would be curious enough to open it. They were. They called me and I was in.

"I remember sitting in [Sydney voiceover agent] John Scott's office; I had just managed to convince him to take me on his books and we had sort of shaken hands on the deal when the phone went. It was a BMW dealer wanting a voice John said: ?we've got the perfect bloke for you ... name of Barry Jenkin'. Well, the fellow didn't pause for breath Ñ apparently there was a bloke in Brisbane Ñ an old actor and a complete shocker to work with Ñ whose name was Barry Jenkin. So they called me Barry Howard!"

The Aussies managed to do something few New Zealanders had been able to achieve Ñ get Jenkin to appear on TV in a suit: "I did this 30-second radio commercial for TNT Couriers. Peter Abels was walking past the door and asked who the voice was. They said it was ?some new bloke from New Zealand'. Abels said: ?Get him here', and that was that. I was the voice of TNT from then on Ñ on radio and their presenter on telly. Thirty seconds for 20 grand! It was a futuristic, Star Trek kind of thing. There was a booth, like a shower box, and a young bloke with his courier uniform and a parcel under his arm appears in the ?transporter'. I say: ?One day in the future we may be getting parcels like this. In the meantime, there's TNT! Standing there in a $1500 suit that the agency bought for half price from one of the outfitters. It was to be used once and returned. I liked it so much I bought it from the agency for half of the half-price, knocked off my fee!

"Within two weeks I had 25 grand so I moved into a place with the mobile phone and soon I was making $8000 a month."

Jenkin moved to the Sydney's North Shore and found himself neighbours with New Zealander Brent Eccles whom he had known from the Auckland group Citizen Band. Eccles was drumming for the Angels as well as managing the band, and running a booking agency. He wanted to come back to New Zealand where he could see a gap in the tour market. Jenkin was back first, and received a phone call: "Eccles put a NZ tour of Bic Runga, Dave Dobbyn and Neil Finn together and it was incredibly successful. He put the acid on me to do the publicity for that.

"I thought, well they're all high-profile, hardworking people, why the hell not? And that's when I started publicly endorsing music again after 20 years. For a hell of a long time I had knocked back every voice job that had anything to do with the music industry. I had been pretty pigheaded and denounced everything that I thought was crap Ñ and had lost a lot of jobs in radio as a result. Well I still think my stand actually did mean something, but lately I've been relenting, mainly because of Brent Eccles being a mate. Besides, you look at things a bit differently when you're older.

"Lately, I've been listening to new music. When they fired me from all the radio stations I couldn't afford to buy everything new so I got further and further out of touch until MP3 came along.

MP3's only been available for two years. Stunning really, when you think you can get seven hundred-odd songs on a data disk. The quality's fabulous. My old ears can't tell the difference between CD quality and near-CD quality. When I got the new machine I just could not believe what you can get down a telephone line! I listened to the net for eight months. Out of the 6500 songs I listened to, I downloaded 50 and I got those down to 16. My son Geoffrey helped me a great deal; I thought it was good to have some young ears on it as well. I emailed all the bands and told them I was going to put a CD together and that they would just have to live with the company they would keep. Most agreed immediately. Very few of them wanted to know name, rank, serial number, bath night, who the review copies were going to, etc. You can get them at Real Groovy Records, or just email me direct.

"I guess you could say I'm semi-retired nowadays. I am still with an agency [he declines to name it] so I don't chase the work." Jenkin is currently the corporate voice of Radio Hauraki.

"At the moment I'm building a gyrocopter here in the garage. I said I'd give myself a year and I'm four months into it Ñ but there's a long way to go."

Suddenly, I'm reminded of the first morning Jenkin and I met Ñ at the NZBC training school in Wellington in 1969, when he'd drawn me aside and said: "I don't know how long I'll do this announcing stuff Ñ I'm actually more interested in flying; I'm building this plane, you see, and I've given myself..."

Bryan Staff is a freelance writer, photo-grapher and broadcaster. His email address is wordstaff@xtra.co.nz. Barry Jenkin's is wendabari@xtra.co.nz.

© Copyright AdMedia magazine February 2001

All material appearing is copyright and cannot be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

Please contact the copyright officer: Ph 0-9-845 5114, Email copyright@mediaweb.co.nz.

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Gruff enough

What drives Barry Jenkin? Bryan Staff profiles a voiceover artist.