Allow me to introduce someone that you will be hearing rather a lot of over the coming months. More in fact than Geoff Lloyd or Russ Williams. Greater still than Nick Jackson. He will be our most prolific broadcaster, with an audience that outstrips even Christian O’Connell’s.  It is not for dramatic purposes that this announcement comes at the eleventh hour, in truth the ink is not yet dry on his contract because this is such an important signing to make.  His name is David Meyer and his role is to be the vocal embodiment of our character and the expression of our attitude. It may be a relief then to find out that he won’t be nearly as serious or self-important as this suggests, indeed just like the rest of us here at Absolute Radio, you will soon hear that he’s more than happy to have a little laugh at himself.

More of that in a moment, but first, how to cast an aural representation of us lot? Not through the conventional route, we wanted to find an new, unheard voice, so listening through the usual agents’ show-reels was out. Instead came weeks of racking our memories for television programmes, plays or films in which our ears had been pricked up by an actor whose voice boasted a special tone or timbre.  It turned out that David was lodged in our memories all along, but for the moment this escaped us.  So the hunt continued, through stand-up comedians, lilting audiobook narrators, versatile beatbox performers and even company directors looking for an interesting sideline.

We thought that we had found the one after stumbling across a You Tube clip of a retired Cyberman who’s voice was deep, luxurious and not at al metallic, but his location in rural France would make the intimate relationship we wanted to foster difficult. In the end it was our Hometime presenter who finally recalled watching a play in which his girlfriend, Zena, was acting; Geoff remembered that one of her co-stars had a beautiful, sonorous delivery. We now had a name. A Spotlight search revealed he had no voice-over agent, a good sign that he was indeed untapped talent. A demo session was organised and David arrived in the building fresh from Operatic rehearsals at the Coliseum. This was the first time he had ever tried his hand at becoming a voice-over, but from the start it was obvious that our search was at an end.

The reason he was already in our memories can be explained by enlightening you to the identity of the actor he is wrestling with in the image above: Roger Moore.  David, or Mischka the knife wielding henchman, predictably came off worse against 007 in the 1983 bond film, Octopussy. Now on Absolute we can expect less train-top acrobatics, but more vocal workouts. Here’s a sneak peak at what’s to come.