Well, that was interesting. I detest walking into a situation where I’m not prepared, and since this whole thing was non-disclosure protected (lots of espionage in the computer game world, I understand) no details could be released to me about this project to help me prepare. So I walked into the recording room cold. It was fun; no denying that. My partner was an absolute scream who made me cry with laughter. The main problem with the five female roles, though, was that they were female stereotypes as opposed to the ten male international characters. Granted, they were stereotypes too, but at least my partner could play with accents. I had to play up the stereotypes, which gave me much less room to improvise and basically left me pretty unengaged. They had fun fooling around with my voice, making me sound about a hundred pounds heavier than I am for one character, and I must admit I had a good laugh when they played back a couple of other characters that I had nailed dead on. All the same, though, as much fun as the exercise was, I wish I’d been given more than three catch-phrases for each role to record as a test, and I really wish I’d seen visuals for all of them.

In other news, we anxiously await the official good news of the birth of the new daughter of our upstairs neighbours and very dear friends Jeff and Paze! They’re at the hospital today, and they’ve sworn to tell no one the name of this child until she’s born, which has left the rest of us with no choice but to call her The Peanut. Poor kid; it’s going to stick. It will, however, be nice to be told the name that will be on her birth certificate! Watch this space for news as soon as there’s news to be released…