Tawkesby: A Beginner’s Guide

Welcome to the Hawkesby School of Elocution. Do you long to sound like TVNZ’s lovely Kate with no fuss and no mess? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Allow us to explain. Kate had a perfectly ordinary voice until fairly recently when, it appears, a branding expert advised her that she should “own” her IP — her newsreading voice — and a leading voice coach helped her to subtly re-engineer key components of the English language in order to differentiate herself from the competition. This is her USP, or “unique selling point”. The effect is rather like… well, imagine how Barbra Streisand might sound if she’d been born in Johannesburg and then sent to a flash English girls’ school like Roedean.

So that we’re all playing on a level playing field — reading off the same newssheet, as it were — we at the Hawkesby School of Elocution feel it’s high time all New Zealanders started talking like this. It’s sexy, it’s now, and it’s so much more fun than boring old Kiwi English.

Just remember to speak perfectly normally at all times when you’re voicing a segment, provided your face isn’t actually on camera — there’s no sense in squandering your USP. But whenever your face is on screen, switch over to ‘Tawkesby’. Yes, that’s what New Zealand linguistic experts are calling this exciting new phenomenon.

Pucker your glossy lips and hollow your cheeks and make your face as long as possible. And don’t forget to do that funny little Streisand-esque grimace/pout with your mouth, just before they cut away to any video segments.

The most important word in your vocabulary is going to be “thousand”, so use it as frequently as possible — you’ll be surprised how easy it is to sneak this all-purpose word into almost any autocue script that doesn’t already contain it, and then milk it to the max — like this:

“Thaarsands and thaaarsands.”

(Remember that in Tawkesby you’re trying not for an “ow”, but rather an “aaar” sound.)

Here are a few other examples, taken from TVNZ’s forthcoming Dictionary of Tawkesby:

“faarnd” = found
“graand” = ground
“corst” = cost
“naah” = now
“inspaah” = inspire
“annaarnced” = announced
“Vaarduct” = Viaduct

Now try stringing together some Tawkesby to form a complete sentence:

“It’s been annaarnced that thaarsands of new apartments planned for Auckland’s Vaarduct Basin, each corsting hundreds of thaarsands of dollars, will naah no longer be built...”

By jove, I think you’ve got it!

Now, just imagine if, say, TVNZ reporter Pippa Wetzell was reading the six o’clock news. It hardly bears thinking about, does it? You wouldn’t need any of these tips, we’d all still be speaking English and New Zealand would be so much less… now, hang on there just one minute…