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…

Prophecies of doom

By Andrea Malcolm

Normally I would have done my best to ignore the media coverage on the avian flu (remember the prophecies of doom around Y2K – I do, I was one of the journalists hyping it) but having a baby has rendered me particularly susceptible to it.

I’ve always fancied myself as fit, healthy and fairly disease resistant so (foolishly or not) I’m not worried about myself but I sometimes wonder how I could keep my little guy out of harm’s way if the H5N1 virus should mutate and start spreading among humans. Because, despite assurances from the Ministry of Health that we could close our borders, I don’t see how we can keep it out.

A couple of years ago I was down visiting my uncle at Putiki Pa in Wanganui and we went for a walk down to the urupara (cemetery). I was looking at the headstones and noticed that about six people in what is a small family cemetery had died in 1918, all within days of each other. It was the Spanish Flu epidemic and I wondered how the disease could have made it to such an out-of-the-way corner of the world, especially during a time when the only way to get to New Zealand was by ship.

So now I find myself compelled to read, watch or listen to every article and item about H5N1 that I come across – which happens almost daily - and wonder whether I should’ve stocked up on Tamiflu (but it’s probably way too late to get any now).

It seems I’m not the only one lapping up all this stuff. TVNZ’s Breakfast was inundated with inquiries when it featured a site that aggregates avian flu coverage from around the world.

Pandemic News is updated daily and pulls in articles from the mainstream media, so it’s interesting if only to see what the rest of the world is being told. It also has links to various sites such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In case you’re wondering who is behind Pandemic News, it’s a colleague of mine, Roger Smith, who’s in charge of Auckland University of Technology’s web site. Roger isn’t a medical man but he does know how to build a site that looks good and with great content.

Last year he won an award from the global museum curators’ community for GlobalMuseum and he also has DinosaurNews.

Bringing home the vote

By Andrea Malcolm

The other day I received a letter from Helen Clark thanking me for my help on Election Day. Let me explain. I joined the Labour Party two years ago. Apart from forking out for the annual membership fee ($60), joining the party put me at the disposal of the Mt Albert electorate office and I was occasionally called upon to deliver Helen Clark newsletters.

Trudging from mailbox to mailbox on these distinctly unglamorous excursions, I’d feel that this wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I signed up. I’d planned to make a difference at the grass roots level and get the sort of government I wanted.

But work, play and a baby got in the way of greater involvement.

The one meeting between Helen Clark (as our MP) and local party members that I managed to make it to was a washout because she couldn’t make it (being bunkered in the Beehive for an emergency meeting after Orewa I). And I was put off the various Helen-in-attendance BBQs with the advice “They’re really just an opportunity to hit you up for a donation.” But then election year arrived and even I started to feel motivated. Don Brash has that effect on people.

I offered to be a scrutineer on election day, having only a vague idea of what that entailed. The mechanics of the job were fairly mundane. Turn up, sit by the electoral officer, and, in the case of the Labour Party, write down the page and line number of the voter. This information was collected by Labour runners and taken back to the electorate HQ so that, as the day went by, the party knew who hadn’t yet voted and these people were rung up and offered transport to a polling booth.

Labour is big on getting people to vote because historically the bigger the turnout, the better it does. National scrutineers on the other hand didn’t have to do any of this. The other part of the job was to keep an eye on the whole procedure, make sure the queues aren’t too long, people aren’t walking out without voting or being hindered in anyway.

But what I loved about it was the primo opportunity to people-watch. I was sent to a polling booth in Mt Roskill (home of the Exclusive Brethren; no, none of them voted) and was surprised to see a queue had formed even before the polls opened. There were four Labour scrutineers, two from National and none from any other parties. The woman from National said she wasn’t allowed to talk once the polls opened. My instructions were that we couldn’t answer questions on voting from the public and above all don’t touch the actual roll because this would constituted tampering. When my baby showed up with this father I wondered if there was a rule against kissing the electorate.

Although we were a bit of a backwater booth there was a steady stream of people all day except when it rained. Just as they say, the wet weather had a definite dampening effect on the turnout. In general, an air of excitement filled our battered church hall. A hugely diverse ethnic population meant many immigrant voters and they all seemed to have a real sense of pride and excitement about what they were doing. Endearingly, nearly every parent with kids would give their voting papers to their child and lift them up to put them in the ballot box. People were patient and generally jovial.

At lunchtime the National scrutineers left never to return. The Labour group lasted another four hours. I wouldn’t have minded seeing what happened in the last half hour before the polls closed as veteran electoral officer Don told me that that’s when all the “crazies” turn up. In a past election, one such individual grabbed the ballot box nearest the door and ran away with it. Luckily he was caught but Don had learned his lesson and pointed out to me that none of the ballot boxes in our hall were too near the exit.

At 4pm we headed back to Sandringham HQ where we offered tickets to the election party at the Dominion Road War Memorial Hall. But I was hankering to see my three-month-old as this was the first time I’d been away from him for more than an hour. Plus I wasn’t too sure how much of a celebration it would be. Winston not withstanding, it turned out OK and I got my letter. Now it’s probably back to the coal face - mail drops for the next three years.