by Dale Templar,  Series Producer

John Hurt

When you’ve worked in television for over 20 years you get quite used to meeting and working with famous people.  There are very few encounters that have ever really fazed me.  One exception was meeting George Michael in a studio at the height of his solo career in the early 90s and, more recently, literally bumping into David Beckham behind the scenes at the O2 in London, with a beefburger in my mouth. 

Well, a few weeks ago I was in another recording studio in Hampstead, North London waiting to meet one of our most truly talented British actors.  I spotted him as he came through the door of the studio canteen and, as I walked towards him, a vast array of movies and characters flashed before me.  Here was “The Elephant Man”, ” The Naked Civil Servant”, Harry Potter’s eccentric wandmaker and finally that stomach bursting scene from “Alien” leapt into my mind!  Yes, it can now be officially confirmed that John Hurt is the voice of “Human Planet”.  And what a voice!  As soon as he shook my hand and said a simple “Hello, nice to meet you”, I just couldn’t wait to start our voice record session.

We spend months in edit cutting the pictures, crafting the films visually but we listen to the programmes with what we call scratch voices on them.  At this stage, the script is usually recorded by the episode producer or, sometimes, the picture editor.  They always do a great job but when the script is finally locked and we finally get to put on “the voice of the series”, a instant transformation occurs.  The narrator gives it a unique identity.   John’s resonant, commanding yet warm voice wraps itself around the pictures and draws you into the action and the characters.  As I expected John was a consummate professional and we all worked incredibly hard, recording the voice-over for both the Arctic and Oceans episode.  This is not an exact science but every line, every word is scrutinized.   John had six sets of professional ears, including his own (which was usually the most critical), making sure everything was perfect. 

What I loved was John’s dry sense of humour.  In the Arctic script we do a scene which is effectively written as a pastiche of a television cookery show, of which we have many in the UK.  Here was John Hurt doing his own wonderful interpretation of Delia Smith, or one of that ilk, reading out a recipe for how to prepare Kiviak, a Greenland delicacy, made from unplucked Arctic birds and a sealskin.  A classic moment I will never forget.