Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

current issue

December 2024 – January 2025 : Solidarity READ ONLINE

RECENT TWEETS

The Lip Service

December 01 2024
© John Sheehy © John Sheehy

A new story from the Pavement’s resident satirist, starring a freelance accent named ‘The Tone’. By Chris Sampson

“I shited and shited but couldn’t be hard!”

“Well,” I thought, “there’s something you don’t hear everyday…”

My name is The Tone. I had joined The Lip Service after escaping the lips of my previous owner, who was still rotting in a 19th Century gaol as far as I knew. The Lip Service would dispatch freelance accents like me to provide appropriate intonations to whosoever required them to be on their lips – or those of their unsuspecting underlings.

My first mission was one of the latter. I was then sent back to the 1980s, an era of high unemployment, where the only work available was to listen to blank C90 cassettes all the way through to make sure they really were blank, at the behest of a Thatcherite businessman who was paranoid that the manufacturer of the cheap tapes he imported into the UK had already been recorded on by what he termed “swarthy, swan-eating foreigners”.

This would have come as a surprise to the country they actually came from: Finland!

The accent on the lips of the man I was assigned to was a suitably dull monotone. For hour after hour he sighed as he listened to nothingness.

How many hours of mindless boredom? I lost count; no doubt he did, too. Then, one day, a voice appeared on one of the thousands of cassettes I’d been listening to. It was not a Finnish accent, so the Thatcherite’s paranoia was unjustified. No, it was a British accent. And it said: “I shited and shited but couldn’t be hard!”

I made a recording (not on crappy 1980s tapes but on a splendid 21st century digital device) and reported my findings to my Lip Service manager.

He dispatched me on my next mission.

I soon found myself in the 1930s. The woman who had made the extraordinary statement was posh; she looked posh and dressed posh – 1935-style. The archetypal formidable 60-something battleaxe deployed by the upper crust between the wars. The shrill hectoring voice was part of her aristocratic armoury, frequently used to intimidate the lower orders into submission. Which was pretty much her job.

For Rupertitia Cavendish ran a refinement class named Overcoming Frightfulness, and was, I soon learned from Bert, a pupil who explained – as he slicked down his Brylcreem’d hair – “Teaching us proles how to talk proper, like wot she duz.”

“Thereby overcoming the natural frightfulness of the working class, as the Toffs think of it?”

“Indubitably!” Bert replied, in as aristocratic a manner as he could manage.

“Hmm. Sounds a lot like plain old snobbery to me,” I said. This attracted the tutor’s attention.

“Chully?” Rupertitia emitted in her piercing tone. “Is that you? You’re late.”

I realised she meant me; I was on the lips of Bert’s fellow prole, seemingly called ‘Chully’.  Unless she meant… I deciphered her intonation: she’d meant to say Charlie.

“Erm, yes?”  I ventured from Charlie’s lips.

“Ah! Good-oh!” she boomed. “Well, you’re here now. So, let’s hear you enunciate, shall we? The sentence on the blackboard?”

I followed her instruction: “Erm... I also shouted – or rather shited – but couldn’t be heard. I mean hard.”

“By Jove! I think he’s gort it!” Rupertitia boomed. “Now, Albert, you must follow Chully’s lead. Chop, chop!”

Bert did as he was bid; ‘shited’ but couldn’t be ‘hard’ to his teacher’s apparent satisfaction.

She went on to teach Bert how to politely explain that “that nice Mister Hitler”, as she called him, was merely “a little high-spirited”, and not the fascist lunatic that the post-WW2 world knows to be the case. But how had her voice been on a supposedly blank cassette tape 50 years in the future?

Such tapes had yet to be invented. So, someone with a digital device such as mine must surely have been here in 1935 and for some reason time-travelled to 1985 and played back Rupertitia’s remarks in front of a tape recorder.

Overcoming Frightfulness in pre-war London had been an eye-opening – indeed lip-smacking – experience, but I would have to report back in my own, 21st century, day.

I couldn’t resist a little dig before departing, however. “So, Rupertitia… Unusual name. Didn’t they shorten it to ‘Titty’ when you were younger?”

“Good Lord, no!” she snorted. “The very idea! No, my nickname was ‘Rupert Bare’.

“You mean Rupert the Bear? Like the comic book character?”

“No,” she insisted. “Rupert Bare…As in nude. I was an artist’s model, you see. He liked us to pose naked for him.”

“I bet he did! Dirty old… Hold on, ‘us’? There were other nude models?”

“Oh, yes. Four or five of us, I think. Over a year or so.”

“Hmm. So, what became of him, this so-called artist?”

“Oh, Pentonville, I think. Or was it Wormwood Scrubs? Parkhurst? Oh, one loses track after a while, doesn’t one? The man was a thorough nuisance, now I come to think of it. Possibly he was hanged.”

Hmm. Well, from what she said of him it seemed possible. I made my excuses, left Charlie’s lips to their own devices, bade Bert a fond farewell and was soon off to my time for a brief, erm, debrief, then to the future.

*

“Hi there! Fans of rasping flatulence and celebrities are in for a treat! Ever wished that your two favourite things could be brought together? Well, now they can, thanks to the New! Improved! Flatulence Visualizer™! Now, every time you or a loved one breaks wind, you’ll be treated to a holographic image of a fave celeb! Or maybe even the historical figure of your choice! Banish the embarrassment previous generations felt when letting rip, because you know that cutting the cheese can summon 3D visions of bewigged former US president Donald Trump, obnoxious actor James Corden, or murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot! Let off a real sandwich-curler to see ex-boy band members! Or long-forgotten former shadow home secretaries!  Or even personalise your Flatulence Visualizer™ to include vanity images of yourself! For just £399.99, the Flatulence Visualizer™ can be yours!  Today…!”

“This slop is what they wanted me to read?!?”, I thought. “Welcome to the future!” Is this the only sort of voice work a time-travelling accent will be able to get in 2035? Advert voiceovers that even an AI would baulk at? The Lip Service had other ideas, it seemed. The voice-overing for tacky commercials was merely a cover story. I’d been sent to the future to report on ‘Bunter Hunters’, or BH’s.

A previous government had, over a decade previously in the 2020s, initiated a seemingly ludicrous scheme to inject obese unemployed people with a corpulence ‘cure’, the better to get them back to work, take the burden of their implied gluttony off of the NHS and send UK taxpayers’ cash to the private company which manufactured the Flab Jab. But by 2035, it seemed that roaming gangs of Bunter Hunters had gone rogue, tracking down anyone who looked a bit chubby, injecting them randomly with the ‘remedy’ – regardless of the consequences – and bagging them with converted windsocks.

“But what about Fat Cats?” I had wondered on arrival in 2035, on the lips of Billabong Smythe, a borderline chubby researcher at BHHQ.

“Oh, they’re fine,” I was assured by Chimpo Stockley, a BH section leader. “The rich are exempt from the Flab Jab. Their obesity indicates success.”

“Whereas prole flab equates with failure?”

“Exactly! Now you’re getting it…!"

But what, if anything, had this to do with a bizarre statement from a woman a hundred years previously?  And why had her voice stopped off halfway between the two eras, to be captured on now-archaic recording equipment? Could Chimpo hold the key to the mystery? Or would it be dragged out until the next episode, so as not to ruin the Christmas and New Year festivities by disappointing anyone who hasn’t nodded off yet with an unsatisfactory ending?

Spoiler alert: could Nostril-Damus be significant to the resolution of the story? Or is he – or she – merely a red herring? Tune in next ish to find out (possibly).

*

Here’s wishing our readers a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I hope Santa brings them a new home at last.

To be continued...

< News in Brief 153: December 2024 – January 2025 Remembrance >
December 2024 – January 2025 : Solidarity

CONTENTS

BACK ISSUES
BACK TO PAGE TOP