What kind of accent does he have?
Never heard anyone speak like this before.
I found it incredibly annoying.
Am I the only one?
Or maybe it's not actually the accent, just the way he speaks? Esp as a narrator, you would think you would like people to listen to you?
shareI'm about to stop watching it because of the accent. I thought it was an Irish accent ... He sounds almost like a valley girl.
I'm fascinated at the material but the accent has me thinking about taking a Xanax!
His accent sounds Irish to my ears. But it's the lilting, sing-song inflection nearly always ending on a high note (that implies a question) that is really distracting. It does sound like the classic "valley girl" voice from the 80's! This is really unfortunate because (for me at least) it is very annoying......I'm cringing at the voice, rather than listening to what he has to say! I'm trying to avoid my natural reaction so I can evaluate the content. Most unfortunate......a professional voice-over artist or even a celebrity voice-over (think Laurence Olivier in the "World at War" from the early 70's .....a very powerful choice) would have been preferable to me.
shareHow can one go through the effort to produce such good program and make such error of judgement on the narrator?
shareYou are dead on. It's like the earth series from BBC. Attenborough adds to it spectacularly. Sigourney Weaver detracts.
When there are two, one betrays-Jean-Pierre Melville
I could not agree more. I found the series unwatchable with the sound on, as his voice ultimately felt like an aural ice-pick. I watched sound off with subtitles, and I'm sure I missed a lot. Very unfortunate; it's incredible the degree to which his voice detracts from the series.
As I said in my review of the series, the best remake in history would be to just re-loop the sound with Peter Coyote (or similar) doing the narration.
It's a sing-songy voice, repeating the same rising cadence over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and.....
Until you want to scream. Every sentence sounds like a question, and you feel as if he's asking you to agree with him or he won't keep talking. This may be a tendency in Irish speech, but there are plenty of Irish actors who know how not to sound monotonous, and to vary the flow of their pitches. Cousins is a brilliant man, but he should have left narrating to the professionals. When somebody else starts to talk, like the American historian in the first episode, it's a blissful interlude. But then Cousins starts up again.
The Republican Plan: repeal all reform; collect payoffs; go yachting (but not in the Gulf).
Everyone is correct: he has a tendency toward "up-speak" (as linguists call it), and from a subjective standpoint, I agree with everyone who has responded here: it is annoying to the point of maddening, and completely devalues an otherwise extraordinary project. Some of the twisted arguments, inverted sentences, strange emphases and pronunciations all further detract and distract, but it's above all the up-speak that weakens the narration considerably.
share[deleted]
There are beautiful narrations in Irish. This is not one of them. For me, this has nothing to do with equal opportunity, this narrator's voice is just terrible!
(Ah.... just realised the director is narrating! That's the problem, he should have got someone else (Irish) to narrate this, someone who wasn't unbearable to listen to. Spoils the whole thing for me.)
It's an absurd choice for a narration. I would sincerely prefer Stephen Hawking to narrate it.
He seems disinterested, unimpressed, and like he's presenting an adult education class in his spare time.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
His accent is Northern Irish. Yes, I find it quite hard to listen too also but have gotten used to it over a few episodes. I do feel his passion for the subject however it is very distracting. Another poster above has also noted that we are trying to pay attention tot he content but it is hard to divorce what he is saying from the accent and tone.
shareSounds Irish
shareA good radio journalist will often try to write his copy as if he telling you a story in your living room or at the dinner table, or in a conversation with a friend.
I just wonder if this is how he would speak to me, if we were just chatting. Because that would be incredibly distracting.
It's Irish, so what? Should he of asked Morgan Freeman or someone instead? Maybe, but it's HIS film based on HIS book, so he can do whatever the hell he wants, he worked 5 year on it, let him narrate it and just go along with it, people. It's a fascinating series
shareNo, I will not just go along with it. It's his series, but unless he always planned to keep it to himself, it was envisioned as something that would be shown to audiences, and the consensus of the people here seems to be that his narration harms it. Did he have the right to screw up his own project? I guess, but how does that take away my right to be irritated, and to say so? If he wanted to narrate it, he should have had some elocution lessons.
shareNo, you are way off base. This simply is not accurate:
"the consensus of the people here seems to be that his narration harms it. "
A consensus means everyone in the discussion "consents", goes along, to move something forward. No, I don't consent, I venture to say there are a lot of people who don't consent to your opinion that his narration harms it.
I saw the whole thing, to me his narration enhances it. It is better than, say, a very dry and flat narration like Keanu Reeves does on the documentary "Side by Side" (which every film fan should see, BTW). But even Reeves is fine because the focus should be on the content, not the accent of the narrator.
Maybe you have a particular ax to grind, or maybe you are just jumping on the bandwagon, but don't try to convince everyone else that they should think like you do!
TxMike
Make a choice, to take a chance, to make a difference.
at first i thought it was annoying too, but then after i got used to it. even found it soothing.
have to admit though, this was a second attempt at watching the film, the first time i turned it off because
of his voice. now i like it and i'm adding this film to my favorites for a rainy day.