Chances are you hear him every day, yet you’d pass him in the street without a glance. Jo Ind meets Marc Silk

A day never passes when I do not hear the voice of Marc Silk. Every evening, when I get home from work, I listen. I sometimes hear him as I get the breakfast ready too.

Marc’s nasal/slug-like/dulcet/husky/sonorous/tones are an inescapable feature of my life but, unless I had met him, I might never have known just how much he is part of my daily routine.

“I’m the most famous person you’ve never heard of,” says Marc who is the voice of Bob the Builder in the USA, of Bumble and Slugsy in Fifi and the Flowertots and of Maxi, Flash, Heli, Drifter and Dinky in Roary the Racing Car. These are voices that hold my three-year-old son enthralled.

Marc, who is aged 36, can also be heard in Johnny Bravo on the Cartoon Network, Starwars and Pingu. And he was the announcer at Prince Charles’s 60th birthday party, broadcast on ITV last year starring John Cleese, Robin Williams and Rowan Atkinson.

His voice is heard right across the globe – literally – but most of his recordings are made from his studio in Solihull. He has worked with stars like comedian Peter Kaye and actress Jane Horrocks – and yet few would recognise him if you passed him in the street.

“There is so much you can do with sound,” says Marc. “I like creating something from scratch. I like the idea of saying to your audience, ‘Shut your eyes and let me tell you a story’.

“One day I’ll be doing something for Play Station 3 and the next day I’ll be the voice of Bob the Builder. I wouldn’t be able to do so much if I was a regular actor. Being anonymous means I get to do a great variety of things.

“I get to have a regular life and yet I get to work with the most amazing people. I get the best of both worlds.

“I was at an event in Birmingham the other day and a woman was really excited to meet me when she knew who I was. I enjoy that. It’s fantastic but then I like to be able to walk through the Bullring with nobody knowing me.”

He has created an ideal career for himself, yet he has done it with no training in acting or producing or IT.

“At school I was the quiet one,” says Marc who went to Park Hall in Castle Bromwich. “I was the one sitting at the front taking it all in. All the loud people sat at the back.

“I never thought of myself as a performer. I wanted to be the button guy. When I was younger I wanted to be a lift attendant because I wanted to press the buttons.”

But when he was at school he took a course in media and got to work on a radio show.

“It was just so exhilarating,” says Marc. “It was everything I loved all together – music, creativity, characters, the buttons ...”

He did work experience with BRMB – filing in the library to be precise – and knew then with a passion that radio was where he wanted to be. When he left school after his GCSEs he did a radio show for Mercia based in Coventry and after six months was invited to have a show with Radio 1.

“The invitation came totally out of the blue,” says Marc, and, much to the head-hunter’s amazement, turned the opportunity down. “I told them, ‘I think it’s too early for me. This really matters to me and I’ve only been doing it for six months. I don’t want to screw up on Radio 1’.”

For this unusual career move, Marc earned respect and was told the door was always open to him, but in fact he never went back.

Another element of Marc’s considerable talent is his passion for technology. He has always been interested in buttons, as he says, and is ahead of the game in terms of seeing their possibilities.

“I could see the time was going to come when people would be able to make material of broadcast quality from their own homes,” says Marc.

“That was 15 years ago and it had just become possible to edit audio on a home computer.

“I saw this as a fantastic opportunity. I knew the time would come when you could be able to link up with other studios all over the world.”

So Marc drew up a dream list of people he wanted to work with – George Lucas, (Star Wars) Steven Speilberg (Jurassic Park), Warner Brothers (Batman, Scooby Doo, etc).

He was a radio presenter at the time, but as he wrote his dream list, he realised that the connection between these people was the voice, and that his work involving characters was where he should be concentrating. He decided to set up his own company, called The Production Pit (“classy,” says Marc), creating character.

Marc has never had to learn how to produce different effects through his voice, he just finds he can do it.

A producer will come to him and say they need a voice for a slug, for example, so he needs to sound wet and mucousy, and somehow Marc knows how to create that sound.

“The first couple of years, I did the character side of things,” he said. “Then I went through that whole thing about finding your own voice. It’s taken me a good while to find out what my own voice is, but I’ve got there now.”

And because of the technology, Marc has never had to leave Solihull.

“It always used to be that if you were making programmes you all had to meet up in a studio in Manchester or London,” says Marc.

“We still do that for something like Roary the Racing Car.

“Peter Kaye is Roary the Racing Car. I meet up with him and with other great voice actors and we all get together and spend a day making it. It’s mentally exhausting but it’s fantastic fun.”

But it does not have to be like that. Using Skype, which is a system of video calls through the internet, Marc has been able to work with a director in Holland, a writer in London, a producer in Rugby and someone doing audio in Leicester, while he was in his studio in Solihull.

“I recorded it at the end and I emailed it to them,” says Marc. “It’s important to me to be near my family and friends who are around Birmingham. It’s a great place to be and thanks to the technology it’s possible. I love it.”

Watching Marc at work in his studio, playing five different parts at a time, it is hard to see how he does it without getting confused. Does he have to annotate his script in different colours, one for each different character, so he knows which voice to use?

“I put a star by my name so I don’t forget it’s me, but I don’t use different colours for the different voices,” says Marc. “I don’t need to. I’ve always been musical and it feels like making music. That’s what it is, it’s all music to me.”

www.marcsilk.com