SPEAK UP, girl!

Do you find yourself hiding in plain sight, mumbling your way through life, or hedging every sentence with 'like' and 'sort of'? Hollywood vocal coach Samara Bay talks to Sally Saunders about how we can all find our voice

- Samara Bay

'My God, where on earth are you from, I can't understand a word you are saying!' I had been at university less than an hour when I received that comment. I was in the queue for my first meal, having tearily waved goodbye to my equally teary parents a few minutes earlier, when it came.

I was in utter confusion. As the daughter of a midlander (Mum is a proud Leicester girl), I had a different accent to my South Yorkshire schoolmates and was branded too posh. As a result, I spent years studiously trying to flatten my vowels and drop my 'ts' to stand out less (it was bad enough being clever, to be posh as well was inexcusable).

Suddenly, here I found myself at the other end of the spectrum: as far as most of the students around me were concerned, all I needed was a cloth cap and Whippet and my transformation into a character from some northern sitcom like Last of the Summer Wine would be complete. I was stranded: neither fish nor fowl, at home too posh, in my new surroundings too working-class northern.

These are the memories and feelings that come flooding back to me, 25 years later, as I speak to vocal coach-turned-author-and-activist Samara Bay.

We first connect over Zoom as she strolls, impossibly glamorously, through the streets of New York, following a breakfast meeting. Her West Coast tones, accompanied by the backdrop of the streets of the Big Apple, make her seem like a movie star - the likes of whom she has spent most of her career coaching to get their voices 'just so'. But when she arrives at her hotel and we speak again, she reveals a different side. Still bubbly and bouncy, she suddenly becomes passionate about speech, and what it is secretly saying about us.