The Voice of Mr T

My Twitter profile claims that, amongst other things, I am ‘the voice of Mr T’. No one has ever questioned the validity of this statement, probably because no one has ever noticed it, or maybe people just think I’m trying to be a bit leftfield and whacky.

But I’ve actually treated those 160 characters as a tiny CV of my career in entertainment (my real one is hardly any bigger), and the statement is actually sort of true. Well, obviously it isn’t at all true, but there is a truth behind it. I wouldn’t claim to have voiced any other ’80s TV legends, because I haven’t. Yet.

But, on and off over a period of about two years, I voiced Mr T on my friend Guy Lloyd’s radio show on Brighton’s Juice FM. So it’s kind of true.

It started when Guy and I were both in the Maydays (see previous post) and he asked for some ideas to use in his show. He particularly wanted a different angle for the ‘celebrity gossip’ part of the show (it is local radio after all). So I came up with the idea of Mr T, phoning in every Saturday morning from the call box in the trailer park where he now lived (this was pre Snickers ad revival and the real T hadn’t been heard of in some time).

This was no ordinary trailer park, though. This was the Beverly Hills Residential Vehicle Encampment, a trailer park to the (former) stars owened by none other than (in T’s words) “Mr David Hassahoffa”. T’s neighbours were such luminaries as Corey Feldman, Kirstie Alley,  “that lil’ boy what plays Mini-Me” (Mr T had a hard time understanding why he never seemed to get any older), and “that lady from that movie The Cryin’ Game, you know, the one with the winkie”.

Naturally, in T’s regular 3-minute slot he spent very little time on the genuine celebrity gossip (which suited me just fine as ‘research’ was just a quick skim of some celeb goss websites on a Friday afternoon) and quickly turned the topic to the latest goings-on in the trailer park. He formed a Monkees tribute band with his best friend and neighbour Dolph Lundgren, along with Mark Hamill and “that crazy foo’ from Police Academy what makes all the noises“. We learnt about his disastrous first date with Kirstie Alley (“She sho’ likes fried chicken”), his efforts to cheer up the younger residents of the camp by erecting a tyre swing (“that Macaulay Culkin just sits on there for hours an’ laughs an’ laughs”), and his possibly unfounded conviction that Daniel Craig had stolen his career.

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed my stint as Mr T. So did Guy, as did Andrea, who joined him as a presenter when the show moved from Saturday afternoon to Saturday morning (they’ve now been promoted to the weekly breakfast show, which probably has nothing to do with Mr T’s contribution). Mr T developed an immediate crush on Andrea, even writing her love poems, with the help of Mark Hamill. He even got to do his own Christmas Day speech, which of course mostly revolved around life in the trailer park (“this year, some people have been lucky enough to have a change of fortune and move out, like Mickey Rourke and the Backstreet Boys. Other stars have fallen on hard times and moved in, like Matthew McConaughey, and the Backstreet Boys”).

But although the three of us enjoyed it, I’m not sure what the listeners thought (or if there even were any). The radio station had a meeting and decided to drop the Mr T bit because it was “too intelligent” for their audience (which is very insulting to Juice FM listeners). T was snuck back in every now and then for an update (he was last heard of filming a remake of Bergerac in Hawaii, with his old A-Team buddy Dirk Benedict as Charlie Hungerford).

I voiced Mr T on the radio between 2004 and 2006. I got no money for it and very few people heard it, but it was a lot of fun. I was constantly being promised the digital recordings of his broadcasts, but they never materialised, so I have what is probably the only evidence on a couple of old tapes under my bed. But I will always have a little bit of Mr T in my heart, which is nice.

And when my young daughter saw an episode of the A-Team for the first time, she couldn’t believe some crazy fool had ripped off my act.