Meet the Narrators #1: Peter Wickham
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Peter has been a working actor for over thirty years. In theatre he has played a wide range of roles – from Laertes in ‘Hamlet’ to the Narrator in a dance version of ‘Peter and The Wolf’ at the Hackney Empire and including rep all around the UK. He has often chosen jobs involving travel before career development and work has taken him from Laos to Venezuela and through much of Eastern Europe. An active TV and film career started with ‘Z-Cars’ and the film of ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’, moved through ‘Angels’, ‘Some Mothers do Have ‘Em’ and ‘Only Fools and Horses’ to a starring role in ’10 A.M.’ – an indy movie yet to see the light of day! Most importantly (to him), Peter enjoyed a spell on the BBC Radio Rep and has appeared in hundreds of radio plays, short stories, serials and poetry recordings. That all led to audio books of which he has now recorded more than three hundred, and his only regret about this most enjoyable form of work is that he doesn’t usually travel far to do it!
Peter has a kindly grandfather sort of voice, I think I saw a review stating a sonic resemblance to Dumbledore from the Harry Potter phenomenon.
Some of the finest works of Literature are voiced immaculately by this voice, although not my favorite, he's growing on me!!
As I can listen to all of the Naxos recordings now I am at first basking in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Montaigne's Essays and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which will be for me probably the only way I could get through that cumbersome text.
When I first heard Peter's voice it was of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy both from Ukemi AudioBooks. Including 3 volumes of Casanova's Memoirs, 2 of which I purchased.
He also does The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which I think is the kind of novel that he was destined to record.
That's just a taste of this remarkable voice's work. He gets a 8.5 out of 10 from me. I find that hearing him has a medicinal quality, and definitely an enhancer of time consumption.
46-50, M
