Bridgerton star and audiobook narrator Adjoa Andoh on the changing audio landscape
Charlotte Heathcote is a freelance writer, editor and reviewer, and passionate about championing brilliant books. She started her career in
...moreThe veteran narrator and Bridgerton star tells Charlotte Heathcote about the challenges of recording an audiobook in "the olden days".
Charlotte Heathcote is a freelance writer, editor and reviewer, and passionate about championing brilliant books. She started her career in
...moreWhen Adjoa Andoh MBE started narrating audiobooks in the early noughties, she recorded onto cassette tapes. “There were no computers,” she recalls. “You’d lay your two pages out. The producer would say, ‘Side 22!’ or ‘Side 48!’ ‘And lift the page!’ It was much more complicated than it is now.”
Andoh is perhaps best known as Lady Danbury in Netflix hit Bridgerton, and she has appeared in TV series as varied as EastEnders and Doctor Who, in films including Adulthood and Invictus, and is also a celebrated stage actor and director. She even found time to judge the Booker Prize in 2023.
But she is also a prolific audiobook narrator, declared “the undisputed queen of audio and radio drama” by Penguin Random House (PRH). PRH’s biography estimates that she has narrated an extraordinary 150 audiobooks, but Andoh says: “There are many more than that, I’ve no idea how many. I’ve been doing it a long time.”
Before Andoh recorded her first audiobook, she had been performing radio drama since the late 1980s. “For me, audiobooks were an extension of doing a Book at Bedtime. You’re basically doing an audiobook on the radio, aren’t you?”
She loves narrating just as much as performing for stage or screen. “I love all of it,” she says. “If you’re on stage, you get to go through the story in the company of flesh-and-blood audience members. Your performance is always different and that’s really thrilling.
“If you’re working in front of the camera, there are 75 million people in the room and you have to act like it’s just you and the other person. And you’ll do the same scene seven or eight times, so it’s about maintaining that authenticity.
“But I like the discipline of an audiobook. Narration is harder than it looks. You don’t have any of your tricks. You can’t pull a funny face. All you’ve got is your voice.”
The first book she narrated was bestseller The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, but research provided a challenge in the pre-digital days of 2003.
“I’ve got a wide range of accents,” says Andoh. “But when I started, there weren’t many people who could do a Botswana accent. And there was no internet so, if you wanted a pronunciation for a place in Botswana, you’d have to ring the Botswana Embassy with your list and hope there was somebody kindly enough to spend the time.
“If I was doing a book in Fante or Ewe, I’d have to find an auntie. I went to a woman one Sunday afternoon after church because she spoke Igbo.” Andoh produced a list of words and recorded the pronunciations on a tape recorder, but today, of course, she could look up an online video within seconds.
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Similarly, if she needs a reminder of a character’s voice from a previous instalment, the producer can source a clip. “But in the olden days, I’d have to write detailed notes down. ‘Frank: Glaswegian, mid-range but quite scratchy.’”
In recent months, Andoh has recorded classics including Pride and Prejudice, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights. “Their sentences are enormous so you have to be so precise and so clear and so focused, not just on the language but on the direction of travel of the whole sentence, and the whole thought, so you can take the listener with you.
“The listener only has your voice, they don’t have words on the page that they can re-read. If you don’t get that right, it turns into word salad.” But their exquisite writing made them a pleasure to read.
“It’s more challenging to bring books to life that are less well written, because you’re having to do the work to make it interesting, to make it make sense, to make rather dull sentences vivid. Make me have to work to live up to the material, don’t make me have to work to paper over the cracks.”
Other personal highlights of her narratorial career include Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (“The writing is sublime”) and novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John le Carré and Ian Fleming.
“When you do an audiobook, you have to pour your heart into it. However many characters there are, you’re singing that many harmonies to a song. Then you have the narrator’s harmony, and whatever the narrative drive is – is it a thriller? Is it a romance? So, you have an orchestra in your head and you have to sing all the different parts.
“When it hits you right, you are so overwhelmed by the terror, the joy, the hysteria, the sexiness, the weeping, whatever it is, that you are transported to another world.
“I often cry when I’m reading and we have to stop the recording.” She recently broke down while narrating Ali Smith’s Winter and Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi, though she hastens to add: “I’m not crying at myself, I’m crying at the story as it unfolds.”
When she is swept up in narrating a book, it feels as if her brain has split in two. “The surrounds melt away. One brain is completely in the story, and the other brain is doing all the technical stuff, like scrolling up [on-screen]. It’s exactly the same if you’re filming and you’ve got to hit your mark, or if you’re on stage and riding a laugh.
“Your job is to draw the listener into the story, hold them and let them feel like they’re in a safe pair of hands. I love doing that. Your job is to make everything come to life in the listener’s ear. And that’s what I love and that’s what I want to honour with a work that I record.
“Human beings have always told stories, whether it’s cave paintings or songs. That’s how we make sense of our lives. So, I’m thrilled that audiobooks are part of that tapestry.”
