The secret life of the audiobook star

Dale developed his own system for keeping track of different voices. “When I come across a new character, I tend to record their first sentence on a small tape recorder. Then I make a note of it on a pad, together with the number of the page and the name of the character, so that when I’m recording and I get to that new character, I stop everything and I play the tape back.” In the final Harry Potter book, there were 143 characters: the voices, says Dale, were drawn from his past, from old radio comedians to his Scottish aunt.