The Gabble
I have mentioned in the past how I listen to the radio.
I don’t actually have a radio on, but Herself is in the next room and she loves the radio, so naturally I overhear it.
She has a choice of about 10,000 stations [it’s an Interwebs radio] but narrows her choice to about three. That’s fair enough.
Now there is a phenomenon that has crept into the world of radio, possibly many years ago but it’s only recently I have really become aware of it. I honestly don’t know whether it annoys or amuses me.
I refer of course to The Gabble.
An advertising break comes up and we get the usual singy songy voice extolling the virtues of some broadband service or a car or maybe some financial crowd. Now the advertisement is usually irritating enough, speaking at us as if we were ten years old [when has a ten tear old kid determined our choice of car, broadband or bank?] but at the end of the advertisement we get The Gabble.
The Gabble is the audio equivalent of small print. It’s all the exclusions, terms and conditions which they are now obliged by law to include in case any of us are dumb enough to fall for the ad. Now the advertiser is paying for their slot by the second, so they don’t want to waste precious air time telling us stuff that more than likely nullifies the bilge they are trying to sell and certainly limits its appeal so they hire someone to read The Gabble at breakneck speed.
The Gabble is really quite clever. They manage to fit about three paragraphs into about two seconds and if you listen very carefully you can actually make out individual words. The problem is that the words come so thick and fast that you haven’t time for your brain to process the meaning. This is the clever bit. No one can possibly make out what The Gabble is saying, but if you try and prosecute the advertiser they can legitimately claim that they did include the information and if you are too dim to understand it, then that’s your problem.
There are obviously people who are hired on the basis of how fast they can talk without actually tripping over their words.
I just wonder if that’s the way they normally speak?
A sideline voiceover career for an auctioneer, perchance. They’re the real masters of ‘the gabble’ – or gavel.
They tend to deal only in numbers though and as such are slightly easier to understand. How would they manage with “This offer is only available every fourth Friday of the month to fifteen year olds from Sidcup who were born since 2020“?
Is it recorded using some really deep bass voiced person and then speeded up on playback?
No. It’s usually a male voice but sometimes female. Speeding up provides a recognisable distortion, but these are just vary fast speakers.
We were talking about this today. What consumer has ever benefited from it?
It’s there to cover the advertiser in case listeners take some of their claims too literally. I heard one advertiser stating quite categorically that their broadband was “faster than the speed of light”! The Gabble then gave more realistic figures of [I think] 100Mb/s. I think they are required by law to include it anyway.
Do you remember the great Michael O’Hehir?
How can I forget? He destroyed the peace of many a Saturday afternoon on the beach in Summer.
Far too many of the working younger generation speak in rapid mumble, they need subtitles, but infinitely better than the baseball hatted non working younger gen who communicate is a series of grunts.