‘Could you de-um this please?” the producer asked, handing me a reel of quarter-inch audio tape. Being eager to please, I told him I’d be happy to, even though I knew not what he was on about. This was 1994. I had just started working at BBC Radio and was still learning the ropes. Furtively, I sought a friendly face to tell me a) what de-umming was and b) how to go about it.
It turned out to be exactly what it sounded like – removing the ums, ers and ahs from recorded interviews. It really was the most infernal fiddle, involving razor blades and bits of sticky tape, for which I had neither the skills nor the patience. Mercifully, before long, someone having decided that I should be a presenter, de-umming no longer seemed to be my responsibility. I’ve not wielded a razor blade in a quarter of a century, and neither has anyone else since quarter-inch tape became obsolete. There must be billions of miles of it somewhere. Has all the audio been digitised and the tape disposed of? Does it biodegrade?
These days, with everything done digitally, de-umming is a lot easier, which must be almost annoying for producers of quarter-inch tape vintage, because it seems the practice is also a thing of the past. I checked this with one of my more senior producers. “We don’t really de-um any more,” he said. “I occasionally do it if they um a lot, but by and large we don’t now. Something to do with authenticity.”
And quite right too. It always felt to me like a bit of a cheat. If interviewees spoke like that, were we not deceiving the audience by cleaning up their delivery? In television, of course, viewers have always been less deceived than radio listeners, as while you couldn’t hear the joins, you could certainly see them. De-umming a filmed interview would have the interviewee’s image jumping around all over the place.
For writers, almost literally, it’s a different story. There’s not a journalist alive who doesn’t clean up the quotes from a recorded interview. Often – preposterously, really – an interview styled as “Joe Bloggs was talking to …” will run to thousands of words, ostensibly delivered with quite incredible eloquence.
And what of fiction? Novels, plays, television dramas and films? All a tissue of lies! No one in them ums, ers or ahs. If they do, it’s only to indicate that they’re lying or suffering some kind of breakdown. Just as a cough indicates the onset of critical illness, the ubiquitous and mundane, by its vanishing rarity, is always elevated to great significance. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dan Brown: liars, the lot of them. I demand some truth.
This has all been on my, er, mind since Miranda Sawyer mentioned my radio show the other week. In an otherwise generous review – for which I thank her – she said: “He ums and ers through the questions of the day.” This cut me to the quick, for it is the truth. My umming and erring has got out of control. If you took the ums and ers out of my shows there would be next to nothing left. The mad thing is that I made a conscious decision to start umming and erring a bit. I did so several years ago, as I thought it sounded more natural. But what started as an affectation stuck fast and has been running out of control. I now um, er and ah on air much more than I do in real life.
I resolved to take back control and, in the week following the review, I believe I managed to um barely once. I have de-ummed myself. It doesn’t sound right to me, but it had to be done. At the same time I want novelists, dramatists and screenwriters everywhere to do exactly the opposite. In the interest of verisimilitude, they must start having everyone sound as authentically unintelligible as I did on the radio until the week before last.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
