The voice may have been cracked like an ancient sculpture but without the whine of parody.Almost beyond belief, Van was up for a good time, too It was definitely his crowd. Opening with “Days Like This” it was unashamedly a song everybody knew – a song used by the Government in a series of TV peace commercials After it, he spoke. This is a man who gets through entire concerts in silence.”That was from the peace gig we did with Bill Clinton,” he said. Stories leaked out about desperate admen hiring amateurs for their “fresh style”.

Paul Cardwell, the man behind the Creature Comfort electricity ads, got a tax inspector from Bristol to do the tortoise voice. They recorded 132 hours of tape to get just 40 seconds of quality ad time.Humorous but hungry Equity strikers got extra laughs out of unsubstantiated rumours about admen taking leading voiceover roles themselves. Wild tales began circulating in the press like that of five unknowns from Glasgow who turned down a three year contract with McEwans for pounds 50,000 each or Scottish thesp, Dennis Lawson’s tale of an unemployed actor with two small children who turned down a pounds 25,000 contract rather than break the strike.November 1997In what must rank as one of the calmest, head-held-high strikes on record, the big names took their stand. Helen Mirren, for example, calmly turned down a Virgin Atlantic contract, said to be worth anywhere between pounds 30,000 and pounds 100,000, for the sake of solidarity. Voice-over giants like Brian Cox and Bill Paterson stood four-square. Chris Evans, not even an Equity member, refused to do an ad for nappies.Those “voice professionals” as they are called in the trade, claim they noticed a perceptible decline in quality of ads.

We had no choice but to take a stronger line of action.”September 1997And thus it was decreed: no actor, no matter how matter how rested or broke, should take ad work. “Some people endured considerable hardship,” says the actors’ representative. Equity refused to agree to the IPA’s terms, ordering their members either “only do adverts to finance serious projects” or, at the other end of the spectrum, to make ends meet.February 1997Then it got silly. According to the ever-helpful but nameless Equity spokesman, the ad industry “dug their heels in and wouldn’t budge”. But the nice chap from IPA said simply, “Well, they walked out and refused to talk.” And so, inevitably…May 1997With impeccable timing, Equity called a strike – the day that Tony Blair, luvvie patron, took office. However, they allowed members to continue working if they were offered terms under the 1991 agreement.August 1997Things muddled along unhappily for a while until both sides met for informal talks to try to break the stalemate.