About Us

My Story -  Andy Barrett

Hi. I’m Andy, the founder of Bart Cale Training.

I was born and raised in Bristol UK, went to a state school and served an apprenticeship as a Gas Turbine Aero Engineer. I left Bristol, went travelling to a few countries and spent some time in South Africa. While I was there, I decided that I could be a professional actor and after joining a few amateur groups I auditioned for and was accepted into a drama school. This is when my interest in first speech started. On my first day, the class had to read a poem individually and when I had finished my reading the whole class had their hands up ready to criticise me. I was a bit shocked because I was not aware that I had a particularly strong accent until the other students mimicked me in a mock UK West Country farmer accent. I thought I could get away with putting on what I thought was a posh accent but it really did sound false. I was advised by acting agents to lose my accent if I wanted to act professionally.

The speech tutors within the drama school tried with me and when they didn’t make a great deal of progress and I was sent to private tutors. I remember one of these inhaling a cigarette and blowing out the smoke to demonstrate her breath control. I went to a few different mediocre elocution teachers and didn’t really make a great deal of progress. I actually went out on a date with a speech teacher and it was embarrassing when she corrected me in public. Looking back the teachers I had were very well spoken from childhood and couldn’t really relate to teaching an adult with all sorts of problems. The breakthrough for me came when I spent some time with a speech therapist and she showed me how a therapist approaches a speech problem rather that the “copy me darling” type teachers I had been to. 

I looked at speech, as an engineer rather than an arty would be actor and assessed which of my sounds were different from RP or Received Pronunciation sounds. I had always done physical training so I applied the same principles to speech and created my own exercises to address my own problems. Once I had devised a set of exercises, I worked as hard on my speech as I did in the gym. However, within a short time I must have mastered being able to speak RP because I was getting professional bookings to do voice overs from the SABC and other acting work that specified RP.

I married Conchetta and we moved back to Bristol in the UK and bought a house. I worked as an engineer and took time off to do small TV acting jobs. What is relevant is that people asked how I learnt to ‘speak properly’ and could I teach them and children? At the time, UK interest rates peaked at 14% so with a relatively large mortgage we needed help making the payments so I placed an advert in the local Post Office advertising elocution lessons. These became very popular and students started bringing audio recording devices to the lessons and one chap turned up with a camcorder. This triggered a thought that no one had ever produced a video to teach speech before. Conchetta allowed me to sell the family Ford Sierra Estate to finance producing a video to teach people how to improve their spoken English. This might seem crazy now but there was no YouTube or popular Internet at that time. I had a professionally produced broadcast quality video and because it was the first of its type it received some media attention.

Once again there was no internet so the only ways to sell a video at that time was either mail order or through main high street shops. I spoke to UK brands WH Smith and HMV and they said they would sell the video if I could get sufficient publicity so that the public would know it was available. The only ways of getting that sort of publicity open to me were either through the press or daytime television. So I registered with the ITV and BBC and within a short time two things happened –Diana Princess of Wales was going to have speech coaching and a new UK pop group named East 17 were due to go to the US and there was concern that America would not understand their strong UK accents. I was invited on to This Morning with East 17 to give them some pointers and to host a phone in offering advice on speech. I prepared some training material for Princess Diana, which included my first video, and because of the royal link I still include a small section of the original video in my Personal Development Plans today. It is easy to spot which video it is because I have a massive bouffant hairstyle and I am wearing a pink jacket, yellow shirt and pink flowery tie.

Interest rates dropped, Conchetta and I had four children and I continued to teach, developing training material and expanded into clarity of speech for people speaking English a second language. I have always noted where my students needed help and I have written and recorded lessons to help. So all of my material has been developed through an actual need and has helped real life students. As time went on my limited acting ability became apparent, coupled with my total inability to remember lines so it was best for me to leave acting to the true professionals. Teaching speech continued and I was sponsored to compile training material for the secondary schools in South Gloucestershire by a consortium of large employers in the area. 

Because I am not an academic the consortium wanted an academic body to so before my material was released into schools it was reviewed and endorsed by the Chief Educational Officer for Oxfordshire. While I was in Oxford for the educational review I took part in interesting TV programme which compared how a state school student compared with a student from Eton College. It was an early makeover programme and I had to help the chap speak with an accent that sounded as though he came from Oxford. You can’t realistically change an accent in a very short time but it gave me the opportunity to define what I think an Oxford would accent sound like. 

It is fairly simple and not a bad set of guidelines to aim for. If you are from the UK and you form all the consonants correctly and aim for RP (Received Pronunciation) articulation and vowel sounds - but don’t quite achieve either, you end up with a neutral accent and with very good articulation. This is why I identify the tutorials as UK British Oxford.  This probably as good as anyone in everyday life is going to need, unless you are aiming to read the BBC News or you happen to have landed an acting role in Downton.  If English is your first language and you have an accent I generally advise leaving the vowel sounds unchanged and work on the consonants and articulation. This keeps your accent intact and you can still be very well spoken within an accent. 

For a US accent if we apply the same principles and introduce UK British articulation you could end up with the best of both worlds. American vowel sounds with educated British articulation.  I wanted to have some of my material recorded in American accents so I listened to many professional voice over artists who would best represent East and West coast US accents. I chose Patricia and Jessie not just because of their accents but because I really like their voices. I identify the US tutorials as US West Coast UCLA (Patricia) and US East Coast Harvard (Jessie)

To bring you up to date Conchetta and I have three grandchildren and I am still teaching and creating speech tutorials. I am confident that I have covered all sounds and combinations of sounds that anyone is likely to have problems with. But having said that if there are any sounds or words that you are struggling with let me know and I’ll build the word for you from the basic sounds.

-Andy