From a tape recorder won in a raffle to the London Underground, BBC Radio 3 and a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music.
There is a voice you have almost certainly heard, even if you have never been able to put a face to it. It has guided millions of commuters through the tunnels of the London Underground, voiced a carrot called Katie who got married on Christmas Day in an Aldi campaign, and narrated the intelligence of the Starship Avalon — the ship at the centre of the Hollywood film Passengers, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. That voice belongs to Emma Clarke, a woman from Sale who built one of the most remarkable careers in British broadcasting from a spare bedroom in the North of England.
We sat down with Emma for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, craft, composing, academia, social media and the future of a profession she has inhabited for over three decades. What emerged was a portrait of someone who has never once accepted that geography, gender or background should determine the ceiling of ambition.
A Girl from Sale, a Raffle and a Tape Recorder
Emma Clarke grew up in Sale, the only child of a policeman father and a mother who was a housewife before taking on a little Tupperware work a couple of evenings a week. It was, as Emma puts it, a simple little life. But being an only child meant she had to manufacture her own world.
“I just had to imagine stuff – make my own fun. So I wrote stories. I was obsessed with my mother’s tape recorder. She won it in a raffle, and I was absolutely mesmerized by this incredible machine. So I became kind of obsessed with audio from being a very, very small child.”
That obsession with audio — with the texture and possibility of sound — never left her. By the time she was 15, she was writing letters to the BBC. Not asking for work experience, not requesting a tour: she wrote to say she loved voice acting and asked if she could come in for an audition. Remarkably, they said yes.
“I went along and prepared six pieces and read them in this huge radio drama studio that was in New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road, and it was just me and a microphone in the middle of this big room, and just a disembodied voice coming from a control room.”
At the end, the producers came out from behind a curtain — Wizard of Oz, Emma notes, with a laugh — and they began giving her work. She was 16. What followed was a period of high-brow poetry, prose and drama for BBC Radio 4, before she began gravitating toward commercial work. She became a full-time voice at 22.
Learning the Hard Way
The path from drama student to professional voice actor was not a smooth one. Emma’s first attempt at recording a radio commercial ended in gentle humiliation. She had been doing Stanislavsky-trained theatrical work for BBC Radio 4, and brought exactly that register to a script for a production studio called Alfasound in Sale. The producer was not impressed.
“He said, ‘No, that’s terrible. That’s really bad, but work on it. If you’re really serious about this, go away and work on it.'”
She took that note seriously. For two years, she recorded radio commercials off the air like, in her own words, a nerd. She listened, transcribed, analysed, and built an internal metronome — learning to voice copy to exactly ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, or to a hundredth of a second when voicing for visuals. She went back two years later, auditioned again, and this time they said yes.
By the 1990s, Emma was driving across the north of England daily — Liverpool in the morning, Hull after lunch, Sheffield on the way back — recording live in studios with producers at Radio City, Radio Viking and Hallam FM (and many more besides, throughout the country). Technology eventually gave her back her time: ISDN meant she could record remotely, then broadband opened up the world. But the discipline she built in those early years — the internal stopwatch, the instinct for a script — was earned the hard way.
Mind the Gap: The Break That Was A Wonderful Surprise
In 1999, a production company in London approached Emma about a project she assumed she had no chance of landing. London Underground needed new voices. They were looking at six men and six women.
“I thought, There’s no way I’m gonna get this. It’s gonna go to a bloke. I just don’t think I’m gonna get it.”
She recorded a demo and then heard nothing for 18 months. When the call eventually came — you’ve been selected — it felt surreal. What Emma didn’t know was that during those 18 months, her sample, along with all the others, had been put to focus groups. Commuters on the Underground had chosen the voices themselves.
“I learned that they code named my voice Marilyn — but I often wonder, if they’d have called me Brenda or Muriel, would I have been selected? I do wonder that…”
The initial recording session lasted three hours. She still records new bits and pieces now, but the bulk of what you hear on the Underground today was laid down in a single afternoon a quarter of a century ago. The first time she heard herself echoing through a Tube carriage, the experience was, she says, genuinely surreal. Her son — who now lives in Amsterdam — was visiting London recently and sent her a recording of her own voice on the Bakerloo line. His message: I want to tell everybody you’re my mum, but they’ll think I’m mental.
Doing It All from the North
Emma’s client list reads like a roll call of global commerce: ASDA, AstraZeneca, Barclays, BBC, BMW, Coca-Cola, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Nike, Premier Inn, Royal Mail, Sky, Sony, Tesla, The Walt Disney Company, Virgin, Walmart — and many more. These are not the clients of a regional voice-over artist. Yet Emma has built this career without ever relocating permanently to London.
There was a period when she kept a flat in London and divided her time. But when her father died, she came home to the North and she has not looked back. The decision was not simply grief: it was also a refusal to accept a premise she never believed in the first place.
“Why not achieve everything from the north? I just refused to accept that I had to be in London to do my job… I’ve always been passionate about the North. I’ve kept my northern accent. This is me. I’m not going to change a big part of my core identity – my voice – for anybody… I just refuse to accept that we should accept less. I just refuse to do it. It just never enters my head that we should compromise our ambitions because we’re from the North.”
It is a position delivered without anger or performance — just the steady certainty of someone who proved the point and stopped needing to argue it.
BBC Radio 3, a Podcast and Twenty Years of Patience
Presenting the Saturday breakfast show on BBC Radio 3 looked, from the outside, like a bolt from the blue. From the inside, it was twenty years in the making, mediated by a pandemic podcast and a LinkedIn message.
Emma had been thinking for some time about how to bring together her various interests — music, audio, broadcasting, conversation — into a single project. The result was a podcast called Before the Bar Opens, built around what happens before the music starts. She did two seasons, reaching out into the worlds of music and broadcasting, learning how to interview as she went.
“And then I got a message on LinkedIn. I’d had mixed feelings about LinkedIn. I thought, is it a bit cheesy? I mean, I don’t get up at five o’clock and do yoga and write my intentions every morning. But I’ve been won over.”
The message was from someone who had been an intern in a studio two decades earlier, sitting in the back of the room during a Classic FM recording session where Emma couldn’t get through the word ‘wind’ without laughing. And two decades later, this man had become the controller of BBC Radio 3. He had found the podcast. He wanted to meet.
“He said, ‘Could we meet up and talk about opportunities?’ So I went along and had breakfast with him, and I recorded a demo. I was asked to present the Saturday breakfast show on BBC Radio 3 — just amazing! I did that for a year until they moved the show to London.”
The connection, Emma points out, was twenty years in the making — a reminder that seeds planted in passing can take a generation to flower.
“I found my lucky stars every day that I got that opportunity. You just never know, do you?”
Composing, a Master’s Degree and a PhD Nobody Saw Coming
Ask Emma when she became a composer and she will tell you it was the pandemic. But the music had always been there — heard in her head since childhood, playing classical guitar from an early age, audio endlessly fascinating to her. The pandemic simply removed the excuses.
“During the Covid crisis, I realized that I couldn’t control this situation. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I could just control my little world and how I felt every day. So I thought, okay, the world of voicing has become a bit weird… I decided to start writing contemporary classical music.”
She wrote to the head of composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, asked to be put in touch with a teacher, and began composition lessons with the composer Tom Harrold over Zoom in September 2020. Five months later, her teacher suggested she apply for a Master’s degree at Leeds Conservatoire. She had no undergraduate degree. She applied anyway.
“I thought, they’ll never have me. I haven’t even got a bachelor’s degree. I set up my business when I was 17, so didn’t go to uni. But I thought, try it, try it, try it. So I applied, and they said yes. I couldn’t believe it.”
After the Master’s, the RNCM offered a PhD. Her research explores how her background as a voice actor shapes the way she writes music — a question that sits at the intersection of performance, instinct and language that only someone with her biography could pursue. She is now in her fourth year of a part-time doctorate and has been selected as one of the Britten Sinfonia Opus One composers.
“I didn’t know if it was going to be really stuffy, really pretentious, really intimidating, but it’s the most wonderful place, so inspiring, and it’s made me perceive myself in all sorts of expansive ways, because you realize, actually, the only limit that you put on yourself originates in your own mind.”
Three Books, Three Worlds
Alongside voice work, presenting and composing, Emma has written three books — each distinct, each emerging from a different corner of her life. The first, You Are Here, is a mindful travel journal that grew out of a weekend away and a list of things she wanted to notice. The second was aimed at children, drawing on her earlier years teaching drama and art at community college. The third emerged from a conversation with her own children about social media.
“I wanted them to take responsibility for their own use of digital devices in social media, and we had to figure out how they would self regulate… and how they would devise their own personal manifesto for how to use devices and how to navigate online life.”
Three books. Three audiences. Three completely different problems being solved through the act of writing.
The Idea That Won’t Leave You Alone
With so many irons in so many fires, the question of how Emma manages creativity — how she generates ideas, and then which ones she actually pursues — is not an abstract one. Her answer begins with doing nothing.
“I think one thing that’s really important to me is meditation and just sitting down and literally doing nothing… your mind is really unruly and it’s like a puppy that’s wanting to run around and sniff everything. It’s crazy trying to control your own mind. So I meditate and just take time just to breathe. All I do is breathe, literally. I breathe in, I visualize cool blue light… and I breathe out black smoke — all the anxiety, negativity and self-imposed limitations.”
The emptying is the point. Clearing the clutter lets ideas surface. Emma describes the sensation of a good idea as physical — something that scratches at the back of your head, refuses to leave you alone, gets scratchy if you ignore it. The ones that persist are the ones worth pursuing.
“For the outside world it might look like it’s just a sudden idea I’ve come up with, but actually, I’ve been thinking about it for three years, and I’ve been mulling it over for three years, and I’ve got mind maps and notes and God knows what dated back from years. And then suddenly I thought, yeah, now’s the time, and then I’ll do it.”
On the question of monetising ideas, Emma takes the same long view.
“As long as you’ve been true to the stuff that mirrors your own experiences, your own interests, your own knowledge, and you’ve really tapped into that, and you’ve thought about the timing of executing that idea, then I think it becomes obvious how you monetize it.”
On Algorithms, Twitter and Knowing When to Step Back
Emma was an early and active presence on Twitter when it was a place of genuine creative exchange. She has watched, with dismay, what it has become.
“It’s a horror show. I find it really hard. And right now, I’ve sort of taken a bit of a step away from a lot of social media. I’m still active on LinkedIn, and I still post every day on my Facebook page, but I left Twitter when Musk took over, because I just couldn’t. It was just awful, awful, and it’s just become increasingly toxic and divisive.”
Rather than chase the algorithm, Emma has shifted her energy toward direct outreach — real conversations with people already in her network, conducted offline.
“They change the algorithms like they change the socks. I feel like you’re always kind of chasing the algorithm, chasing ways to please the algorithm, and it just exhausts me. I’d rather work on my work than manipulate what I do to fit an algorithm.”
On AI and Its Ethical Considerations
“The people who’ve asked me to sell them my voice for AI are some of the biggest companies on the planet. I’ve always declined. Here’s why.
The ethical concerns around AI are frankly bone-chilling. My voice is part of my identity. My values are: honesty, integrity, quality, trustworthiness, transparency and empathy. If I were to sell my voice, all of this would be under threat.
An app, an AI company, a text-to-speech programme could use my voice in ways that contravene all my values. My voice could be used for disinformation, scams, torture, porn, extortion, fraud, cult activity including recruitment. Even terrorism.
Imagine hearing your own voice in a piece of far-right propaganda? In a warbot? In a sex doll?
I don’t want my voice to ever be at risk of being used for these purposes, or for any form of exploitation. I also don’t want my voice to be used to sell or endorse products and services I’m just not comfortable with. I never want to be in competition with my own voice. I don’t want my voice to be reduced to a bland, homogenous ghost of who I am.”
On Raising Creative Children
You have creative children — how did you encourage that?
“I just encouraged my kids to be who they are. Me and my husband have given them the space they need to figure that out… and how they want to express themselves in the world. My son is a professional ballet dancer (he works with Dutch National Ballet and Opera in Amsterdam) and my daughter is training to be a barrister… but she’s also a painter. They both have an incredible work ethic — they both work really hard. I guess they’ve seen me work hard and they’ve understood that you don’t get to where you want to be by winging it.”
How Do You Want to Be Remembered?
“As someone who was great to work with. Because, ultimately, people buy people. Long after the specifics of any project fade, what endures is how you made others feel, how you showed up, and how you built trust. Relationships are everything, and being someone who brings ease, clarity and integrity into a working environment is, to me, the most valuable legacy you can leave.”
Still Going, Still Curious
What is striking about Emma Clarke, across two hours of conversation, is not the volume of what she has done — though that is considerable — but the consistency of the instinct that drives it. Everything traces back to that tape recorder won in a raffle, to a child alone in Sale who decided that audio was interesting and never stopped following that conviction wherever it led.
From Radio 4 drama at 16 to the London Underground at 30, from a pandemic composition experiment to a PhD at one of Britain’s great music colleges, from a blog post idea to three published books, the through line is the same: notice the thing that won’t leave you alone, take it seriously, and then — as she was told by a patient producer in Sale when she was a teenager making a mess of her first commercial — go away and work on it.
The rest, as Emma Clarke’s career demonstrates, tends to follow.
Emma Clarke is based in Manchester. Find her at emmaclarke.com
With over 80 attendees, Smiley Happy People continues to be a standout networking event in Altrincham, bringing together inspiring speakers like Emma who share their real-world insights and practical advice. A big thank you to Emma for this engaging talk, and to all the attendees who make these events so impactful!
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