Voice male

Not only was he going to raise his voice, he was going to get paid for it.

He is the Voiceover Man, a performer who’s heard but seldom seen. You heard him every time you watched The X Factor – his was the voice making the dramatic announcements (“It’s time to face the music”... that sort of thing) at the top of the show.

That’s only the tip of the vocal iceberg.

Now he’s looking for singers to join him on a summer dance record, Shake It, in conjunction with milkshake shop Shakeaway.

“We’re looking for three singers to star in the record with me. Boys, girls, doesn’t matter. Just three good-looking, talented people who can sing and dance and appear in the video,” he explains.

There’s a lot going on in his life, including two projects based around his voice. One’s an iPhone application, that enables people to put together words and phrases to make their own ring tones and voicemails. There’s an application, too, for those without iPhones.

‘I’M going for total world domination,”

he jokes when I suggest he’s everywhere at the moment. “But when people start throwing money at you to say things...”

His voice may be everywhere but he’s no newcomer to the entertainment industry.

He worked closely with Steve Wright, creating characters for the radio presenter’s shows on Radio 1 during the Eighties, and later launched a London station, Melody Radio, where he presented the breakfast show for four years.

He was a BBC news editor and BBC announcer, shouted “Come on down” for Bruce Forsyth’s The Price Is Right TV game show and has written for shows including The Fast Show. He’s also the voice of the E4 entertainment strand.

So you can see that he’s more than just a voice with the best part of 30 years in broadcasting behind him.

He points out that he’s only a very small part of The X Factor. “It’s purely the title sequence – all very dramatic and only about a minute-and-a-half. But there’s a lot of work goes into it.”

He comes from Northern Ireland, although you’d never know from his voice.

“I never had a very strong accent. Also, in those days when I was a news reader for the BBC, they did still like ‘received pronunciation’ for newsreaders,” he says.

“There’s been a huge sea change in the way voices are heard on TV and radio. We now hear a huge range of accents and heavy regional accents. It’s a good thing.

“The key is not necessarily having what most people consider to be a good voice. Having an interesting voice is important, but it’s what you do with it. How you interpret the copy you read. You have to give it the right emphasis and make it sound easy.”

He doesn’t do anything special to take care of his voice, although recommends drinking as much water as possible during the day and avoiding dairy products, like milk in coffee. “You get a frog in the throat with milky drinks,” he explains.

He could make a living without saying a word as he’s started to branch out, having an interest in media companies and a London Soho hotel. He won’t be returning to the subject he studied at university – he left with a psychology degree but confesses to having forgotten everything he learnt.

The Americans could soon be hearing Dickson. He’s talking about going to the US with The X Factor when Simon Cowell debuts the show there. “I’m hoping that I will go across, but nothing’s decided yet,” he says.

Perhaps his biggest TV voice rival is Geordie Marcus Bentley, the voice of C4’s Big Brother, and Dickson recalls the two of them were voted the most iconic voices of the last decade.

With that, it’s time for him to go off to record a TV commercial in Soho. “It don’t know what it is,” he says. “The last time I was there I had to be a schizophrenic octopus and drown while speaking in four languages.”

■ For a chance to sing on the Shake It single go to kaboosh.net/competitions.aspx