We were pleased to welcome former BBC correspondent and erstwhile Strictly Come Dancing star John Sergeant to the studio to record material for his forthcoming BBC2 spoof documentary “John Sergeant Meets Rab C Nesbitt”, in which he travels to Govan to interrogate the man behind the string vest, supported by clips of Rab’s finest and funniest moments. It’s a long time since Gregor Fisher’s magnificently down-at-heel Scotsman graced our screens, and judging by the sections of script we recorded it should be an absolute scream. Due for broadcast on BBC2 on 10th November, 2011.

A fun couple of sessions at the studio when the wonderful Dame Judi Dench dropped by to record a bunch of commercials via Source Connect with New Zealand for ASB Bank. She is always one of the nicest people on the planet to work with – completely natural, self-deprecating and very funny. She was just about to start filming the new Bond movie. “Any nice locations this time?” we asked. “Oh, probably just the usual shed at Pinewood…” she replied.

 Legendary psychic and cutlery-manipulator extraordinaire Uri Geller dropped by to record some promos for his syndicated show “The Successor” aka “The Next Uri Geller”, which is currently broadcast in 18 countries. Not that we would ever have asked, but while he was here he spontaneously offered to do a little spoon-bending and did indeed cause one of our teaspoons to droop before our very eyes. Never a dull moment…

A busy start to 2011 in the studio with continuing projects for Cisco, Diageo and SKF. This week’s main job was working with talented Aussie actress Casey Hill on a new IVR recording project for the Tesco International Calling Card.

Meanwhile, we were delighted to welcome top UK ventriloquist Paul Zerdin to the studio to work via Source Connect with South Africa on commercials for Dial Direct. You might wonder, as we did, quite how ventriloquism works in a voice-over context, but actually the session was part of ongoing work to establish character voices for a later onscreen campaign. And no, sadly Paul didn’t bring his puppets with him!

A busy multilingual week in the studio. We linked up with partner studio Speakeasy in Singapore to record Korean actress Sang Hwa for an ongoing corporate project for Cisco and our continuing work for Pepsico this week involved Arabic. Meanwhile our quarterly news program for Swedish engineering giant SKF was delivered with subtitled versions in English, Swedish, French, Spanish and Italian and dubbed versions in Chinese, German and Brazilian Portuguese. We slept well this weekend…

Hypnotherapist Marygrace Anderson has been in the studio this week recording her new CD and website audio. It was so relaxing that we would probably all have fallen into a deep state trance had we not been running the session.

All of which was a pleasing antidote after a marathon five hour recording session for Pepsico in Vietnamese and a slightly less taxing session for Cisco in Brazilian Portuguese with the lovely Margot Caroni.

Suddenly there was a rush on with our Pepsico security job so, thanks to our hardworking translators, we were able to complete the scripts for Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese in double quick time and make a start on the Spanish recordings this week. One down, six to go…

Slightly less frenetically, we worked on a TV spot for Lambi toilet paper in Russian with partner studio 20 Post in Stockholm. Russian actress Larissa Kouznetsova dropped by to add her voice, somehow managing the unlikely feat of making toilet paper sound sexy…

A major new project started this week on behalf of US security experts FishNet Security for beverages giant Pepsico, localising their security training modules into seven languages. Translation and voice-over recording of around 13,000 words of material will be undertaken in Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Thai and Vietnamese.