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“Are you the voice on Peppa Pig?”

It is not every day that I get asked this. I was wrapping up an online training course at about 4.30pm and had asked whether any of the participants had any questions before we finished.

Usually the response is along the lines of “I have a question about X” or “When will I receive my course completion certificate?” or most commonly “How do I get a refund?” But being asked about my professional capacity in voice-acting a porcine animated character on children’s television is not as common as some people might imagine. For a start, despite my propensity to go hiking in the countryside every Sunday, I do not enjoy jumping in muddy puddles.

So unnerved was I by this challenge that later in the evening I played back the video recording that I’d made of the training to determine whether my voice actually does sound like Peppa Pig’s. Who knows? Webex is constantly in a state of snooty antagonism with my audio devices while I am training, rendering me (according to my trainees) variously too loud, too quiet, completely muted or “talking like Norman Collier”. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the regular mandatory Webex auto-updates has now inserted a pre-schooler’s comedy voice-changer into the mix without telling me.

Nope, I could hear that I sound the same as usual. Not exactly Brian Blessed but certainly not Peppa Pig either. While Handbrake was compressing the 2GB video file, I wondered whether my trainee had meant that my voice sounded like that of the narrator in of each episode. You’ll have to judge for yourself: even though you may not know what my voice is like, imagine reading back this column in Peppa Pig’s voice.