I’ve always found novelty voices on satnavs about as funny as The News at Ten. Largely because I spent one of the most fraught hours of my life, lost on the outskirts of a French airport, thanks to the John Cleese voice my dad had thoughtfully downloaded onto his TomTom.
I could tell something was wrong when my dad started grinning from ear-to-ear the moment he switched the sodding thing on, before we pulled out of the car park. Five minutes later, something was definitely wrong, when for the third time in as many minutes, we had to cut across three lanes of traffic to make the required turn, only to get even more lost than we were in the first place.
The reason? Mr Cleese’s hilarious directions threw in the suffix “beaver right”, every time he issued the genuine direction “bear left”. Bear, beaver, get it? Yes, it had me in fits of laughter for, ooh, nano-seconds. The problem was, with the traffic noise and iffy speaker I couldn’t really hear what Basil Fawlty was saying, and thus bellowed at my dad to hang a sharp right every time he took a left. There’s a place for weak puns, and that place is The Daily Express – they have no place on satnav commentaries.
So it was with a weary sigh that I discovered TomTom is adding Yoda’s voice to its line-up of novelty accident causers this afternoon. Then I watched the spoofed “making of” video on YouTube, and I have to admit, it made me laugh…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FdcJVuylmsM
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