How to hire a lip reader for the Royal Wedding

The Royal Wedding is coming up fast and this is going to be the fun event of the year starring Prince Harry, the nation’s favourite royal. We will all be watching and of course we all want to know what is being said when they think no one can hear them – or as our team says, when no one is watching. Our team of professional lip readers will be watching their every move on the day, to give you the comments that you can’t hear. If you’d like to hire a lip reader – here’s what you need to know.

There are a lot of people out there who can lip read to some extent. How do you know if your chosen lip reader will do the job to the standard you require? It is obvious that a deaf person will be able to lip read better than a hearing person, as they will have put in the hours and hours of practice to get better at reading lips. But remember, not every deaf person can lip read well – this is a difficult skill to master. Most people use their residual hearing to help them to lip read. There are very few deaf people who can lip read and understand everything they see.

The only official test available is the BKB speech perception test (Bamford-Kowal-Bench) which serves only as a test of basic ability to lip read (with the audio switched off). A lip reader needs working professionally needs to have built on their BKB score by challenging themselves, lip reading different accents and without hearing aids, and be able to lip read without the assistance of an interpreter.  

When you hire a lip reader, caveat emptor. Unfortunately there are too many people taking advantage of the fact there is no official test of lip reading, they will take your job and tell you what you want to hear. A simple way to test a lip reader is to video call them on Skype and switch off your audio, or meet them and don’t use your voice. If they can’t follow you, you have your answer.

Don’t forget – Google is your friend.

If you hire a lip reader through 121 Captions, you will get the best lip readers who have honed their craft throughout several years of daily practice and who will only tell you what they have seen.

It’s quite difficult to lip read events on the fly as you only get one chance at catching what is seen, unless you watch a video recording and replay it. It’s much easier to work as a team as two lip readers can work together and check against each other for any words they are uncertain of. Tina had the pleasure of working with Terry Ruane, getting us mentioned in err….. Prime Minister’s Questions.

Terry will be lip reading the Royal Wedding with us on Saturday, he is very excited to be involved. Terry has been a professional lip reader for several decades and we love hearing about his forensic lip reading experiences.

I remember being asked to lip read Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973 for one of the national newspapers.  This was picked up by the French photo magazine, Paris-Match who had a problem in that they go to press a whole week after the event so they were looking for something “different” to offer their readers.  They flew me over to their offices in the Champs Elysees, and I was taken to a TV station to review film of various members of the Royal Family at the wedding. From that material they were able to produce a beautiful spread of colour photos with captions below of what was being said at a particular time, which added more interest to the pictures.

Over the years I covered a number of other Royal Weddings plus the visit of the Queen to France and a gathering of world leaders at the opening of the Grande Arch de la Defense completed in 1989 which celebrates the bicentennial of the French Revolution.  Much of my work was in Paris although I have worked for many national newspapers in the UK.

Tina Lannin heads up the 121 Captions lip reading team. Like Terry, she has been lip reading for several decades and relies on lip reading to communicate. Tina has been the official lip reader at several royal events including Prince Harry and Meghan’s engagement interview, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, and the Queen at her Diamond Jubilee.

I was sitting in the Sky News TV studio in West London, my notepad and pen out, with a huge TV screen in front of me. Prince William and Prince Charles were waiting at the altar for Kate. William turned to his father and said “This was supposed to be a small family affair”. His very funny quip made the headlines that day. I also caught Camilla and Charles arguing in the glass carriage on their way to the ceremony – I’m not saying what that was about!

The Royal Family are a lot of fun to lip read as I feel we have come to know them a bit through the media, they are not ‘just another celebrity’ but people we can look up to.

Lip reading CCTV for the police and courts is a different matter altogether and requires an even higher level of ability and confidence in the lip reader, and therefore when you hire a lip reader for this purpose, this is a much more serious matter. Only the most skilled lip readers should carry out this kind of work. Terry opines;

I have never been entirely happy with Forensic Lip Reading for the police.  Although I have undertaken this kind of work, I have always preferred to have a second lip reader to verify and confirm this work and in many cases it turns out that the client does not want to incur this additional expense which actually is very important if it is going to have any kind of credibility.  I have often been faced with completed reports from other lip readers which just do not match up with the video and there is one well-known example of a lip reader who simply wanted to give the police exactly what they were looking for as shown in the initial brief. It seems to me that there is less reliance on this kind of forensic evidence these days as a result of a court case that was about the credibility of a particular lip reader.

Tina works for the National Crime Agency and the police, and she has seen the fall-out of this. Tina feels too many people are simply believing what they are told, without having the lip reader or their work checked by an impartial party. Several lip readers, unconnected to each other, working together to corroborate findings, will deliver the most reliable work.

The lip readers at 121 Captions will be working together as a team, checking each other’s work and delivering an accurate transcript. When you hire a lip reader from us you can be assured you are getting the most able lip readers who work together to check each other’s work before submission. For you, this means more reliability, more experience, a higher standard of professionalism, and better value for money.

If you’d like to hire a professional lip reader and get the inside scoop, contact us.