Michael Winslow

Police Academy’s Michael Winslow is the self-dubbed ‘man of 10,000 sound effects’. He tries a few out on Laura Davis

“Except when the opportunity arises to have talking food in the Chinese restaurant,” he laughs.

“You’d be surprised the kind of trouble you can get in. But you’ve got to be nice.

“And you can’t do the stewardess call button on an aircraft any more. It’s a Federal felony, but back in the day (he makes a high-pitched “bing-bong”) – and of course she’s going up and down the aisle trying to find where the noise is, because it’s not in her panel.”

During his career, Winslow has learned (the hard way) not to make the sound of a dog in the same room as one “because he will bite you”, and that he does an extremely accurate Bengal tiger.

“What you do is you go into the other room and make that sound and the dog thinks ‘There’s an animal next door, I’m going to have to find it’. So he gets up and comes in the room, he smells every inch, every corner, then the dog looks at you and goes ‘Nah, it’s not you, you got two legs’.

“That’s good for about half an hour of fun,” says the impressionist, who soothes his talented vocal chords with regular doses of lemon and honey.

“Then there’s a scientist in the Carolinas who studies tigers and she asked me to come in and do the sound of a Bengal and to see how close I got, so she did some voice analysis and I got 92%.”

He is currently working on the sound of waves as a therapeutic tool to use in his motivational speaking.

“I’ve got a strange bloody job, don’t I,” he says proudly.

“I keep having very odd tasks where people hire me to do sound effects for movies or television or cartoons, and you have to think in terms of the entire environment.

“If you can do just one sound, that’s all right, but you have to do everything else around it in order to put it in context.

“Like going out to feed the animals . . . you’ve got the door opening, you’ve got the wind, you’ve got different animals barking at you, you’ve got the hedgehog – he’s upset.

“You’ve got the food in a bag, you have to open the bag, pull out the food, pour the liquid, then they’ve got to fight over it, you’ve got to tell them to stop it . . . that all happens in a matter of seconds.”

He pauses for breath, then – “I’ll go feed them right now,” he announces, and he’s off in a cacophony of squawks and barks.

LISTEN to Michael Winslow at the Philharmonic Hall on Wednesday, September 23.