Royal Mail's AI ad voice sounds like a dead BBC narrator

Royal Mail has confirmed that the voiceover in its 2025 Christmas ad was AI-generated, after the daughter of a dead BBC narrator said she heard her father's voice.

The admission came in response to questions from Deadline, which published the family's account on October 8; The Independent, Metro and The Telegraph reported it the next day.

A Royal Mail spokesperson said: "The Christmas advertisement was produced for Royal Mail by external partners and featured real actors. As is increasingly common, the voiceover was AI-generated and we were advised that it was created using prompts and was not designed to replicate any specific individual. The production partners also carried out checks and advised that these did not identify any resemblance concerns."

The campaign aired in November 2025. Deadline reported that the advertising agency Darwin & the Machines oversaw it, that the producer Untold Studios filmed real actors, and that the voiceover was subcontracted to Fameplay, an AI studio based in Prague.

Fameplay is backed by Czech Media Invest, chaired by Daniel Křetínský, whose EP Group owns Royal Mail. Deadline reported that Fameplay licensed its voice technology from ElevenLabs, which confirmed the narration was not a direct voice clone of Vaughan but would not say whether its model was trained on his recordings.

Paul Vaughan died in 2014, at 89. He narrated the Paddington audiobooks, the BBC science series Horizon, Radio 4's Kaleidoscope and the atomic-bomb drama Threads. His daughter, who is not being named, was watching television when the ad aired, 11 years after his death.

She said: "My dad died over 10 years ago. I often listened to his audiobooks of Paddington over the years, just to say 'Hello Dad'. But imagine my shock when his voice just popped up on a new Royal Mail Advert. No one in my family had given permission to use his voice. No one had asked."

Two speech specialists supported her account. Vincent Hughes, a professor of forensic speech science at the University of York, told Deadline there was "considerable phonetic similarity" between the ad's narration and Vaughan's. Voice perception researcher Nadine Lavan said the AI voice "sounds like Paul."

Actor Peter Caulfield, who founded the Save Our Voices Now campaign against unauthorized voice cloning, said Royal Mail should have known better than to use AI instead of paying a voice actor. The group says ElevenLabs has since placed Vaughan on a "No Go Voice List," which ElevenLabs has not confirmed.

Royal Mail has not said whether it will change how it makes ads. The case shows how a voice made from a prompt can still land on a real person anyway.

Deadline's report includes a side-by-side of the ad's AI voice and authentic recordings of Paul Vaughan.