Will in the comments notes this from the Telegraph:
Lord Hall told MPs that he wants to see more regional accents on the corporation’s programmes and have more programming on life outside London.
Asked if the BBC has a “snobbery” against regional accents, Lord Hall said: “I think it doesn’t matter what people sound like in terms of their accents. I happen to think Merseyside accents are great, I would like to hear more.
“It is an important point that we reflect the diversity of the UK outside London. I do worry about this. We have to guard against the metropolitan bias.”
Of course that is the real problem with the BBC, a lack of regional voices….bias in any accent is still bias…though I suppose they think they can sell it to us more easily if it comes wrapped in a familiar voice.
And where is HALL from? -The son of a Merseyside bank manager.
Noted that the Mayor of Liverpool had a Scottish accent, when he held forth on the Reith Lecture today!
What`s the BBC take on that?…I`d have thought that ought to be a Scouse accent for such a job as that?
Or are the Scots allowed to take these jobs here-but no Liverpudlian(let alone any Englishman/woman) would surely get such a prestigious berth to speak for Glasgow, I`m sure?
Bloody Tartan Colonialists eh?…racist maan!
You may have noted his “Scottish accent” however he was born in Liverpool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Anderson_%28politician%29
Got that wrong didn`t I?
Sorry folks! Ta, Albie-didn`t know who he was…you do!
Don’t worry, ChrisH, it says more about the pathetic Scouse accent than it does about than it does about how it sounded to you.
Oi, I resemble that remark! Nothin wrong with our accent la, its sound.
When I was In Her Majesties Armed Forces in The 80`s & 90`s , I went to the Peoples Socialist Republic of Scotland now & again , in the 80`s they had 1 English presenter / newsreader on BBC 1 (Scotland) ,called Jane Copeland , she was eventually given the boot when the new” Apartheid” policy was introduced , only Scottish voices allowed ( although in England we have to put up with them, even though they are not heard in Scotland) Jane went on to be a Channel 4 announcer , then the voice of Orange mobile network , voice overs & is currently the voice on the Piccardilly line. The Al beeb are just f**king racist anti English hyprocrites !Don`t get me going about the Daily Record ,the anti English racism was evil , if you had inserted “black” instead of” English”, in every rant they would of been in court,& should of been !
Agreed. You never hear an English voice on the BBC reporting from Scotland, Wales or N.I.
Nor have I heard a Scot reporting from N.I., or a Taff reporting from Scotland (etc.).
But in England? Full on diversity. No real problem with that, except they call themselves the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Hall could try getting the BBC voices to speak clearly. I have no problem with regional accents although the voices on East Enders grate.
Dropped consonants, goannahs,yeres and the rest. All usually spoken by Southern voices who should know better. It is sloppiness not regional voices that I object to.
Personally I have great affection for the real Black Country (Yam yam) and North Devon ( around South Molton) accents. Distinctive and sadly on the wane.
i’d be happy with anyone reading the news so long as they didnt speak that ridiculous received pronunciation. Posh stuck up toffs. The rest of the world thinks we all talk like that. One can be well spoken without sounding like an upper class twat in the 1920’s.
its pathetically funny when they’re reading the news and say the TalibARN in afghanistARN. Do they call their cat a cart as well?
I cannot see why you should equate received pronounciation with being a “posh stuck up toff”.
There is no logic in saying that at all. Just say you don’t like it as I do not like the East Enders style accent.
An honest statement without any underlying reverse snobbery.
The main rquirement in any broadcast voice is clarity. The accent does not matter.
i just think its a ridiculous accent that posh stuck up twats speak that hate white working class people like me
“One can be well spoken”
Now that is a very typical middle to upper class construction. Now I am a West countryman and it is only heard amongst the land owning and suchlike classes. You never hear it from us country folk.
Are you sure you are not having us on?
its called being educated and just because im a white working class northerner doesnt mean im a thick twat that wears a flat cap and keeps pigeons ( i keep zebra finches!)
are you sure youre not a lefty on some sort of false flag operation
I think you will find my comments over the years would suggest that I am very far from being left wing. Social class has no interest for me .I am an old fashioned conservative countryman. Very much as my ancestors have been for generations.
My interest is England and it’s survival as I would wish for my grandchildren and their descendants.
I’m also a white northerner from a (very) working class background but I think your comment is obnoxious.
I also think your attitude does more damage to the image of white working class people than the “toffs” you so chippily despise.
you’ve got stockholm syndrome
Since I’ve done OK, in fact more than OK, in spite of the posh, southern conspiracy to keep me down, I don’t think that applies.
Grow up.
me grow up? i think al beeb should grow up. why should posh stuck up twats have a monopoly and presenting the news. jobs for the snobs
That’s one of the most ridiculous comments I have seen on this blog. Inverted snobbery is still snobbery, you know.
im not being a snob, im an anti snob, and al beeb is full of snobs who classify themselves as the “metropolitan elite”
if they think of themselves as the elite, what am i? a pleb?
Worst has got to be the Royal toady Nicholas Witchell who pronounces ‘years’ as ‘yars’
indeed. you’d expect people at the BBC to be able to speak proper english
There is one ‘voice’ that should be removed from the Radio 4 airways pronto – that of Neil Nunes. His ‘Caribbean’ accent and extraordinarily deep tone is so unsuitable and unfitted to Radio 4 it is, frankly, disruptive. Whoever decided he should be a continuity announcer, clearly had only enthnicity and ‘diversity’ in mind, entirely ignoring suitability.
I disagree. But we all are entitled to our opinion. It is a pleasure to hear him -for me anyway.
I’d agree Dave if it wasn’t for the fact we know damn well Neil is on there primarily for the BBC to stick two fingers up.
I don’t know why Neil is on, but I think he has a lovely voice.
I so agree about Neil Nunes. His voice makes Paul Robeson sound like a soprano. I find it impossible to listen to, and it is worse because you just know that he got the job because he isn’t hideously white.
I have noticed a tendency towards uniformity among English reporters who pronounce ‘muslim’ as ‘mooislim’, drawing out the vowel in a sound which mimics reverence.
It’s all part of the Arabicisation of INBBC.
It seems odd that BBC top floor market rates come out with stuff like this so overtly.
Are they really so naive as to think that when a guy at the top says ‘I’d like to hear more…’ then that Royal edict won’t get made so PDQ.
Which rather makes a nonsense of continued claims that there is no management personal influence in some pretty key areas of social micro-engineering.
What possible meritocratic basis could there be for the words that speak for the nation suddenly getting prioritised to being articulated in Scouse because the DG wishes it?
It almost seems designed to ensure more discrimination abuses, beyond rendering pan-national professional communications delivery a complete dog’s breakfast.
Any commercial medium is constrained by consumer reaction, so if the minions go too far, market forces will soon act as a corrective.
However, with the BBC there are no such checks or balances; simply unaccountable whim backed by a bullying culture.
I was in hospital recently, and one of the oddest experiences was an exchange, or rather attempted one, between a Forester and a very nice doctor whose English was every bit as accented but also not that extensive or nuanced.
The result was mutual incomprehension.
Maybe with the BBC’s output, that is an apt metaphor, and for a sensible audience no bad thing.
But also a real waste of £4Bpa better invested where needed and useful.
Accent should be irrelevant, but bad diction should be punishable by death.
what’s the problem here. the bBC have Indians reporting from India, Latin Americans from South America. African from Africa, and Europeans from Europe. All of whom can barely be understood when it comes to speaking English and the bBC feels that this is acceptable.
Not like this is a new phenomenon, is it?
Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, written in 1946, has an example of what he thought to be rather inappropriate bombast, hence undercutting the writer’s point, in its style. But it’s the subject matter that is more pertinent to the discussion at hand:
“5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as “standard English.” When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!”
(Letter in Tribune)
Even back then, the sound of what “Proper English” on the air should be was a matter of debate.
One hopes that, whatever the regional sound of the on-air reader, what is being said is nothing like that purple patch.
One of Orwell’s contempories was J B Priestley. His wartime broadcasts were classic. Very strong regional accent – but as clear as a mountain spring.
BBC World Service these days has several “efnik” presenters who sound as clear as mud. Hardly intellible – and it is not the accents. Plus they are inane.
Down the tubes we go.
It`s as if he`d already heard Sarah Montagues elocution teacher, and knew the preppy bluestockings who would follow-like Monti and bloody Libby Purvis, Hodge Harman and-the doyenne of them all Patricia Hewitt.
Yesterday, the 9am end of Toady featured two women talking bollocks about something…both sounded like Polly Toynbee!
Nightmare-Polly in stereo!
I care not a fig what voice reads the news, what I am concerned about is the truth, impartiality and accuracy of the content, of the news they read.
I simply don’t think that one single broadcaster can ever give the plurality of view that a democracy requires.Therefore, even if the BBC did fulfill its charter, which it falls woefully short of doing, it could never fulfill the needs of a democracy. Scrap it and put in its place many other broadcaster with different political views.
I offer this classic. Utterly impossible in the Cultural Marxist era:
As a thank you to all of you that post up those links, I enclose one from 2006-which to me shows that prophets can wear a uniform, and get sacked as Private School Spokesman.
Interesting man…and this 2006 reprt in the Sunday Times is eerily good to me-and scary too.
Paul Collier on Start the Week got me thinking of this.
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=31492
John Arlott.
What a voice.
Sue Lawley had to check up on what “onanism” meant when Grayson Perry used the word in his Reith Lecture.
1. Doesn`t that sum up what you miss when you burn your Bible and live off Karl Marx and his Radio Times musings?
(Gen 38.9 if anyone at the Beeb gives a XXXX).
2. Given that the BBC is stuffed to the gunnels with cultural onanists like herself….I`m surprised that she needed to rummage through Perrys handbag to find its meaning.
I don’t think I’ve missed out by deciding not to listen to any of Perry’s talks.
I am trying to find the precise date when the BBC metamorphosed into Pravda. 1922, 1939, 1945, 1963, 1974, 1997? Can anyone help? My memory is going.
Speaking as a former English as a Foreign Language teacher I rather like the traditional BBC accent. It gives the students a target to aim for and becomes a standard for clarity.
Might I suggest a test? Anyone whose voice will be used by the BBC, other than as an actor or as a correspondent in his/her country of origin, must submit a recording to a panel of non Native English speakers who have competence in understanding ‘BBC English’ and be perfectly comprehensible. This doesn’t exclude regional accents but places a limit on them.
the bbc and radio 5 live has always been the home and preserve of posh sounding middle class lefties and liberals educated in the universitys of marxism,but what i really object to at the bbc is there classism,the working classes never get no representation at the bbc as presenters.its just blatant discrimination against the majority who are sneered at ,looked down at and mocked as racists and homophobes by these leftie bbc and 5 live presenters,on rare occasions you get good men like peter hitchens who speaks up on behalf of the working classes on question time even though he gets barracked and shouted down just for saying what the silent majority think.
Why is it that people from the South-East region think that they do not have a regional accent ?