Accentuating the need for a more regional Beeb
THE notion of a Welshman to bring our county accent into mainstream broadcasting is a bid to make announcements less London-orientated, and is novel – but very old hat. In case you haven’t been told, Lincolnshire as she is spoke is to be on air. We are to be guineapigs together with Yorkshire and Lancashire and real-life lads and lasses with real-life county burrs will join the Corporation payroll to make us all feel more at home and less like English as delivered in plummy tones from down south.
The Lincolnshire accent is, like the county itself, largely unknown. Indeed it is less in evidence now than 100 years ago. It is a private accent although charming, unlike that of, say, Grimsby its largest town, whose accent owes nothing to it, and is throaty and harder.
Music hall star Freddie Frinton was a master of it in the celebrated film Dinner For One, shown annually on German television.
Similarly, Hull’s accent is very different from Yorkshire’s and I trust the BBC’s Welsh visionary Rhodri Talfan Davies is fully aware that speaking Grimsby is by no measure speaking Lincolnshire.
It is an admirable step to introduce parts of Britain to the varied and subtle changes in accents of its constituent county neighbours, but whether in the guise of officialese is questionable.
During the war, my older readers will recall, the BBC’s deliveries of news bulletins was left to two men, Stuart Hibberd and Alvar Liddell.
The first, the senior announcer, was a Cambridge University man and became an army officer seeing service on the North West Frontier, joining the BBC in 1924. He and Liddell delivered their vital news in impeccable English to an eager nation.
The BBC, however, decided that ‘impeccable’ might not be ideal and infiltrated another reader between them – Wilfred Pickles.
Pickles had a homely Halifax delivery and started reading the news in 1942 in the hope of embracing the ‘other half’ of Britain.
He had become a popular regional reader in 1938 and in 1946 launched, with his wife Mabel, the wireless Have A Go series. The war over, the BBC reverted to the Hibberd-Liddell recipe.
Accents are valued national characteristics. But the general public want the voice of authority and officialdom and, once again, only time will tell if Mr Davies’ idea is yet another dumbing-down or an accepted improvement.