Is received pr a thing of the

Steve Cain

Way back in July 1954, when the first television news bulletin was broadcast on the BBC, the newsreaders of the time were all plummy-voiced men dressed in tuxedos. Things have certainly changed in 60 years, not least of all the dress code – you wouldn’t have to look far, now, to see a male presenter reading the news without a tie! And, in the mid-1970s, Angela Rippon and Anna Ford broke down the barriers of gender discrimination to become the first permanent female newsreaders for the BBC and ITN, respectively.

We have come to associate certain prerequisites with the role of the television newscaster – poise, professionalism, gravitas, and the ability to keep a cool head in even the most challenging of situations. But do we also still expect them to speak in a received pronunciation accent?

Jan Leeming, one of the BBC’s most popular newsreaders of the 1980s, took to X (formerlyknown as Twitter) recently to bemoan the fact that she no longer gets work because of her received pronunciation accent, saying: “I’m old, speak RP English and don’t tick the PC boxes. Have given up even trying.”

Perhaps Leeming may have a point.

Certainly, since the 1980s, there has been less emphasis placed on the necessity for newsreaders to have the plummy tones associated with Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall. Indeed, even regional accents began to come to the fore with the rise of news presenters including Kirsty Young (Scotland), Andrea Catherwood (Northern Ireland) and Huw Edwards (Wales), to name a few.

Chat show hosts such as Michael Parkinson, Russell Harty and Terry Wogan all had their own distinctive regional accents, too. And, increasingly documentaries were being voiced-over by a smorgåsbord of celebrities with a plethora of different accents.

On the other hand, though, Jan Leeming’s former peers, Angela Rippon and Julia Somerville, both of whom are of a similar age and have RP accents, are still very much in demand.

And, despite not having the cut-glass quality of Angela Rippon and Anna Ford’s accents, there is nothing discernible in their voices to indicate that Mary Nightingale is a Yorkshire lass, or that Julie Etchingham hails from the East Midlands.

Furthermore, for every animal welfare documentary fronted by the late Paul O’Grady, there has been a travelogue presented by Joanna Lumley. And, for every game show presented by the likes of cheeky chappie Bradley Walsh, there has been another hosted by an Oxbridge alumni such as Stephen Fry or Richard Osman. So, then, however valid and wellmade Miss Leeming’s claims that the decline of well-spoken speech is “gathering pace” and that the English language is “being mangled” are, it seems apparent that her accent, age and illegibility to “tick modern boxes” are not the only reasons for her lack of work on television.

Difficult for her to accept it may well be, but Miss Leeming must take an objective view of her circumstances and, indeed, her part in creating them. From 1980 to 1987, she was one of the BBC’s most prolific newsreaders, presenting bulletins at weekends and on bank holidays. During that time, she was twice voted Newsreader of the Year by the Television and Radio Industries Club (TRIC) and also won the PYE Award for Television Personality of the Year 1982. So high was her profile at the time that she was given the role of hosting the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest.

However,