We choir persons, you see, have to consider our diction very carefully so that what we sing is intelligible, and in the good old days (when did the good old days finish? 1950? 1960? A week last Tuesday?) BBC English was reckoned to be good enough to serve as a standard for radio and TV persons. Indeed, if you had a regional accent in the good old days you’d have been lucky to get a job. But it’s all changed. Mock-Manchester was bad enough, but now your afternoon tea is likely to spent in the company of “reporters” who suddenly all seem to come from Belfast, and it’s a bit off-putting, while you’re trying to digest your egg on toast (or your lobster thermidor if you live up the posh end of town) to be constantly harangued by the tesseraphthongs of a bunch of Ian Paisley sound-alikes, especially when they all try to be PC and say “gerd” and “curd” and “tuh.” And the cutting-room floors at Corrers and Emmers must be knee-deep in all those dropped t’s. Just as we’d got used to “yer wha’?*”, with a little click at the end, they started putting more emphasis on the little click, so now it’s either “yer wok?”, or, for even more emphasis, “yer wocker-hhhhh?”
Now this is not English as we understand it in civilised parts of the country, or even Yorkshire. It is telly-speak. But I have given this matter a lot of thought, and I believe I have come up with the answer to the question: “Why do telly-people, and especially southerners, sound so very silly?”, and here it is.
It is the make-up they all wear (yes, even the men). It is laid on with a trowel to conceal the fact that many of them are well past pensionable age, and also because of the lights. The problem is that TV lights are so hot that ordinary make-up would melt and drip down their frocks (or whatever), so they use a special make-up which consists mainly of fast-setting concrete. Now if you plastered your mush with fast-setting concrete you would very quickly notice one unfortunate side-effect - you would not be able to move your lips. And if, by some superhuman effort, you did manage to move your lips, then your make-up would fall off in great heavy slabs and Health & Safety would be round like a shot.
So rather than risk cracking the slap, telly-people have perfected the art of talking without moving their lips (a great handicap if you are stone deaf and have to rely on lip-reading, of course, though you can always watch the captions on teletext, which generally arrive five or ten minutes after the words were uttered and the screen is now showing Tom and Jerry or Songs of Praise from Llanelli. ) Hence “gerd berks”, “curd”, “lurk”, and “tuh.”
What I think proves my argument conclusively is that there are no French people presenting programmes on English telly, because French people have to have incredibly athletic lips just to keep pace with their language, which scientists have proved goes nearly twice as fast as English. In fact a trained French person can not only speak, but juggle three tennis balls and operate a remote control at the same time, just with his (or, as the case may be, her) orbicularis oris muscle, or gob, to you and me. No chance of keeping the slap intact there.
*A Manchester expression which means roughly: “I beg your pardon?”
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This article appeared in our parish magazine under the Choirstalls logo last summer. Most readers seemed to have enjoyed it as a bit of fun, but we came back from a holiday in Italy to a raging scandal. Somebody, it seems, had taken offence at the reference to "a bunch of Ian Paisley sound-alikes", and was going to complain to the Bishop, and panic had set in.
Well, the article was a bit of fun, but what sparked it was actually something rather more serious: something which I couldn't possibly have expected to appear in the parish mag.
Early in 2008 there was a sudden influx of Ulster accents in the newsrooms of both the BBC and ITV, especially in the North West on the early evening TV news programmes. There wasn't an influx of Brummie accents, or Geordie accents, or East Anglian accents, or Devon accents - just Ulster accents.
Conspiracy theorists, of whom, heavens above!, I would not call myself one, might legitimately wonder if the two big broadcasters hadn't been engaging in a spot of social engineering - reinstating Ulster accents in an England which had come to associate them with the long, bad years of the troubles. If so - not a bad idea. But to do it covertly? And at exactly the same time? Was there an agenda here that we know nothing about, that might, or might not, have involved broadcasters and government in bed together?
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