“Are you sure that’s the BBC?”

Written by Riviera Reporter

That’s the question reader Vernon Koh asked his wife when he arrived in the middle of one of those five-minute World Service bulletins. Well, times change and so do voices, or at least some of them. Patrick Middleton explains

Count on Private Eye to be slyly misleading. In a recent item of “Media News”, supplied by its Bush House mole, it told us that “British accents are no longer popular at World Service” and as a result “regular listeners are enraged”. Vernon Koh, a Singaporean working in Sophia Antipolis, disclaimed any rage at what he’d heard. “That voice, and one or two others I’ve come across recently, just didn’t sound like the BBC I thought I knew, and that chap particularly. I’m just curious more than anything.”

“A high standard of speech”
That idea of sounding “like the BBC” opens a fascinating chapter of British social history. When the British Broadcasting Company, as it was known for its first five years, was set up in 1922 it was a designedly non-commercial organisation and John Reith, its first Director-General, was determined it should raise moral and cultural standards throughout society. Managers and broadcasters were recruited from the same social sectors as the superior professions. This was clearly revealed in their speaking style which made of the BBC, in the words of New Zealander D.G. Bridson, an early recruit from overseas, “the voice of the upper middle class”. Our main picture shows the London newsreading team in 1930, all of them men (women’s voices were long held to “lack authority”) and all of them educated at public schools and Oxbridge. Arthur Lloyd-James, the BBC’s adviser on spoken English, explained the need for this limited recruitment in a newspaper article published in 1932: “You cannot raise social standards without raising standards of speech and you cannot produce a uniform high standard of social life in a community without producing a uniform high standard of speech.”

Since Lloyd-James wrote there have been vast social and cultural changes in Britain but for a long time their effects were resisted by BBC management, especially in radio and more fiercely in the overseas services than in the domestic output. During the Second World War, in a discussion of presentation on the General Forces Programme, one senior executive insisted that “your ordinary soldier in the field needs to be spoken to by obvious gentlemen”. Such attitudes survived for decades. Following Vernon Koh’s call, and comments from other readers, I discussed the history and development of especially announcers’ and newsreaders’ English with Murray Holgate, English Network Manager at World Service. “I’ve lived the history. I began my BBC career as a World Service newsreader and when I started I suppose we all had rather plummy voices that would’ve been approved of by those chaps in that nineteen-thirties photograph. The trouble was that increasingly fewer and fewer people actually spoke with that Received Pronunciation, as it was called. Here at World Service we began to think more carefully about the kind of English we were using.”

“A widening range of voices”
So what does that mean? “Well, we take very seriously the feedback we get from listeners, most of whom aren’t British expats but come from all over the world. We picked up that quite a few of them felt British Received Pronunciation had a condescending tone, even sounded arrogant. That was the perception and we couldn’t ignore it. But most important was the issue of clarity. This can be assured in a wide variety of accents and that’s something we have to think about as an international broadcaster.” What’s changed then? “Actually, not a great deal for the moment. Yes, we have broadened our recruitment base for announcers and newsreaders. Just to take women, for example, in the past twelve months we have added to the team Zoe Diamond from Scotland, Kath McGregor from Northern Ireland, Pooneh Ghoddoosi from Iran and Blerina Goga from Albania. Personally, I can’t imagine anyone could object to their voices. And, of course, we’ve still got plenty of staffers who exemplify traditional British Received Pronunciation and that’s what some people prefer, maybe including your Mr Koh. On the other hand, we wouldn’t take anyone whose accent would cause real problems to listeners – a speaker of ‘Estuarine’ English for example or broad Brummy.” So what about the voice that troubled Vernon Koh? “Blustering”, he called it. “Well, newsreading isn’t easy and any newcomer has to be allowed time to settle into a style that answers to today’s World Service needs. I remember some of my own early reads weren’t all that good. Of course, if a recruit doesn’t seem to grow into the job in the way we look for he or she has to move on. But we’re now set on a steady widening of the range of voices bringing you BBC News.”

From Reporter 109 - June/July 2005

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