Accentuate the Positive

20/08/2008 by admin.

When I burst on the world of work in 1952, more-or-less straight from Cambridge I still had a strong Yorkshire accent. Cambridge had modified it a bit but not too much. The rest of my department was staffed entirely by people with received pronunciation so I strove to emulate them and, I guess, succeeded. Of course today I wouldn’t have done that. But I find, in an entirely prejudiced way, that some accents that one finds on TV grate a little, mainly, I am sorry to say, a Geordie or generic North Eastern accent, prevalent on the BBC (even on London Today for some obscure reason)  . I wonder why this is so? Asian, Carribean and the accent  reviled by Simon Heffer of the African American announcer on BBC4 bother me not the slightest so why am I so bothered by our friends from Newcastle?

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