Caeci Visum

Thoughts, feelings, curmudgeonliness, and whatever else occurs to me

  • A Little Vocal Difficulty

    For me, one of the delights of producing this blog is uncertainty. I don’t know from one week to the next what I’ll be writing about. I know what my post in forty weeks’ time will concern, but apart from today’s effort, nothing in between. This is deliberate. It means that I have enormous flexibility. So today, dear reader, you shall have, lovingly written, my thoughts presented in an article about an article about an article.

    Yesterday – or, if you’re not reading this on the day of publication, on 29th November – while browsing the website of The Times, as is my habit of a morning, I came across the headline: “‘Posh Ed’ seeks truce in BBC accent war”.

    The import of the article is that the Broadcaster Ed Stourton has written a piece for The Radio Times, in which he calls for an and to the often heated debate on accents in broadcasting. In September, is BBC colleague, Amol Rajan, who speaks with a south London accent, demanded of the corporation’s Director General, Tim Davie, whether somebody with a strong, regional, working-class accent would be given a presenting job on a main network. This followed research which suggested that 70 per cent of newsreaders speak with Received Pronunciation, whereas the same is true for only 3 per cent of the population. Davie’s reply was simple and unequivocal. “Of course.”

    The well-spoken Stourton, who claims that his accent used to be “way posher than the late Queen’s”, argues that a broadcaster’s clarity and authority are both more important than his or her accent. He is absolutely right.

    A number of broadcasters, present and past, have, or have had, regional accents. During the second world war, when BBC announcers (never “newsreaders” or “presenters”) were still required to wear dinner jackets while on air, listeners would often have heard the Yorkshiremen , JB Priestley and Wilfred Pickles. Between 1946 and 1980, cricket lovers were treated to commentaries by arguably the greatest commentator of them all, John Arlott, who was as well-known for his Basingstoke burr as for his poetic descriptions of play. Derek Jameson, a man who never lost, or even trie to lose, his East End accent, was often heard on radio and television when I was growing up. Today, nobody minds the different accents of Huw Edwards, John Humphrys, Ken Bruce, Sara Cox, Kirsty Wark, Lauren Laverne, Adrian Chiles, and a whole host of others.

    Politics is another profession which requires clarity and authority from speakers, regardless of accent. Although a good many people might repudiate their politics, no-one denies that the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon (from Glasgow) and Labour’s Angela Rayner (from Manchester) are both very effective communicators.

    By contrast, the late trade unionist, Jimmy Knapp, was very difficult to understand. This was not because of his broad, Ayrshire accent, but his failure to enunciate clearly. His strange mumblings and hawkings, were actually statements on behalf of one or other of his unions, or answers to journalists’ questions. For those who are curious, Knapp was General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, before it merged with the National Union of Seamen to form the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, which he served in the same capacity. He was also President of the Trades Union Congress.

    Whilst I see no reason why a person with any accent shouldn’t become a broadcaster or politician, I fail to see any merit in Amol Rajan’s decision to pick this rather specious fight. Perhaps it is envy? Perhaps it is insecurity? Or perhaps Received Pronunciation is displeasing to Rajan’s ears? Only he knows.

    Of course, this is nothing new. When I was a child, I received my primary education near Birmingham, and was, therefore, surrounded by children from Birmingham and the Black Country, who mocked me for “talkin’ posh”. I don’t recall any interventions on my behalf from any teachers. However, I do remember getting into trouble for telling one of my schoolmates that the whole number between two and four should be pronounced “three”, not “free”. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have cast doubt on his intellectual prowess, but still, he was wrong, so it seemed reasonable to my five-year-old self, that I should correct him.

    “You have to realise that not everybody talks like you do,” I was told. How very true. But they, my schoolfellows and my teachers, should have had to realise it too.

    I don’t know whether or not the companion of my youth learnt to pronounce his THs properly. Does it really matter? No. If he still can’t, should it, along with his Birmingham accent prevent him from having, should he wish it, a career in broadcasting? Of course not.

    But to briefly broaden the point, “posh bashing”, for want of a better term, is a truly disagreeable habit. It is as unacceptable to complain that people sound too posh as it is to complain of their regional accent. It is as unacceptable for one person to criticise another for being rich or privately educated, as it is to criticise someone for being poor, or for having gone to a state school.

    Diversity is, of course, a laudable thing. However, so is merit. Broadcasters should be judged by their voices, and the clarity of their speech, not by their accents, or their gender, or their ethnicity, or indeed, where they went to school or university. If the BBC and other broadcasters keep employing the best available people, Mr Rajan will eventually see that the question he put to Tim Davie is fantastically irrelevant.

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  • The Ugly Game

    I believe that at the time of publication, we will be on day 4 of the football World Cup. I’m sure that for those who follow it, it will simply be known as “the World Cup”. But as there have been, within the past few weeks, a women’s World Cup in rugby union, a men’s Twenty-20 cricket World Cup, not to mention analogous tournaments in men’s rugby league, both for able-bodied players, and teams of wheelchair users, the sport in question does need to be clarified.

    Anyone who knows me will be aware that I don’t like football, or as our transatlantic cousins would have it, soccer. I can’t stand it. The beauty of “the beautiful game” is, quite frankly, lost on me. So you won’t be surprised, dear reader, to know that the current kick-about carnival doesn’t fill me with what the late Queen might have described as “undiluted pleasure”.

    This doesn’t mean that I’m anti sport. Far from it. I love cricket, and enjoy a number of other sports. I even have medals for rifle shooting. Indeed, I was a British champion once. Not a bad achievement for a blind man, but that’s a story for another time.

    Normally, there are two things that irritate me about world cups. One of them is the blanket media coverage – even beyond normal sports output. Not only do we have endless analysis and speculation, but earnest radio presenters will ask their listeners such profound questions as “where did you watch the match last night?”, and have them all on air to discuss the relative merits of watching it in the pub, or at home, or in a church. But, I suppose that it does fill time easily, so nobody has to do any thinking.

    The other source of irritation is the pretend fan. You know the sort of person. They blithely tell us that they hate sport in all its forms, until the World Cup comes around. Then, they suddenly know all there is to know about football. They cheer, with needless exuberance, those wins that the experts declare mere formalities. They publicly berate referees for adjudicating on technical points which they, the pretend fans, don’t understand. Then, if they are pretend England fans, they will sing, or at least intone, endless choruses of Football’s Coming Home, overlooking the fact that England is the home of the Premier League, which is the most watched football league in the world, thus meaning that football hasn’t yet left home. As I said, you know the sort. You might even be the sort, in which case, consider yourself properly chastised.

    This year’s iteration of the Bonanza of Boredom, though, has a third form of irritation for me. Along with the wall-to-wall tedium of the media coverage, and the hysterical, nationwide fake orgasm of the pseudofans, there is virtue signalling. People, many of whom are actual football fans, have just noticed that the World Cup is being held in Qatar, a country with an appalling human rights record. They seem utterly amazed by this, even though it was announced twelve years ago that Qatar would be the hosts. Why the surprise? And why all the declarations by fans that they will boycott the tournament? Apart from salving their consciences, what good does it do? The Qatari government has made its money back.

    Equally ridiculously, however, other people, including some of the players, are offering the bizarre defence of the tournament, that it will help bring about change in Qatar. This is utter nonsense. If there were any sense in that line of thinking, those sports teams which toured South Africa in the 1980s would have brought about the end of that truly disgusting doctrine, Apartheid, rather than becoming pariahs. And surely we want our sportsmen and women to play their respective games, and to play them well, rather than to be latter-day missionaries?

    The other thing that shocks the fans is that money was cut a motivating factor. Money has always been a factor in sport. People have been betting on horse races since time immemorial. Boxers began to be awarded cash prizes, thus becoming known as “prize fighters”. English rugby was rocked in the 1890s by a group of clubs, mostly in the north, breaking away to form a professional rugby league. The cricketing world was riven by Kerry Packer’s World Series in the 1970s, which paid players more money. Golf is currently experiencing a similar schism owing to the Saudi-backed LIV tour. Money talks, and fans of the richest sport in the world shouldn’t be surprised.

    So, you may ask, am I suggesting that the fans are wrong to be unhappy about the choice of host country for this tedious tournament? No, not at all. Naive, perhaps, but not wrong. After all, a world cup does imply that any country in the world can enter, whether we in the West like their political regime or not. If all sporting bodies thought the same, the England cricket team wouldn’t be touring Pakistan next month, where criminals can still be executed. Nor would future tours to India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the West Indies take place, for the same reason.

    Fans are, however, wrong to be surprised. They are also wrong to be surprised by the venality of the men at the top. After all, football is an example of global capitalism, not an engine for social good, despite the apparently aspiring missionary tendencies of some of the players.

    Football fans must accept that the “beautiful game” has an ugly side. It may be possible to reform things so that it becomes more like a game again, and less like big business, if enough fans can come together, and somehow usurp power. But that seems highly unlikely. And so, the sport they love, will continue to be an amalgamation of beauty and the beast. Although from my perspective, the beast was, is, and will always remain, the dominant constituent.

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  • If Music Be The Love Of Food …

    “Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks.”

    So wrote the Cantabrigian actor, comedian, writer, director, former quiz master, Blue Peter badge recipient, and final ever winner of the Pipe Smoker of the Year award, Stephen Fry, in his 1997 autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. Yes, he is, or has achieved, all that and more. But his words, rather than his accomplishments are of significance at present.

    Like Fry, I love music – many different genres. I’m delighted by classical music, jazz, rock, folk, country, pop music from a goodly number of decades, and a little reggae now and again. Not an exhaustive list of genres I know, but it will do for now. I’m also happy to mix them up. There have been many days when I’ve had my computer or smart speaker play all kinds of everything at random – yes, the Eurovision-related pun was intentional. Indeed, I still do this on a regular basis. A Beethoven piano trio might be followed by a Joplin rag, Mendelssohn might be followed by Metallica, a Franck sonata by Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz by Stan Rogers, or Bach by Baccara. On at least one occasion, the “immolation” scene from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung has been preceded by Lily Allen’s LDN, and succeeded by Pinky and Perky’s rendition of How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?

    But there is a place where I feel that music is inappropriate – almost any shop. For me, shopping represents a stretch in one of the nine circles of hell. Music, rather than soothing my troubled soul, distracts, and adds further irritation. Why do they do it? Especially in supermarkets. Do they believe that as we allegedly want our lives to be more like films, that shopping should have a soundtrack?

    Well, it turns out that this is an academic question. I mean that quite literally. It has been studied. In 1982, one Professor Ronald E Milliman, an expert in marketing, was good enough to offer us an answer. The data he collected indicated that music while we shop encourages us to spend more money. Music, so the theory goes, relaxes us, stroking us, caressing us, and gently coaxes us into digging our reluctant hands a little deeper into our pockets. Forty years later, they’re still bombarding us with music, believing, with utter certainty, or perhaps foolish optimism, that Don McLean will assist us in choosing pies (American or otherwise), Oasis will guide us in our attempts to procure the right kind of champagne, and Jessie J will help us to forget about the price tag.

    Hmm. Are we really supposed to be convinced that a background of Brahms encourages us to buy bread? Or that Glen Miller gets us in the mood to accept the BOGOF offer on crisps? Or that listening to I Should Be So Lucky will remind shoppers, as they’re passing the appropriate aisle anyway, to pick up a packet of condoms, just in case?

    Happily, there is good news for those of us who might be somewhat sceptical – even those of us who lack Professor Milliman’s exalted academic status. The good people who run Aldi have concluded that music on the shop floor really is a nuisance. If it’s loud, it drives customers away, because they can’t concentrate on their shopping. If it’s quiet, hardly anyone can hear it, so it’s pointless. Not only that, but having the relevant licenses is expensive. If they don’t have the licenses, they keep their costs down, which in turn keeps our costs down, and everyone’s a winner.

    So, which camp has the answer? Are the bosses of a great number of supermarkets and an academic correct? Do the Beatles persuade us to buy beetroots, and does Meatloaf lure us to the meat counter, thus causing the tills to go “ka-ching”? Or are the management of Aldi and I right to suggest that Mozart has nothing to do with purchases of mozzarella, nor Avril Lavigne with avocados, and that silence is golden? God only knows.

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  • Can We Keep It Simple?

    A few months ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Gloucester cathedral. Like so many other cathedrals, there is a cafe attached. There, the sounds of shuffling tourists, organ rehearsal, and choristers warming up, combine with the sounds of coffee being ground, machines performing Heaven knows what tasks to produce hot chocolate, and the gentle chink of spoon on cup.

    When it came to my turn to order, I kept it simple. I wanted a black coffee. The lady behind the counter – I’m not sure whether she should actually be referred to as “the lady behind the counter”, or instead, as “the server”, “waitress”, “cashier”, “consumption facilitation operative”, “percolator jockey”, or something completely different – complicated things. “Do you want cold or hot milk with that?” She asked. I replied that I wanted neither, as I desired black coffee. “Oh right,” quoth she, “so, do you want milk or not?”

    Having finally acquired a cup of coffee that was both black, and wholly devoid of milk, I reflected on the general difficulty of ordering a hot drink. Leaving aside the intellectual deficiencies of the lady behind the counter, or the server, or waitress, or cashier, or consumption facilitation operative, or percolator jockey, or whatever she prefers to be called, why, in the name of all that is holy, and of a good deal that is unholy, has society allowed it to become so difficult to order a simple cup of coffee?

    When I was but a lad, learning about what passes for cafe culture in this country, one could either order a black, or a white coffee. Some adventurous perveyors of hospitality would try to sell us a cappuccino, or possibly even an espresso, but they were so few and far between that most people didn’t take any notice. Now, there is a bewildering choice of beverages.

    As far as coffee is concerned, once you have chosen the nationality of the beans, and whether to have caffeinated or decaffeinated (a substance with no known merit), there is black, white, cappuccino, espresso, latte, ristretto, lungo (or café serré if you prefer French to Italian), mocha, and who knows what else? It’s all rather terrifying.

    Then, one must consider, at least for some of these brews, not only the temperature, but the type of milk – cow’s milk, goat’s milk, soya milk, coconut milk, oat milk, almond milk, rice milk, hemp milk, and, for all I know, sheep’s milk, camel’s milk, and human milk. Then, having chosen the species of milk, one must choose the process – full fat milk, which seems to be known as “normal”, and what we used to call “low fat” or “skimmed”, which is now known, at least when in coffee, as “skinny”. Why skinny? Why not light? Or diet? Or pointless?

    Anyway, having finally, and hopefully without injury, navigated the minefield of coffee and milk, there is yet more to decide – additional flavouring. A few years ago, some barbarian came to the truly bizarre conclusion that coffee would be immeasurably improved by the addition of flavoured syrup. The multitude of flavours includes: chocolate, gingerbread, hazelnut, caramel, and the ubiquitous abomination that is salted caramel. There should probably be a coffee one, but there doesn’t seem to be. However, the aforementioned barbarian was wrong. They don’t improve the flavour. Quite the opposite. If people don’t like the taste of coffee, they should drink something else, rather than profaning it with these perverse creations.

    But, dear reader, there is yet more torture. There is one more necessary decision that must be made before the ambrosial fluid can be imbibed. Sugar (white or brown), sweetener, or nothing? For the record, I have neither sugar nor sweetener. I’d like to tell you that I’m sweet enough, but I shan’t, for two reasons. Firstly, it isn’t remotely true, and secondly, I try not to use cliches.

    We need to rid ourselves of this collective, coffee-inspired neurosis. This quasi-bureaucratic Mount Everest is turning what should be a relaxing cuppa into a massive source of needless stress, for young and old alike. We need to return to a simpler age, when one could ask for a cup of coffee, and the lady (or gentleman) behind the counter, or the server, or waitress (or waiter), or cashier, or consumption facilitation operative, or percolator jockey, or whatever she (or he) prefers to be called, would only ask, “do you want milk and sugar with that?”

    And don’t get me started on tea!