Pygmalion, not the BBC, has it right – RP got me into Oxford

Patsy Ferran (Eliza Doolittle) and Bertie Carvel (Henry Higgins) in Pygmalion at The Old Vic
Shaw's Truths: Patsy Ferran (Eliza Doolittle) and Bertie Carvel (Henry Higgins) in Pygmalion at The Old Vic

Last week I was told by a new acquaintance that I had a “beautiful voice”. Since my accent is RP by “name and natter”, as one friend put it, you may have guessed correctly that the person conversing with me wasn’t British. Speaking 1950s-style BBC English is such a crime nowadays you’re amazed someone doesn’t hand you a revolver on a cushion, while directing you to an empty library to do the decent thing and exit the voice pool.

So I have huge sympathy for former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming who says she would never be asked to front any TV show now, “I’m old, speak RP English and don’t tick the PC boxes”. How I know that feeling!

A couple of decades ago I was in demand as a “talking head” on TV, fronted some programmes and did loads of radio, but gradually the offers thinned out as my plummy voice became an emblem of class oppression. Around the same time, posh gels Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine disappeared from prime time schedules for the crime, one imagines, of being patrician.

The ironic thing is that my father was a working-class publican who left school at 14. My voice represents mum’s triumph in getting her five children to speak like minor royalty. Life in the Pelling family circa 1975 was a scene out of Pygmalion as she made us repeat every vowel sound ten times: “ay, ee, eye, oh, youuu.”

Eventually, we sounded so genteel that on a trip to Lingfield racecourse with my heavy-betting dad someone asked me if “your father owns a horse?”

My plummy voice helped get me a scholarship to a good school and was an advantage when I applied to Oxford. My accent was the complete norm when I entered the media in 1991. In those days, anyone wise knew not to make assumptions about a colleague’s background through their voice, as many older hacks had had elocution lessons.

You still shouldn’t make lazy assumptions, except now many ambitious middle-class people in the media and arts strive to be “street” and talk in fluent Hoxton or Brixton British. I imagine they’re trying to emulate presenters like Amol Rajan, the new host of University Challenge who confessed this week he’d always said “haitch”, rather than “aitch”. Rajan’s stellar career is testament to the power of the new style King’s English.

And yet whenever I speak to a North American, Kiwi or Ozzie, they say how much they value RP for its silky smooth clarity. Actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Emily Blunt are feted for their bell-like tones.

Conversely, almost no one outside Scotland can decipher broad Glaswegian. Same goes for Newcastle and treacle-toned Geordie. I adore both accents but if I want to hang on every word, RP still leads the field.

My own household isn’t immune from vocalising downwards. I stopped scolding my 20-year-old son for talking Estuary English and saying “f” in place of “th” when it became clear he would never deviate from the mantra “nobody cares”.

And yet when he needed a “reliable” parent to talk to a friend’s dad, as part of the process of nailing down guarantors for a student house, he came to me. The father in question – a foreign diplomat – wanted to speak to a UK-based parent to check his son was joining a bunch of nice, respectable young men. Why was I wheeled out? Because I speak fluent RP and millions across the globe still find that tone reassuring. Even if our broadcasters beg to disagree.

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