The Queen's English

When I left the country of my birth, my spoken English was still at the "I was - you was" level. Self-respect, determination, my service in the Forces and, chiefly, the BBC, helped me to make English my first language in speaking, writing, reading, dreaming, counting and just living.

I long for the now forgotten days, when Lord Reith was the first Director General of the BBC. Its supreme task was to educate. Under his iron rule, news-readers had to don dinner-jackets and speak with a uniform, well modulated, distinctively clear and careful pronunciation: The Queen's English... To talk like that these days is food for vulgar comedians.

After a lifetime trying to live up to these standards, I still have an ineradicable foreign accent. Spending a major part of my waking hours listening to BBC Radio, LBC chat-shows, to BBC TV, ITV and Channel 4 broadcasts, I am therefore even more appalled to witness an ever growing contempt for the English language that I consider and cherish as my greatest intellectual treasure.

Do you also cringe when you hear, now at all levels of social class, those awful, sloppy, uncaring (and sometimes affected) accents, pronunciation nothing to do with genuine dialects and the ever-returning meaningless filler phrases like "You know - You know what I mean - Yeah - I'm good - Sort of - Kind of - Effing This, Effing That...”?

Only recently, all of the eminent scientists and even the presenter in an otherwise interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 again and again embellished their contributions with a shower of "Sort of" and "Kind of" fillers.

I feel as if I were sitting on a bench, reading my newspaper, and above scores of sparrows and pigeons aim their droppings at my head... I wish the gaunt ghost of Lord Reith would still haunt the executive corridors of Broadcasting House.

And as for the standards of spoken and written English, displayed by school-children, school-leavers, and even students in higher education and at university, in broadcasts and in general in shops, offices and on public transport, I wonder just what was the response to Tony Blair's "Education, Education, Education" mantra.

I know that as a B.F. to the end of my life I have little right to complain, but what are blogs for if not for irritating the natives?