Issue: 12 February 2005

Last month at the British Library, as part of the admirable series of poetry evenings organised by Josephine Hart, Edward Fox and Dame Eileen Atkins presented a reading of ‘Four Quartets’. It is not eccentric to declare Eliot’s long poem, composed between 1935 and 1942, as the greatest written in English since the death of Tennyson, and it is certainly the greatest English poem of the last century, conjoining, as it does, the language, landscape and history of this country. Fox and Atkins, sensitive to its music and grave beauty, gave a memorably lustrous performance.

Afterwards, however, the gratitude that one felt for hearing Eliot’s resonant, mysterious language spoken with such sympathy was disturbed by what the writer, in another of his famous poems, called ‘an overwhelming question’: how often does one hear the world’s greatest language spoken with respect by its native speakers? Not often in England, that’s for sure.

It is not only on the streets of our cities (and, increasingly, our villages) that the verbal barbarians have taken over, with their glottal stops and rising inflections. Turn on the radio or the television, and anybody who cares for the sound and meaning of the English language must recoil with horror at how it is abused by those who make a living from speaking it. Although it is our greatest gift to the world — and the world has not withheld its thanks — too many English people are either unable to speak it clearly, or, in the case of a metropolitan media class tainted by inverted snobbery, they refuse to.

This is not a matter of accent, though it must be said that the number of bogus proletarian voices on the airwaves has reached epidemic proportions. Has anybody heard the continuity announcers on the BBC recently? Plenty of broadcasters have spoken with distinctive accents, and many, notably Benny Green, were first-raters. Compare Green, whose London voice was genuine and warm, with the ghastly Jonathan Ross and you can see how far we have slipped. Where once there was elegance of delivery, now there is cultivated oikism.

No, it is to do mainly with language: the colour, weight, clarity, rhythm and articulation of words. Their meaning, in other words. For every presenter or reporter who speaks clearly, like the much mocked Ed Stourton, there are half a dozen guilty of elision, omission, addition and exaggeration. Familiar words, names and places are mispronounced. Verbs are left to fend for themselves — ‘troops arriving in Iraq’. The letter T (either ignored, or pronounced as a D, as in ‘alodda’) is a lost cause. Even Andrew Marr, the BBC political correspondent and a well-spoken man in most respects, cannot say, ‘going to’. Instead he says — emphatically and repeatedly — ‘gunner’.

Ah, ‘well-spoken’. There’s the rub! The most persistent foot-soldiers in this Kulturkampf are those middle-class types who feel that by speaking poorly as a matter of principle they are expressing solidarity with that mythical sub-culture, ‘real people’. Writing in this magazine recently, Charles Moore (who speaks well, as Etonians should) observed that Ruth Kelly delivered a ‘breathtakingly graceless’ speech at a Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch four years ago ‘in an accent which she would never have had while at Westminster School’. Of course she did. It would never do for an ambitious Blairite to be seen consorting with enemy forces. The assumption of an alien voice was her crass way of saying, ‘I belong elsewhere.’

The Prime Minister himself is familiar with this stratagem. His popular touch is not infallible (they didn’t do ‘demotic studies’ at Fettes) but it doesn’t stop him trying to sound like a pop star, which is really what he has always wanted to be. Man of the people and all that guff. As Anthony Burgess, who spent most of his adult life abroad, said, on one of his last visits to this country, ‘Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.’

These daring new democrats have established their base camp at White City, and their centre of operations is Five Live, an outlet dedicated almost entirely to the brutal suppression of decent English. Other than the outstanding Brian Hayes, who is Australian, and Nicky Campbell, the cocky Jock, the station is awash with mediocrities who enjoy nothing more than speaking out of the corner of their mouths and upsetting the balance of every sentence by emphasising the wrong syllable. But even in this undistinguished gathering it is possible to identify the worst offender. Step forward, Susan Bookbinder, newsreader and (so she insists on reminding listeners every few minutes) Manchester City fan.

This lady’s finest hour came two years ago, after the death of Adam Faith. In the course of a single sentence, ‘born on a council estate in west London, he was determined to make something of himself’, she managed to put an incorrect stress on five syllables — ‘born’, ‘west’, ‘he’, ‘some’ and ‘him’. Even by Five Live’s lamentable standards it was a virtuoso performance. Perhaps she ex-changed high fives with her pro-ducer later.

Can we expect the BBC to take the lead in banishing Bookbinder to the boondocks, and restoring good English to the airwaves? Mark Thompson, the director-general, should remember what Auden said about the first duty of poets, which was to act as ‘custodians of the language’. If he doesn’t know what that means, he can turn to Eliot, who commended a world in which ‘every phrase and sentence is right’, with this amplification:

...where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together.

In an ideal world it would be the BBC’s bounden duty to equip all employees, on their first day at work, with two literary masterpieces: ‘Four Quartets’ and Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. Until that blessed day dawns, can Jimmy Savile fix it for Fox and Atkins to read the news?