Young Royals put accent on ordinary

Jul 20 2007 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

PRINCE WILLIAM and Prince Harry’s excruciating dance displays at the recent memorial concert for their mother showed that they are not, as we say in the North, bred out.

Like all posh people, they jig about to a popular beat combo, every muscle in their Armani-clad bodies shrieked: ”I ain’t got rhythm.”

It’s as if, due to years of sitting on horses and having their ear drums blasted by shotguns, the aristocracy now have an in-built design fault.

They cannot synchronise music and movement except when marching to military bands or doing the Gay Gordon.

However, when the two Princes opened their mouths, haltingly reading from cribbed postcard notes, we witnessed an evolutionary auditory moment.

Yes, the lads are obviously not from Bootle, but, compared to the rest of the older Royals, they sound quite normal.

Well-spoken, clearly top-drawer, but without exhibiting the strangulated vowel sounds and mouthful of marbles tendency of the rest of their family.

Their accents were upper-class, yet not stridently so, a received pronunciation which did not sound “house” as “hice”.

What, I wonder, does Prince Charles make of all this? Is this another hand-wringing example of the decadence of the modern age, a sure sign of the erosion of the elite he once espoused?

Or is he cheered by the fact that his sons sound more like the people they will eventually be lording it over?

In days gone by, aspirational parents would want their offspring to “talk posh” as an entree into certain universities and professions.

Indeed, people were encouraged to shed their regional accents if they wanted to move onwards and upwards.

Margaret Thatcher had elocution lessons as a teenager in order to get rid of her Lincolnshire accent, and Stockport-born Joan Bakewell decided in a Cambridge University ladies’ loo to start pronouncing “bath” as “baath”.

For further proof, listen to older generation Coronation Street actors when they are off-duty.

In a delightfully amateurish way, they’ve poshed up according to Northern rules, sounding as if a creche is something that happens in the outside lane on the M6.

The nuances of class, status and up-bringing are evident every time we speak. As George Bernard Shaw once said: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

As an 18-year-old, I went to university to study English literature. During my first week, I was told that I had an affliction rather than an accent and asked how could I possibly recite poetry with flat vowel sounds? As chat-up lines, they weren’t the best but they certainly got my dander up.

I retorted that Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth all retained their regional accents and added flirtatiously that all value judgments about accents are social rather than linguistic.

It wasn’t the start of a beautiful relationship (ironically, when I moved to the North East to teach four years later, I was accused by the pupils of sounding like a Sloane Ranger). Perceptions about accents link into stereotypical judgments. In a 2003 survey, 64% of those questioned thought a Liverpudlian accent showed signs of being unsuccessful in life, and less than a quarter thought those who spoke with a Scouse twang were hard-working.

Oh dear. Even Liverpool’s own Beryl Bainbridge criticised “uneducated regional accents”, saying that, in her day, nobody spoke like the cast of Brookside, availing themselves of elocution lessons wherever possible.

Although the accent of the professional middle-class, received pronunciation, is not required in all employment circles these days, many bosses still have concerns about recruits who cannot speak clearly and correctly. I recall visiting a Further Education College where the students were being assessed in work-based learning activities. One exercise involved a role play to test appropriate use of voice and language when using the telephone.

Student A had to telephone Student B in a fictitious company to speak to a given person: “Hello. Can I speak to Miss Susan Duffy, PA to the managing director? came the polite enquiry.

“No, sorry, you can’t. She’s on the lav,” came the rapid response.

Suitable use of a business vernacular? Definitely not. Speaking clearly and correctly to convey meaning? Absolutely.

Posh looked classy compared to LA

THE much-promoted documentary about Posh Spice moving to America was shown on TV - and highly entertaining it was, too . . . for all the wrong reasons.

Naturally, laughing at Mrs Beckham has for a long time been a national pastime but by juxtaposing her antics alongside those of the LA set, it became a patriotic duty to stay in and watch.

Still, by parachuting her into a society where it appears taste, restraint and decorum are missing components in this lotus-land’s thesaurus, the producers achieved a minor miracle - they actually made Victoria Beckham look classy.

* FASHION guerrillas Trinny and Susannah have for a long time made their money by telling people that, if they dress well, they will feel good about themselves, even if they are overweight. They have counselled against going to the gym and adopting low-calorie diets in favour of wearing better underwear, namely their own Magic Knickers.

How disappointing, then, to see Susannah Constantine reveal in a newspaper interview that she works out three times a week with a personal trainer.

That may, of course, be for health reasons, but it does lessen her need for her own brand of big bloomers - and, in turn, our desire for them, too.

* TORY MP Boris Johnson, then, for Mayor of London? To his fans, he is a benign buffoon; to his enemies (and that may include many Scousers after his "self-pity city" outburst), he is a great deal worse. It is said that the man nicknamed Blond Ambition will stop at nothing to achieve his desires: be they linked to women, money or power. Old Etonian David Cameron’s endorsement of fellow school chum Johnson’s candidacy does little to endorse his public utterances that the Tory party is a modern meritocracy. More than ever, it still appears to be a public school playground.

* IT HAS been revealed that most parents are too afraid to let their children play out on their own due to fears of abduction and attack, despite the fact that such occurrences are, in fact, relatively rare. There are claims that children are no more at risk from such sinister factors now than they were in the 1950s. Maybe so, but there is one big difference in today’s external environment: traffic. Roads are busier, drivers go too fast in built-up areas, and many children are killed in accidents daily. Playing in the street is no longer risk-free, hence the caution of myself and many like-minded mums and dads in keeping our children where we can see them.