Have I Got News For You <\/em>this week, the guest host is the veteran newsreader Moira Stuart. In the early 80s, she was seen as radical: the first black woman to read the news for the BBC. Recently she was taken off the news, and I think it’s partly because of her very rigid accent – once labelled as BBC Received Pronunciation – sounding out of place on 2007 TV.<\/p>\nIn fact, on HIGNFY she was asked what her accent was. “I don’t have one,” she replied. Well, she didn’t have one when she started out. In the 80s, all BBC TV announcers spoke in the same way. But the world has changed around her: they now either have articulate regional accents (Welsh and Northern Irish are particularly popular: “Noy on BBC2…”), or they have a kind of false-modesty, non-specific Southern English voice, like BBC RP but with the edges filed off. Like Mr Blair. In order to haughtily address the nation, you must no longer sound like you’re haughtily addressing the nation.<\/p>\n
Ms Stuart has gained an old-fashioned accent simply by not changing the one she thinks she doesn’t have. She could probably move to Radios 3 or 4, though, where such voices are still monarchs. Albeit more honest monarchs.<\/p>\n
The HIGNFY writers made her read out various jokey appeals for work, purely so they could hear her anachronistic tones grappling with the latest networking jargon:<\/p>\n
“If you’re watching this and you’re a TV producer, why not ‘Poke’ me -”<\/p>\n
(She pulls a shocked expression, and the audience laughs.)<\/p>\n
“I never thought it would come to this… (she tries reading it again) Why not ‘Poke’ me on… Facebook?”<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Tuesday. For no reason, I’m in a stressed-out, upset mood. So I find things to upset me rather than be upset because of things. A sticky day, pushed against other people on a packed 43 bus that stops everywhere, then pushed against other people on a packed Silverlink train that seems to take longer than usual. Add to which spending four hours solid in a hot underground studio, finding that I have to phone up Tom and get him to email me a drum track for use then and there, finding that my email isn’t working just when I need the track, wondering if Rachel is getting my messages about singing tomorrow, and so on. None of this matters in the greater scheme of things, obviously, but when you’re in just the wrong frame of mind, everything matters too much.<\/p>\n
The garish new London Olympics 2012 logo is the city’s current talking point. It gives me a headache, and the animated version reportedly produces epileptic fits. Still, I’m proud that this is a city where the aesthetic qualities of a mere logo can be the subject of intense feeling. Other countries get upset about content; we get upset over style. Or rather, the money behind the style. Once people could put a price to the logo (400,000 pounds), it was back to the price of everything, and the value of nothing. No story about a painting in the news comes without a mention of its fiscal worth.<\/p>\n
Without the price tag, the furore over the logo would have no index. It’s ugly – that should be enough. But no, the consensus must be: it’s ugly AND it costs a lot of money. It’s like the old joke: “The food’s terrible here. AND it’s in such small portions.”<\/p>\n
Many people use price tags in order to understand the world, which I think is their failing. I don’t, which is mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The video for that song about chocolate biscuits by The New Royal Family is online: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5N1qFjZc7_g It’s like a kind of jolly dream – the ones you really have as opposed to the ones Dr Freud wants you to have. I have a cameo role as a butler, and filmed my bits a month or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}