Accent on fad to sound Scottish or at least like a star

I ALWAYS feel reassured, said a colleague from London, when the pilot of my plane has a Scottish accent. The reason being, one assumes, that she associates Scots with technological skills and sobriety. Well, it's a safe, Gordon Brown sort of stereotype: we can buy that.

This week, two of the top three movies in the USA and the lead film at Cannes star Scottish actors while the election campaign kicked off with three Scots - Charles Kennedy, Michael Ancram and Gordon Brown, batting for their respective parties.

The Scottish voice and the many Scottish accents are universally accepted as appropriate for the voice of government or the sounds of show business. What a long way we have come.

In 1947, George Orwell wrote an acerbic book called The English People - and he began with the English accent. The one Americans identified as English from films was current in only a minority of the population, he noted. He also observed that "the language of the BBC was unintelligible to the masses". That was a profound irony in itself because, in the interests of clarity and understanding (it was said in justification), the BBC news had to be read in the accent of Received Pronunciation (RP). That was tosh, of course; clarity had nothing to do with it. Nobody ever had any trouble following Wilfred Pickles or the great Lancashire comedians.

The sound of the news emerged from the experience of the BBC in a strike-torn peace and a subsequent European war. It was in the continuum of broadcasts to empire; strike pronouncements, the abdication and the necessary collusion with government during the war.

News was about passing information and not at all related to our present democratic service of adversary stance journalism.

The news was official and that meant sounding official - like the governing classes. The blight of the RP sound, however, maintained a hold for almost 50 years after Orwell's remark.

While news values were maturing and changing, the voice of the various services stayed resolutely RP for much longer. Newsreaders for many years were more likely to be trained actors rather than journalists.

Susan Rae, a young Scot with an accent to match, began as an announcer on Radio 4 in the 1980s. Her competent work drew a scathing letter from a listener in St John's Wood who commented that it was absurd to have Susan Rae presenting Radio 4, an English network, because, after all, "the Scots had the World Service".

The perceived need for RP also created the cartoon sound of the original BBC Scottish Home Service. There were many beautiful voices but no accents that related to the folk in the local chip shops. Even when Radio Clyde opened the airways to voices from the real Scotland in 1973, American accents seemed to be predominant in the adverts and among some disc jockeys.

It seemed Scotland still lacked cool. Its own voices and sounds were thought to be unconvincing at the commercial edge where people had to sell products and hold listeners to survive. A Scots voice, honoured in the professions, lacked authority elsewhere.

We were right to be unconvinced. In the cinema we were still a nation of pantomime characters. There were canny policemen played by Duncan Macrae and Jamieson Clark, canny tugboat captains and canny Western Islanders.

At British and international levels in the cinema, a Scots voice was still a pass to a junior or supporting role. Sir Sean was a squaddie in 1962's The Longest Day while Gordon Jackson and Angus Lennie were stalwart prisoners in The Great Escape.

In the early 1960s, the voices of authority in Scotland were still public school, couched in RP and often with English accents. Glasgow itself, the home of robust counter-cultures, had returned a majority of Tory MPs in 1959 and old folk voted that way because the "laird syndrome" persisted. The leaders rarely spoke like the people they governed and it was no disadvantage. That gap was to be closed rather quickly.

What made the difference? Well, the same thing that released the rest of the accents of Britain: the new wealth of the 1960s. Harold Wilson tried to harness the new voice for his Backing Britain economic strategy.

If it helped the economy, it was worth an MBE and the accent was irrelevant. That was an American instinct and philosophy and it was an important part of the re-thinking the British were being forced to do.

While The Beatles, on their first trip to the USA, were explaining to American reporters why their speech did not sound like the English accents the American public were used to - Orwell did get it right - Wilson was changing his accent from the clipped Oxford of his 1948 Board of Trade days to the brown sauce demotic style that meshed with the working class entrepreneurs and artists of 1964.

Wilson's win was the narrowest possible but there was indeed decisive change in the focus of the media to accommodate the new aristocracy: the celebrities of pop. In The Spy Who Shagged Me, Mike Myers neatly parodies the synthetic Swinging London argot that replaced RP as the sound Americans recognised as British. For the first time money had very different accents and those voices dominated the media.

It took a generation, of course, for changes to root and in that time Scottish voices too became bankable, as they say in the movies. John Gordon Sinclair's greatest triumph has not been in films but in television reading voice-overs to sell products.

What is most encouraging about the new voices is that they are now winning roles as romantic leads, adventure heroes and comic villains for international audiences.

Their Scottishness, at last, is not an issue. You might also want to note that Chancellor Brown was once a broadcaster. The media have been a positive influence in building modern Scots confidence.

Copyright 2001
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