Looking Back: 'Sit thisen darn lad. ah tha all reet?'

The first television presenters spoke with a clipped cut glass accent. It was called ‘Received Pronunciation’. People wanted to hear the Queen’s English even if they didn’t speak the same way.

The early presenters were McDonald Hobley, Mary Malcolm and Sylvia Peters who was the same age as The Queen, chosen to introduce the Coronation broadcasts, and even give Her Majesty tuition on public speaking.

As time went on, presenters with accents from all round the British Isles or further afield became commonplace.

It does seem that the way we speak can give us either a head start in life or seriously affect our chances of success.

It can affect job prospects and possibly unkindly, give a bad impression of us.

Eight out of 10 employers admit to making discriminatory decisions based on regional accents.

Accents are lovely. You can tell where a person is from from their accent, but that is different from speaking incorrectly. Some are more popular than others.

My favourite has to be the Liverpool accent but then there will be people who hate it, and some accents almost need subtitles to understand.

Many people, certainly in our region, say ‘wi’ instead of ‘with’ ‘gi it to him’ instead of ‘give’ and of course ‘g’eor’ Surely bad speech, nothing more or less!

There seems to be a move at the moment promoting bad or lazy speech in the guise of calling it ‘regional’

Would you expect to be greeted by your doctor saying to you – ‘Sit thisen darn lad, ahtha all reyt?’

And yet we are bombarded by advertising for ‘Rey’t gud’ or ‘Rey’t clean’ or ‘Get thi winders weshed!’

Advertising on the side of trams told us that ‘There was nowt easier than t’tram’ for just ‘nippin ahht!’

On litter bins we see ‘Tek it om!’ or ‘Gerrit pur in!’

I’m afraid I see it as setting a dangerous precedent when we should be speaking correct English, no matter in what accent it is spoken, and setting an example to the younger generation.