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The Best…accent on TV

Adrian Chiles
  • Posted at 3:44pm
  • 26 September 2007
  • by DavidWhitehouse-RT
  • 8 comments

Rise, people of Birmingham, rise. This mockery of your accent must end and it must end now. For too long has it been the subject of needless and unfair derision.

Yes, it's different. And yes, some think it's strange. But it remains the most interesting and unique of all the colloquial tongues. It's better for telling jokes than Scouse and it's more menacing when miffed than Mancunian. And that's why its prime television exponent right now, the unassuming, self-effacing Adrian Chiles, is the leader of this uprising.

Chiles is the classic everyman. From football on Match of the Day 2 to pop culture on The Apprentice: You're Fired!, via the complex inanities of business on Working Lunch, he is both the authority and the man on the street. All right, he might look like a pug dog that's just discovered its wages haven't gone in, but few before him have given the Brummie accent such a genuine warm-hearted charm, though many have tried.

Bill Oddie is too urgent and squeaky to afford the Brummie accent the time it deserves, Ozzy Osbourne sounds and very probably is just too mad to make listening to him enjoyable, Lenny Henry is a broken foghorn with a Dudley variation and in the mouth of Jasper Carrot the twang sounds like the whine of a depressed tea bag. Cat Deeley does well, but it's Chiles, with his dry wit and unapologetically impossible-to-understand-if-you're-American diction who has made the Birmingham brogue lovable once more. And about time. See, the humble Brummie has been getting a bit of bad press.

According to Birmingham English: a Sociolinguistic Study (Steve Thorne, 2003), among UK listeners "Birmingham English in previous academic studies and opinion polls consistently fares as the most disfavoured variety of British English, yet with no satisfying account of the dislike". That's because there is no real reason to dislike it. It doesn't offend. It doesn't grate. It doesn't fall into the turgid, pointless debate that is the north/south divide. Yet a goodly proportion of the British people think they HAVE to dislike Brummie, and teach it to their children, along with not talking to strangers and not drinking bleach.

Thorne states that people from other countries, however, find it "lilting and melodious". This is because they've not been subjected to the classic Brummie stereotypes that the British have over the years. Television, pre-Chiles, paints the Brummie as thick and useless, little more than a giant gerbil. Timothy Spall's Barry in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet might as well have had potatoes for brains, and as for Benny in Crossroads, well, a few hundred years ago he'd have been sent to Australia on the next boat.

Chiles, whose Brummie accent could be no stronger even if it were to load up on steroids and pump some serious iron, is proof positive that the Brummie accent can be popular and above cheap abuse, if only we forget that we're not supposed to like it. Instead, we should embrace it and its elongated vowels as we have him and his elongated jowls.

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Comments

  • Posted on 26 October 2008
  • at 7:26am
  • by topcat

for national broadcasting keep out regional accents,especialy the dreadfull southern ( london) type. no more GRAAHS and PAAHTHS near the CAAHSTLE etc etc. i could choke on my breakfast. if there must be a regional accent keep it to the region, and do not let readers and commontaters bring in vowels etc other than the regional one.the BBC should have education classes (not claahses) to educate the broadcasters to speak as written. can we have a revolution and encourage viewers to turn off the programmes using the irritating [rent a screemer mob] totaly orchustrated and encouraged by the floor managers and producers, and as a consequence totaly ruining the shows.

  • Posted on 19 October 2008
  • at 7:17pm
  • by Clem

Beryl Reid immortalised the Brummie accent on radio in the Fifties with her "Marlene" - she made it both entertaining, amusing, but also acceptable and pleasant in a funny kind of way. Chiles comes nowhere near.

  • Posted on 22 August 2008
  • at 8:37pm
  • by Mal

Never mind about his accent,it's what he say's that is soooo anoying. Childish yob like comments about sweat on peoples arm pits. Every thing is about HIM,seems unable to work as part of a team and sometimes let them lead.Sooner he does go off to ITV the better I say, our Kid!

  • Posted on 02 January 2008
  • at 5:38pm
  • by Dr Featherweight
As a Londoner with a classic RP acent (the result of elocution lessons as a child!), married to a Scot with the so-called 'purist' accent in the UK, I moved to the Midlands with all the stereotype assumptions about Brummies and their accents - and indeed, the Midlands in general - only to fall in love with the area and its voices. It's dry, droll, not aggressive like Scouse, Mancunian or Glasgow (or indeed the Sarf East), and indescribably warm. And think of this - what accent do you think Shakespeare was more likely to use - Received Pronunciation or a warm Warwickshire drawl? 'Rowmeo, Rowmeo, wurfore ort thou Rowmeo? A rowse boy any uther noime would smell as sweet...'
  • Posted on 16 October 2007
  • at 8:04pm
  • by Perspicador
Since I am not going to subscribe to regional or ethno-centrism, I would like to suggest that the most pleasing voice on the air is that of Rachel Allen on the Saturday morning Favourite Food programme. The most mundane things can sound poetic when they are spoken beautifully. Also, bearing in mind before sweeping away 'Northern' accents, the purest vowel sounds, and therefore clearest speech are progressively to be found the further North you go. Plummy BBC accents simply do not have what it takes anymore.
  • Posted on 16 October 2007
  • at 6:38am
  • by erimus

Chile's co-presenter has the worst accent, Northern Irish, terrible. I do not like ANY 'regional accent' on TV/radio...the good old 'BBC accent' was OK by me, anyone can understand it, anywhere in the Country.There are too many Scottish accents, especially among weather presenters on the whole...

  • Posted on 09 October 2007
  • at 2:10pm
  • by lawsw6

Surely this, should open the debate as to whether we should have any regional accents on TV and Radio at all. Personally I find a regional accent on a news programme gets in the way of the news. It doesn't really matter if it is the whiney intonations of the scouse accent or the swagger of a Manchester one, they just grate... RP was preferred for many years, and I really can't see it shouldn't be today. I have no problem with accents in drama or sport etc... but not for news...

  • Posted on 04 October 2007
  • at 12:58pm
  • by MazY

Have we been watching and listening to a different Adrian Chiles, I wonder? His accent is as awkward and as irritating as any other Birmingham accent. And what is with the "That's because there is no real reason to dislike it."? Nobody asked me.

It's slow in delivery, leaving impatient people like me twiddling our thumbs, waiting for each elongated word to slowly dribble from the lips of the speaker.

I cannot sit listening to Chiles. It's the aural equivalent to watching paint dry. No matter how excited he may or may not be, everything he says is delivered with the same dull and flat pitch, and with the same (excruciatingly slow) tempo.

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