Presenting Pick of the Week on Radio Four the other day, I was determined to feature (and did) BBC Radio One’s Annie Nightingale, and Radio Two’s Janice Long — both excellent presenters who take us through the watches of the night; but my producer and I didn’t find it easy to identify any short clips that triumphantly demonstrated their brilliance. The skill of a presenter/disc jockey (or what use to be called a compère) rarely resides in showpiece tours-de-force, but in the whole atmosphere in which by chit-chat, humour, wit and sympathy they contrive to cocoon their hours on air, so that we feel we know them, and are sharing our morning cup of tea with them.
Which brings me to Ken Bruce. I love that most mainstream, middle-brow, middle-of-the-road (and popular) of all our national radio stations, BBC Radio Two, and turn frequently to the station whenever Radio Four gets too clever for me and I simply crave a little of what the over-thirties would call popular music, plus light commentary, regular short news bulletins, funny snippets from the newspapers, and good-natured quizzes and phone-ins. From 9.30 to noon, Ken Bruce presents Radio Two’s mid-morning programme. He follows Wake Up to Wogan, which follows the inimitable Sarah Kennedy, who wakes me up with her adorable wittering about absolutely nothing.
Kennedy and Wogan have been around for yonks; Ken Bruce is rather more recent. His success (unquestioned, I think) in breaking in to the world of light broadcasting transgresses what might be thought a cardinal rule in the casting of broadcasters and of entertainers generally: that idiosyncratic genius is a one-off thing, and trying to replicate a successful act seldom works.
The genius in question is Terry Wogan: simply the greatest light broadcaster who has ever lived. Millions of words have been written on the genius of Wogan, and I shall not add to them. There can never quite be another. But many years ago, when Radio Two chiefs were looking for a presenter to occupy the remaining hours of the weekday morning, they do seem to have been looking for another. What, they must have asked, are the essentials of Woganism? Middle-aged, middle-class white man; unthreatening; self-deprecating; good humour; gentle wit; musing style; sympathetic but teasing manner; and — and this is important — a non-southern-English accent.
Wogan’s is Irish. Bruce’s is Scottish. Both accents are as gentle as they are distinct. Both men have voices of similar timbre. In fact it is possible to switch on Bruce, hear a little Celtic banter, and think for a moment that it is Wogan. And I’ll bet there were people who, when Bruce took the presenter’s chair, said, ‘Ah — great mistake. You can’t copy Wogan. Bruce will just be second-best. We should have had a contrast.’
Well, contrasts do often work. As a presenter, record-spinner and current-affairs interviewer, Sir Jimmy Young was irreplaceable, and the BBC did not try to replace him. Jeremy Vine, who has taken over Sir Jimmy’s 12–2 slot (after Ken Bruce’s) is quicker, edgier, cooler, much younger — and (in most people’s view, including mine) a big success.
And so is Ken Bruce, but for almost the opposite reason. Bruce presents no contrast at all with Wogan, just a gentle clickety-click at 9.30 a.m. as the points change and we go over from one kind of Celt to another. Bruce is perhaps milder than Wogan — who hints at a subversiveness beneath the surface — but could otherwise be called another example of the same kind of thing. Yet it works. Ken Bruce is so good at it: his banter with quiz contestants, fellow-broadcasters, travel and weather presenters such as Lynne Bowles is such fun that there now almost seems to be a broadcasting rule that from 7.30 a.m. to noon, a warm, funny, mellow Celtic mist envelopes the airwaves, and surely always must.
These three, Kennedy, Wogan and Bruce, illustrate well a point we might make about class, gender and radio in Britain. Sublim-inally, most British listeners react badly to upper-class male voices unless they are royal, like Prince Charles, eccentric, like Brian Sewell, or of a certain vintage, like the BBC’s incomparable Rome correspondent (since 1971!) David Willey (what fun it was to hear his clipped tones, better-tuned to quick canters through the papabili when a Pope dies, describing the Gay Pride festival in Rome recently).
But if you’re a thirty-, forty- or fifty-something male broadcaster, then an upper-class accent is a real liability unless you present yourself as either a serious expert or a pantomime joke.
This does not apply to women. Sarah Kennedy’s accent is distinctly upper-middle-class, so was Angela Rippon’s as a newscaster, so is Anna Ford’s, and so is Charlotte Green’s. I do not believe that men with accents as faintly grand as some of these would have been taken to the nation’s heart as they were. British men everywhere — from business to politics to the media — are dumbing down and Estuarising their accents these days, in order to fit in. Women far less so. In film and drama, grand-sounding ladies are adored, where their masculine equivalents would probably have to be cast as villains like Mr Burns in The Simpsons.
What’s the reason for our tolerance of la-di-da voices when they’re female, but not when they’re male? My guess is that it’s a man-thing. Men bridle at upper-class tones in other men: we feel unconsciously threatened or put down by them. They make us feel chippy. But we rather like the cut-glass tones of upper-class women — not because we don’t find them slightly bossy, but because we don’t mind the thought of being bossed around by a lady. I’m afraid there may be something sexual in it. It may even explain the quivering subservience to which one flash of Margaret Thatcher’s blue eyes used to reduce a certain kind of male Tory MP. The grand tones of Ian Gilmour certainly never had that effect on his colleagues.
I have little doubt that there exist men who once liked to imagine Angela Rippon in leather with stiletto heels and a whip. But it wouldn’t work with Jeremy Vine, whose accent has very subtly Estuarised over the years — while his predecessor on Radio Two, Jimmy Young, always had a middle-to-lower-middle-class delivery. Only James Landale on BBC News 24 gets away with a slightly Etonian voice — and gets away with it, I suspect, because he’s so good at his job.
Which brings me back to Ken and Terry. You see their secret, don’t you? We English, the vast majority of their radio audience, are unable to place their accents in class terms. There are, of course, upper and lower class accents in Ireland and Scotland, but the English do not know how to read them and distinguish. With the possible exception of a thick Glaswegian accent or deep Irish brogue, Scots and Irish accents are classless to English ears. This enables us men to relax and stop feeling threatened. The same is true of the male American, Canadian and Australian voices we warm to on the BBC.
The conclusion is clear. If you want to get on in British broadcasting, son, choose Dublin or Edinburgh for your university education, and try to pick up the accent. Girls, however, are still well-placed at Rodean.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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