BBC Oneness - idents and presentation

I'm from Liverpool...

The quite large number of new and non-BBC sounding voices all at once on BBC One is quite a shock to the system when you consider how the same few traditional voices have been the mainstay of the channel for years. It's like when the ITV regional announcers were axed and suddenly all these new ones appeared.

They seem to be going down the same road as ITV where it seems being matey and in step with the audience at home is more of a key quality than actually being a good unflappable announcer.

I'd rather have the France 2 style of continuity where they use trailers and short idents instead of the pally delivery.

STV has gone the other way and brought back a long standing old CA from the past and he cut above some of them .

Agreed! Jim Symon is one of the best. Now, all we need is more Maggie Lavender on STV!

To me, Peter Offer is the voice of BBC One... he must have been doing it well over twenty years, I seem to recall he left a few years back but he does still pop up fairly often on BBC One. I prefer his style of authoritative delivery to any of this matey stuff.

I suppose Michaela Saunders is perhaps the equivalent "bbc-ness" female announcer.. haven't heard her on tv for years though.

I dunno, the let some bloke with a Manchester accent do BBC One continuity 20 years ago





I jest of course, but if one of the main newsreaders can have a Welsh accent, and the aforementioned Manc bloke can do lots of the Sport coverage, there is no reason why continuity has to be done in RP.

His accent is hardly like the Gallagher brothers though is it.

To be fair you don't often get proper broad regional accents even in regional TV.

I'm just slightly suspicious that we've suddenly got a few new announcers and they are all far from RP making it look like some W1A style diversity of voices project rather than just recruiting to fill a vacancy.

My personal objection to the announcer featured in the Points of View piece has nothing to do with his accent - it's the poor pronunciation. When Mark Chapman popped up as an announcer in the 90s, yes, his style and accent was certainly different to what we were used to - but pronunciation was perfectly decent. There's nothing snobbish about expecting our main broadcaster to hire announcers/voiceover artists who have good pronunciation - I'd say it's a pretty fundamental prerequisite. The fact that a lot of members of the public may use similar pronunciation to the announcer who triggered this discussion does not make him an appropriate candidate for such a job. His pronunciation is just plain wrong.

According to what, though?

Seriously? Why don't you start by looking at Oxford English Dictionary pronunciation. I'm pretty sure, for example, that "3" isn't pronounced "free".

But a different pronunciation of the consonants is part of a regional accent

You can't ask for a regional accent and then expect just different vowels and not different consonants