Tom Leonard - '6 O'Clock News'

Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow in 1944.   He is proudly Scottish, proudly working-class, and enthusiastically left-wing in his politics.

'Received pronunciation' is what is sometimes called 'BBC English'.  

It is what we would call: 'talking proper'.  

How the news is read was invented, actually, during the Second World War, when the BBC wanted to establish the BBC News as THE source of truth.   The Nazis had their own propaganda newsreader - an Anglo-Irishman with a voice so posh that people nicknamed him 'Lord Haw-Haw'.  

The BBC made their newsreaders wear suits, even though they couldn't be seen by their listeners!   They had to speak in standard English with a calm, educated accent.   They always started by giving their name.   In this way, they became people who were recognised and trusted to tell the truth.   English people never believed a word Lord Haw-Haw told them, but people throughout occupied Europe tuned into the BBC to find out what was really happening in the war - they trusted the BBC truth more than their own government-produced information.

Tom Leonard HATED this posh, southern, English way of speaking.   He realised that it was part of the hated class-system, which kept people who couldn't 'talk proper' 'in their place'.   People with ordinary accents rarely end up as the bosses, or the officers in the army.   People with posh accents rarely ended up doing ordinary jobs, or fighting on the front line.   This is what he wrote about it in 1973:

beauty in language is recognised as the property of a particular class ... naturally truth is assumed to be the property of that class also.   So a person who doesn't "speak right" is therefore categorised as an ignoramus; it's not simply that he doesn't know how to speak right, but that this "inability" shows that he has no claim to knowledge of truth.   That supposed insult "the language of the gutter" puts forward a revealing metaphor for society.   The working-class rubbish, with all its bad pronunciation and dreadful swear words, is only really fit for draining away out of sight [or as] "comic relief" to offset the noble emotions up top.