Diary – 1 August 2009

As the President of the Associates of Rada and an ex-Rada student, I was asked to make a speech about my days at the academy for the third-year students and some of my friends.Speech-giving is tough, speech-writing even tougher and I envy Mr Obama and his silky way with words. Does he write them himself, I wonder, or does he have a team of experts crafting his elegant soliloquies? Certainly his recent speech in Kenya was masterful and he verbalised what many people thought for years and dared not speak for fear of offending the Gods of Political Correctness: namely, that Africa is to blame for its recent troubles.

My Rada speech was only a teensy bit politically incorrect but nevertheless it seemed to go down quite well. I was struck by the enormous difference in the way the students looked between today and the 1950s. They were all much older than our group. I was 16 when I started at Rada as were David McCallum, Diane Cilento, Susan Stephen and many others. We were fresh out of school, innocent, naive and quite frankly wet behind the ears. We wandered through the streets of Soho in our short and revealing outfits (the girls that is) with never a thought of being mugged or having our space invaded. Great care was taken with hair, make up and grooming: we even had make-up classes at Rada. We were all instructed to speak the preferred Received English of the time — in other words we were taught to speak in a sort of adenoidal glottal-stop squawk, and regional accents were out. Celia Johnson personified this ‘proper’ voice in Brief Encounter. ‘Aim heppy, eow so heppy,’ she squeaked. Good actress, but, oh, that voice. Needless to say Rada’s classes of 2009 all have Glaswegian, Mancunian, Irish or Welsh brogues and are encouraged always to use their natural accents in their work.