Why are so many BBC broadcasters going native?

Of the many characters created by the peerless Victoria Wood, one creation in particular lingers in the mind: namely the immaculately polished, but unashamedly snobbish television continuity announcer, who, with an assassin’s smile, treated her audience with utter contempt. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them,’ was one of her more cutting remarks.

Coming from Manchester, Wood was clearly making mischief with counterintuitive comedy. She was taking aim at how crisp, received pronunciation can make anything sound plausible. Had she not died in 2016, at the age of just 62, we can only wonder what a comedy genius like Wood would have made of the way the pendulum has since swung for news presenters and broadcast journalists in terms of enunciation, articulation and inflection. This is not only in their worship of the on-trend glottal stop (Hello, Amol Rajan), but the fashion for literally going native when it comes to pronouncing foreign names and places.