Stone unturned

Drummers, for reasons I’ve never fully fathomed, have historically borne the brunt of rock humour. In Spinal Tap’s back story, they worked their way through 18 tub thumpers, including John “Stumpy” Pepys, who died in a bizarre gardening accident, Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, who choked on vomit “of unknown origin”,  Peter “James” Bond and Mick Shrimpton, who both expired in bizarre on-stage explosions, and Chris “Poppa” Cadeau, who was eaten by his own pet python, Cleopatra. 

Rock drummers are otherwise portrayed as the madcap members of the band, epitomised by Keith Moon “The Loon” and the Muppet he inspired, Animal, and invariably hidden behind a wall of tom-toms and a sea of cymbals of every diameter. Traditionally they are indulged by their bandmates by being provided with time in a live set in which to flail at their skins alone while everyone else disappears to do whatever rock musicians disappear off stage to take care of.

Charlie Watts wasn’t anything like that. He was, by any rock drummer's standards, a modest timekeeper. Resplendent off-stage in Savile Row threads, in contrast to Keith Richards’ ageing pirate look and Mick Jagger’s skinny-jeaned effete, Watts sat behind a simple kit - a single tom-tom, snare, hi-hat, bass and just enough cymbals to punctuate the rhythm only when necessary. Even his drumming style appeared conservative, by comparison to the more expressive likes of Moon, Bonham or Collins. Herein, though, lies the seat of what has allowed the Stones to endure for almost 60 years. Amid the partying, womanising, divorces, dysfunction of every kind (not to mention the Glimmer Twins’ occasional schisms), Watts provided more than just the backbeat. He was the quiet rock of stability, musically, of course, but I suspect also in the more colourful aspects of the outfit that can still justifiably call themselves the “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”.

He was also so much more than - so the somewhat apocryphal tale recounted in Richards’s biography, Life recounts - just “Jagger’s drummer”, too. Part of Watts’ magic was what he brought to the Stones’ music, and part was what he brought to the Stones’ personality. Musically, he was at heart a jazz drummer, but had been drawn into London’s R’n’B scene in the early 1960s, which had its epicentre in the west and south-west London suburbs of Ealing and Richmond. Watts had also worked with the Godfather of British Blues, Alexis Korner. A meeting with Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones in one of those R’n’B clubs led him to joining the fledgling Rolling Stones in 1963, an association that only ended 58 years later with his death, announced earlier this week. 

Amazingly, Watts became the first Stone to pass away in old age – at 80 – (with the previous departure only being Jones at the age of 27 through his own misadventure). No one knows quite what has kept Richards going, given the onslaught his constitution has been put under by years of chemical abuse, although the more popular theory is that he has consumed such a sustained cocktail of substances that they have somehow metabolised inside the human laboratory that he surely has become. Watts, by stark contrast – even to the macrobiotic, still-teenage waste-sized Jagger – has always projected a more sober image. Even when he surprisingly succumbed to heroin addiction, it was a brief flirtation rather than a fully-blown descent, and it was ended by Richards’ intervention. Even that dabbling with the darker side of the rock’n’roll lifestyle was conducted with modest privacy. It was, however, a surprising revelation from a musician who, by comparison to the other surviving Stones, had led a decidedly normal life. Watts had been married to the same woman, Shirley, since 1964, and away from the band lived privately on a Devon farm, raising horses, children and grandchildren. Little is known beyond that, as he had always shied away from the attention that the others courted, happy to let his drumming do the talking.

The statement, issued after his death by publicist Bernard Doherty, included the understated phrase “one of the greatest drummers of his generation.” That is the respectful custom on these occasions, but in Watts’ case, thoroughly justified. He applied his jazz chops to the Stones’ blues-infused rock with an intricacy that at times belied the more straightforward rhythmic form of the band in front of him. This stems from his early exposure to Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker records as a teenager before his parents bought him his first drum kit in 1955. This led to regular gigs at the age of 16 in London’s jazz clubs before joining Korner’s Blues Incorporated. In turn, that brought about the fateful encounter with his future Rolling Stones bandmates, though their initial approach to join them was rebuffed as Watts wanted to concentrate on his stable day job at an advertising agency. In fact, even after making his first appearances with the band, he continued to work in a Soho office, up until the point that Decca Records’ Dick Rowe signed the Stones in May 1963 after he’d seen them at the Crawdaddy Club, the legendary crucible of British blues hosted by the old Station Hotel in Richmond-upon-Thames.

Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, described Watts as “probably the most underrated of all the rock’n’roll drummers”, adding that his natural feel for the music was “just exactly right” and that “no masterclasses or tutorial books, no solos or fancy gymnastics” could ever embellish it. You could say, then, that a drummer knows a drummer. Mick Jagger may have been the Stones’ focal point for most of their 58 years as a performing unit, and Keith Richards the band’s soul, (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten the contributions Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and latterly Ronnie Wood have made to that elixir with their so-called guitar “weaving”), but Watts contributed probably more than most people will appreciate. 

So the story goes, Satisfaction was more of a traditional blues drawl before Watts upped its tempo, his crisp snare beat giving the band’s signature song a danceability that ultimately propelled it - which Watts had strongly advocated should be a single against Jagger and Richards’ initial reservation - instantly to No.1 in the UK charts, but more significantly, to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, where it remained for four weeks, cementing the foundations of the band’s global dominance for the next five decades. Think, too, of Paint It Black, which opens with an Indian-influenced guitar riff before Watts snapping snare, again, drives the verse. You could argue that this is simply what a drummer is in a rock band for, but the more you analyse Stones songs like these - as well as later hits like Start Me Up or Love Is Strong - and you realise how Watts wasn’t just the Rolling Stones’ drummer but a core component of what made the greatest rock and roll band in the world exactly that and pretty much unassailable in that status.

Watts, of course, would be typically self-effacing about his role. He stoically accepted that the Stones’ colour was provided by the more flamboyant band members, and that just suited him fine. He once famously described being in the band as “five years playing, twenty years hanging around”, but despite the truncation of their current No Filter tour (which began in September 2017 in Hamburg) due to the pandemic, they have remained more active than most other surviving acts of a similar vintage. 

The Rolling Stones will continue to roll on. Despite the others’ own advancing ages – Jagger turned 78 last month, Richards will do the same in December, and ‘junior’ Ronnie Wood is 74 – they remain committed to touring and even recording. It remains to be seen how Watts’ death will impact their appetite to continue, though given that they also hold the accolade for remaining one of popular music’s most lucrative operations, the health of the others not withstanding, it would be reasonable to expect that retirement is not in the plan. Bruce Springsteen endured the death of his wingman Clarence Clemons, but Led Zeppelin called an immediate halt after John Bonham’s untimely demise. The Who, it could be argued, were never the same after Keith Moon died before he got old.

It would be gloriously romantic to view the Rolling Stones continued longevity as the result of being inspired by their itinerant blues heroes who played until they dropped, but beyond mercenary need, there is a sense that they will carry on until forces of nature stop them. They will, however, not be the same without their quiet drummer, who kept time but also, passively, kept the order, too.

The worst thing Mrs. Beggs has ever heard

Trifecta - Adam Holtzman, Nick Beggs, Craig Blundell
Picture: Hajo Müller

Nick Beggs, it could be said, takes a somewhat alternative approach to the art of record promotion. “My wife says it’s the worst thing she’s ever heard,” he says of his better half’s view of his new album project, adding: “I want that printed on the front of the record: ‘Ann Beggs - worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Great! Listen to the reaction. Own it!”

Beggs is in ebullient mood talking about Fragments, the debut recording from Trifecta, the trio formed by Beggs, keyboard player Adam Holtzman and drummer Craig Blundell while they were on touring duties with Steven Wilson. The basic pitch - that I am, frankly, wary to describe on the basis of Mrs. B’s verdict - is that they are something of an experimental jazz collaboration born out of extended jams the three musicians noodled away at during soundchecks with Wilson, squirrelling the results away on their phones for future use. Much of the material grew out of Blundell playing something in an odd time signature which intrigued Holtzman enough to take it away to play with at home, which Beggs would find himself doing as well. 

“We’d go into some wormholes,” Beggs says. “We’d split the atom, you know? We were rolling around, playing with different times and weirdness. And it’s not going to be for everyone.” Which is where his wife’s blunt view comes into play. “She’s a Northerner," he explains. “What can I tell you?”. 

The Wilson soundchecks became Trifecta’s sandpit. “Steven doesn’t like wasting time in them - two, three songs at the most before he’s off to preserve his voice. Adam, Craig and I would then hang back and start making a racket. It pissed everyone off because the road crew wanted to turn everything off and go and have their dinner, but we’d be having our ‘jazz club’. I was recording it on my mobile, these little vignettes, and we all agreed that there was something going on.” That didn’t mean that everyone in the touring party thought that what the three were creating was to everyone’s taste, but that didn’t dissuade them from driving forward. “It takes quite a lot of willpower to do that,” Beggs stresses. “When everyone’s saying, ‘Fuck off! That sounds shit!’ Everyone’s an A&R man!”.

‘Writing on the road’ has long been a rock and roll tradition, and thus Fragments began to form while the tour for Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone progressed. “We just thought, ‘Now, hang on a minute. There’s something here’,” says Beggs. “I’d listen back to these things and send them little bits and say, ‘Listen to this. Listen to what’s happening at one-minute-twenty-three-seconds’. And I’d get back ‘Wow! That’s great - that’s an idea there. Let’s extrapolate it.’ Which is what we did. We started file sharing on the road, just saving the ideas, logging them in the dictaphone of life. When we all got home we all started to expand on these ideas.” This was where the individual creativity kicked in. 

Trifecta’s outline premise might stray dangerously close to Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey, but by Beggs’ own admission it is simply the result of three like-minded good friends having fun and coming up with 15 pieces of intriguing, funky yet still highly accessible “fission” music. “It’s like fusion, only less efficient and more dangerous,” he jokes, referring to the genre that emerged in the late 1960s when the likes of Miles Davis (with whom Holtzman worked), his guitarist John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra appeared to imbibe Jimi Hendrix’s freeform blues and, along with characters like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, started to experiment with jazz as only a nominal root. “If you want a buzz statement,” Beggs says of Trifecta with slight reluctance, “it’s a cross between Weather Report and King Crimson. That’s the way I’d see it…but it is a little bit crass to say that because there’s a lot more to it. There are a lot of touch points, a lot of musical influences.” 

Holtzman, Beggs and Blundell
with Steven Wilson and Dave Kilminster

Beggs’ journey to this point starts, more or less, as a founder-member of Kajagoogoo and key contributor to their uber-hit Too Shy’s radio-monstering rhythms, before embarking on a prolific - some might even say restless - career playing bass and Chapman Stick (more of which later) with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, Howard Jones, King Crimson and his good friend Wilson, as well as in his own side projects, like Ellis, Beggs & Howard and The Mute Gods. 

He is also a gifted artist, a talent given legs in the last year via another sideline during lockdown of accepting commissions. It has provided a particular perspective on the approach Trifecta has taken. “You can’t just always do the same thing,” he says. “You can’t paint the same picture over and over. You’ve got to make the landscape interesting for the listener. I do, anyway, because I always look at everything like a visual. We were taking all these different ideas and painting different pictures with them.

Fragments is predominantly instrumental but it is far from a series of extended jams, spread over the album’s 45-minute playing time - “just three mates having a laugh”, as Blundell recently described to Prog magazine. “There’s a lot of influences,” Beggs tells me. “One track, Have You Seen What The Neighbours Are Doing? is a response to a track by Ween [featuring drummer Marco Minneman, Beggs’ Mute Gods cohort) called Too Many People In The Neighbourhood. I just loved that track and the idea of it.  It was weird and quizzical and brilliantly executed with a great production aspect to it, so I thought ‘I’m going to write a track that’s a direct response to that’. And it’s really fucking weird.”

Fragments’ sole track with a vocal on it is Pavlov’s Dog Killed Schrodinger’s Cat, originally conceived by Beggs for The Mute Gods. “Adam took it somewhere completely different,” he says. “When I wrote it, it was up-tempo. Adam completely changed the arrangement. When I first played it to him, he said ‘Just give me a little while with it’ and within a few days he’d come up with this really mellow Fender-Rhodes version that just suited the song perfectly. That’s why you work with great musicians, isn’t it? Because they know what to do.” 

As the only immediately commercial track on the album, Pavlov’s Dog… intentionally serves as a seduction to the exotic mix thereafter. “I was talking to [Adam and Craig] about how we should format the record, whether we wanted songs or instrumentals,” reveals Beggs. “We all agreed that we should have one song with lyrics to act as a shoehorn for the fan base or indeed anyone who was interested in it. If it could seduce them into a false sense of security by hearing this semi-pop song, then they’d might want to hear the rest of the record, which is not really anything like it,” he adds, emphasising the contrarian approach the trio have taken.

Picture: Richard Purvis

Another track, The Enigma Of Mr. Fripp, draws inspiration from the King Crimson co-founder’s distinctive guitar sound, which Beggs appropriates on the Chapman Stick, a somewhat esoteric 10-stringed instrument of which he is one of the few exponents (Crimson and Peter Gabriel alumnus Tony Levin being one of the others). The Stick effectively allows bass and harmonic scales to be covered at once, much like all 88 keys on a piano. 

“It’s as symphonic as a piano,” says Beggs. “When I first saw Tony Levin playing it, I didn’t know what the hell was going on either.  I had to listen to the records to sort of distil it. That’s the great thing about the Chapman Stick: it gives any musician - not just bass players - range, because it’s not a bass instrument. It gives any musician the opportunity to expand their understanding and their skillset and do something in an unusual way. There’s loads of really amazing bass players out there,  but not many people using the Stick, though.”

It’s one of the many things that makes the likeable Beggs stand out as unique and at ease in his own skin as any I’ve encountered in the music industry. That said, the experience of the last 18 months rankles, with cancelled tours including the latest with Wilson, which would have seen him playing a sellout show at the O2 Arena, amongst major venues. “All my commitments are up in the air,” he says. “I’ve had two tours cancelled. I have no idea what’s going to happen. None of us do. And, you know, the music industry was coughing up blood before [Covid]. So what it’s actually going to mean for live music and the feasibility of touring, I have no idea. You know, it’s very difficult to take a band out on the road.”

In particular, Beggs doesn’t seem Trifecta touring: “Adam lives in New York and visas are expensive.  Going to Europe is going to be a no-no until the government decides to get its finger out of its arse and do something about it. I don’t really see how and when and if we’d be able to take Trifecta on the road. I’d love to. I really like the idea of doing some kind of filmed performance. I like that idea. But, again, how realistic that is, I have no idea at the minute. We will do another Trifecta album, though, because it was too easy and too much fun. Maybe another two, I have no idea. I like to keep an open mind.” As indeed should the listener. And, possibly, Ann Beggs, though I’m going to shy away from confronting her on it.

Masked anxiety

So there we had it: our first flights in over a year: to Edinburgh and back for a four-day break. The only ‘foreign’ holiday this year, as everywhere else was either booked or that plonker Grant Shapps has placed it on the red list, or the amber list, or the amber-plus list, or the oh-what's-the-point list. Or Iceland. And, yes, it wasn't lost on us that the train from London to Scotland would have been more environmentally friendly, but with exorbitant ticket prices for a family of four, plus a five-hour journey each way, we wanted to both maximise our budget and what little holiday we were actually able to get this time.

Edinburgh was, thanks for asking, very pleasant. So pleasant we got engaged there. Yes, I am now a fiancé. The things you do on holiday, eh? What was noticeable in the charming Scottish capital was, firstly, how relaxed it felt for a busy administrative city, and secondly, how well drilled everyone appeared to be under Ms. Sturgeon's jurisdiction. Call the Scots Nats upstarts if you will, but Covid-discipline was impeccably observed wherever you went, even by the vast majority of tourists. There really was precious little obvious civil disobedience when observing the still-enforced coronavirus etiquettes, both social distancing and mask wearing in shops, restaurants, on buses, and inside attractions. No one, from what I could tell, was abstaining on grounds of belligerence or twattery, and that made for a pleasantly anxiety-free time. Only the occasional tourist - who clearly hadn't received the memo - sauntered around indoor venues with their fizzogs fully on display.

You see, I’m a self-confessed zealot when it comes to observing the COVID rules. Despite having had two jabs and indeed a mild dose of the virus itself back in November, I’m diabetic and over 50, and bloody paranoid about catching this thing again (a possibility - even the double-jabbed health secretary Sajid Javid got it). 

I’ll admit that having a  compromised immune system is partly the result of my own misadventure, but I can’t help being 53. Basically it meant that the final leg of our journey back from Edinburgh, from London City Airport to home, was one tightly knotted ball of anxiety, as every carriage we entered on the DLR, the Tube and the SWR train was full of maskless Covidiots, looking back at my petrified eyes, peering over the top of my mask, as if to say “Yeah? What’s your problem?”.

To be somewhat fair, part of the problem is not necessarily ignorance but our dear Prime Minister. Ever since Boris declared 19 July “freedom day”, the wearing of face masks in England has been largely a matter of personal choice. How very doctrinal. This is despite warnings from the scientists - those people who, it would be decent to point out, know a thing or two - that easing rules on masks will reduce public protection. So with “personal choice” the most ambiguous health and safety stipulation you could make (I could jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute or cut off my legs with a chainsaw - it’s all a matter of personal choice), it’s no surprise that anyone with an aversion to wearing masks, due to comfort, personal freedom or because being told to do something is not for them leads to people cramming onto our trains with their faces bare, breathing in and breathing out in crowded compartments with little concern for their own wellbeing and, more bluntly, mine.

This all stems from one of the few consistencies throughout the pandemic in the UK: inconsistency. And indecision. Boris Johnson appears so eager to please freedom-loving party acolytes that something as simple as mask wearing in environments where the virus can be passed with amusing ease can not be countenanced out of common sense, above anything else. It’s why London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has deemed that masks will remain mandatory when traveling on all Transport for London services, including the Underground, buses and trains. Not that he’s been able to enforce the rule, as our journey home the other night amply demonstrated.

“I’ve repeatedly made clear that the simplest and safest option would have been for the Government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport,” Khan has said. “But ministers aren’t willing to do what’s right. I’m not prepared to stand by and put Londoners, and our city’s recovery, at risk.” He has since doubled down on that view, last week calling for mask wearing to be made legally enforceable with criminal prosecutions an ultimate sanction for failure to comply. Khan’s view is partly out of the hope that a bye-law on London’s transport network would partly reduce any further spread of COVID-19, but perhaps as importantly, it would increase the confidence of commuters like me in returning to the capital for work or pleasure, giving a much-needed boost to the economy. Sadiq Khan says that 86% of passengers do observe the mask etiquette, but that means that a sizeable 14% don’t, which is a problem as scientists have said repeatedly that masks only curb the spread of the disease if everyone wears them. I think we’ve lived long enough with the Covid numbers to know what risk that represents to public health. 

However, imposing such rules is still reliant on enforcement. Given the number of trains and buses operating in London, most of which now are driver-only (and in the case of the DLR, driverless), restoring guards as, effectively, enforcers, on the scale required would be problematic. Transport for London has some 400 enforcement officers already, but given the prevalence for some of London’s finer citizens to carry knives, you can understand the reluctance for confrontation. This places extra pressure on depleted police ranks to enforce what is at present little more than a polite request.

Picture: TfL

The challenge for Khan, however, isn’t just safety: TfL faces a budget deficit of as much as £500 million over the current financial year, having been severely impacted by the pandemic. As restrictions ease, Khan desperately needs people back on public transport. That said, there are already signs of private car usage increasing, and second-hand car sales have gone through the roof as people spend saved cash on used vehicles to get around in.

Back in Scotland - where Nicola Sturgeon has appeared to be one step ahead of Johnson throughout the last 18 months - the government intends to continue with the wearing of masks “unless exempt for special circumstances” until at least next year. “The law says you must wear a face covering in most indoor public places including public transport,” official guidance states. “The Scottish government recommends that face coverings should be worn when moving around when it is crowded. This is encouraged for busy outdoor events.”

In England, Boris has customarily faffed on the issue, conceding that “If it’s not mandated it probably won’t do any good” and that he “expected” people to carry on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, which is hardly an imposition. Here, in the midst of all this, is us and especially me, the paranoid. The trouble is that the issue is now at risk of getting bogged sown in politics. One scientist worries that this will mask the actual point about wearing a face covering to begin with: “We know wearing masks, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated environments, has a big impact on the levels of transmission that can take place,” Professor Clifford Stott, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (Spi-B), told LBC last week. “But also I think [that] wearing a mask is also communicating to others about a sense of responsibility, and I think that’s a key issue in mask-wearing now, unfortunately. It’s become almost a little bit politicised whether one wears one or not, which is I think a shame.” Stott is firmly of the belief that masks have had a “big impact” on stopping transmission.

In truth, according to the Office for National Statistics, mask wearing in England hasn’t changed all that much in the last month since the legal requirement to wear them in enclosed spaces was dropped, with figures showing that 95% of people were still covering their face when leaving the house. Our public transport experience, however, suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s an East London thing, as the majority of abstainers were on the DLR west from London City Airport, and then from Canning Town to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. That degree of mask-free fellow passengers has done nothing to restore my confidence in getting out and about again. A shame after so many months cooped up at home (including three confined to the sofa following foot surgery). I’ve been desperate for freedom to return, but I won’t hide my anxiety at what I see as other people’s inconsideration and ability to comply with something as relatively simple as wearing a mask.

Perhaps, then, it’s just for me to deal with, but it does rub with me that my liberty can be curtailed by an inconsiderate few. Perhaps I should move to Scotland, where Sturgeon’s position - admittedly, not universally accepted - has at least been unambiguous. “It is my view that if a government believes measures like [face coverings] matter, and this government does, we should say so,” the Scottish First Minister has stressed. I won’t gloss over the fact that the overall numbers are falling, as vaccinations and so-called ‘herd immunity’ take effect. It’s true, too, that the R rate appears to be dipping, but with the school holidays in force, this may well be the ‘circuit break’ needed. 

Come the autumn, and the possible return of colds and flu as more and more companies open up their offices for the first time since March last year, the whole issue of travelling to work on public transport will come under the political and clinical microscope again. This, I’m sure, will put Boris’s chronic prevarication on the line.

Elocution defeat

Picture: BBC

The things people get steamed up about, eh? I’m sure there are plenty of weightier matters for Lord Digby Jones to get peeved about than Alex Scott’s pronounced London accent, but the BBC Tokyo 2020 presenter and former Arsenal footballer’s elocution has properly riled the portly baron.

“Enough!”, the self-appointed Professor Higgins harrumphed on Twitter. “I can’t stand it anymore! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin”. He then went on to call out Sky News political editor Beth Rigby and Priti Patel (amusingly conflating the two in his tweet by saying that Scott was “hot on the heels of Beth Rigby at Sky the Home Secretary for God’s sake! Can’t someone give these people elocution lessons?”.

Scott hit back, declaring that she was proud of her accent and her roots: “I’m from a working-class family in east London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets & I am PROUD. Proud of the young girl who overcame obstacles, and proud of my accent! It’s me, it’s my journey, my grit.” And she added: “A quick one to any young kids who may not have a certain kind of privilege in life. Never allow judgments on your class, accent, or appearance hold you back. Use your history to write your story. Keep striving, keep shining & don’t change for anyone.”

As if Digby hadn’t dug himself a deep enough hole, the former CBI director general and, briefly, government minister, then doubled-down on his original tweets by posting: “Alex Scott, please don’t play the working class card. You are worthy of much better than that! I admire & often publicly praise the adversity you faced & defeated to achieve all the success you deserve. Not sounding a ‘g’ at the end of a word is wrong; period. It’s not a question of class, it’s not a question of accent, it’s a question of poor elocution. Don’t let it spoil your otherwise excellent performance.” He didn’t just leave it there, either. When confronted by The Times, Jones said that he was “disappointed” with Scott’s reaction, adding that it wasn’t a matter of class. “I come from very modest beginnings in Birmingham. I got a scholarship to a public school; my parents never could have afforded to pay. It’s got nothing to do with it. It is about elocution and the fact it is inaccurate.” He dismissed the public reaction to his comments about Scott’s pronunciation, adding that “At last, someone’s talking about it”. Peak patronising gammon.

While I do grate at some of the political correctness the BBC goes in for, its approach to regional accents is not one of the things I care too much about. We’re a nation of almost 70 million people - why should one “received” accent be the only one that matters? Scott’s regional pronunciation is no different, in principle, to the former BBC political editor John Cole, whose rich Ulster accent was never considered a problem by anyone, as I recall, only getting a light ribbing in Private Eye, which spoofed his commentary with parody stories that always began with “Hondootedly…”. 

Likewise, does Scott’s One Show colleague Alex Jones get grief for her Welsh pronunciation of “moosic? Or what about the plethora of Scottish presenters down the years? Even Gary Lineker and Jeremy Clarkson have regional accents - the footballer’s Leicestershire vowels and Clarkson’s Yorkshire flattening occasionally revealing their origins. The list goes on, and Digby really should get over it.

Stephen Fry had a good point by saying the pompous patronising peer’s view on Scott was “everything linguists and true lovers of language despise”. The problem is that accents aside, Jones’ ridiculous moan has served as another painful salvo in the supposed culture war. Scott receives enough abuse as it is for being black and female, with social media’s anti-woke/anti-BBC hate brigade regularly branding her a box-ticking token (when false rumours circulated last year that she was replacing Sue Barker as presenter of A Question Of Sport, the bullies went into overdrive. When she was actually announced as Dan Walker’s replacement in Football Focus, there was even more misogynistic - and, yes, racist - shit directed her way).

Picture: The Times

Scott has become an unlikely and unfortunate lightning rod in the cultural divide that’s been allowed to fester in Britain in recent years by the political classes. It’s the same war that has Labour Party deputy leader Angela Rayner branded “thick as mince”, simply for having a strong Lancashire accent and having been a single mother at a young age. Somehow it has become ingrained that a regional accent equates to its owner’s intellect, and that only the plummy-voweled have any right to be in positions of authority. In broadcasting it’s even worse, as if anyone on camera or with a microphone should conform to Reithian ideals, of continuity announcers in dinner jackets and ballgowns. It’s true that until not that long ago the BBC appeared to be largely voiced by purveyors of so-called “received English”, but not exclusively: Michael Parkinson, for example, had a prime-time Saturday night chat show, and yet spoke with a Yorkshire burr, as did John Noakes on Blue Peter.

What makes me applaud Alex Scott is that she hasn’t tried to modify her accent, as so many do in public life, such is the apparent stigma of sounding regional (I was always shocked to discover that Kate Adie comes from Northumberland). The sad fact is that people with provincial accents are still perceived as being less intelligent. A recent University of Essex study found that, that anyone speaking with an apparent working-class accent was judged less intelligent, friendly and even trustworthy than middle-class people when reading aloud. The same applied to people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

“The link that people make between accents and competency is something we need to break down,” Dr Amanda Cole, who led the Essex study, told The Times. “An accent reflects where we’re from, our class, our ethnicity, our identity. So to criticise someone’s accent is a veiled criticism of those different social factors.”

So on that learned note, let me end this post with a screenshot of Lord Digby Jones’ Wikipedia entry, as of yesterday (it has since been edited...), which some enterprising scamp had updated to reflect his ridiculous attack on Scott.