55° North
Nil Degrees Northern
There is clearly something wrong with the collective perception of BBC
TV programme makers. An attempt to make yet another cop programme differant,
by setting it on Tyneside, starts off by making the lead character a black
cockney. Then because it wishes to be politically correct it feeds in
large doses of ethnic minorities, so it looks like scenes from East Enders.
In fact I dont know why they just didnt paint out the Queen Vic and paint
in the Tyne Bridge and move the cast over en-mass. But what about Geordies
? This is supposed to be Newcastle On Tyne, we know that, because we keep
seeing fancy shots of the Tyne Bridge, but have you discovered any Geordie
speakers ? Nope, not a one. Lots of sort of ‘somewhere up north’
accents that they teach in the acting schools, and some Geordie’ish
accents, but working class Geordie dialect ? Not a ‘gaan’ or
a ‘yem’ or a ‘hoose’ to be heard. So where’s
the political correctness in relation to geordie folk then ? We can be
excluded from our own city in order to paint a totally unreal picture
, in fact make it like any other southernocentric programme with the Tyne
as a backdrop, and a few dropped northern vowels, that’l do them
. I get heartily sick of this painting out of local and regional differences
in order to fit some imagenary image of us all being the same everywhere
you go. Doubtless thats the way they would like it to be, but nobody who
lives north of Watford Gap believes this to be anything other than a totally
artifical picture. Ha-weh , if Glasgow can have Rab Nesbit and his genuine
Glasgow twang, and East Enders can have genuine cockney, any chance of
a bit Geordie for Tyneside ?