RADIO / English as she is spoke: Speaking in tongues - Robert Hanks reviews the airwaves

Is having English as your mother tongue a blessing or a curse? Before hearing the question wrangled over on The Great Language Debate (Radio 4, Thursday), the answer seemed to me that it was a blessing - it gives you access to Shakespeare and to airport announcements the world over. Afterwards the argument seemed more finely balanced. If your mother tongue were, say, Greek, then you would never have to listen to John Mortimer in full flow; and even if you did, it's unlikely you would appreciate the full awfulness of the experience.

Mortimer's basic thesis was sound: if you have to have a language, make it one that comes with a lot of literature and plenty of fellow speakers attached; and English fits the bill pretty neatly. But he abandoned reason in favour of point-scoring, interruption, hectoring and simply ignoring the other participants.

With Peter Hobday sounding embarrassed in the chair and Professor Ted Wragg writhing impotently on the other side of the case, the whole exercise seemed futile. Nobody advanced the argument beyond their opening positions; nobody seemed to notice the irony of holding the debate in the Charles de Gaulle Lycee in London, an institution named after a man who taught the English the meaning of the word 'non'.

The argument was taken a little further by As Soon As I Open My Mouth (Radio 4, Saturday), a short programme on the significance of accent that made mock of Mortimer's suggestion that the English speaker has automatic access to other English-speaking cultures. The thrust of Anne- Marie and Trevor's story was the way that accent creates barriers. He initially mistrusted her as an air-headed American; she dismissed him as a bumpkin. They now live together in Glasgow, along with Anne-Marie's daughter, who spent her early years in Essex and is now understandably confused.

As a dramatisation of the divisions of speech, it lacked impact - only Anne-Marie's mother, a New Yorker appalled by regionalism, added punch. The problem was that the barriers between Trevor and Anne-Marie were artificial, the product of a culture gap that had nothing to do with vowels: Trevor's accent was actually Yorkshire, which for most English people has a whole different set of associations from 'bumpkin'.

Earlier on Saturday evening, Radio 4 provided a rather helpful display of Yorkshireness at work, with Alan Bennett taking one of the leads in J B Priestley's When We Are Married. Thanks to Stephen Daldry, it's hard now to look at Priestley without wondering about the subtext. In this farce of fragile respectability, it's easy to spot the same targets aimed at in An Inspector Calls - vanity, hypocrisy, false respect for social institutions, sheer unkindness. The difference is, perhaps, that by the time he wrote An Inspector Calls, some eight years after When We Are Married, Priestley felt the confidence to make his moral points straight, without hedging them around with funny stories. What Matthew Walters's excellent production demonstrated was that When We Are Married can be a less indulgent, more digestible play. So who knows: one for Robert Lepage?