Barnsley poet Ian McMillan urges broadcasters to employ newsreaders with northern accents

TV bosses believe people outside southeast should not ‘be trusted with t’autocue’, he claims

Ian McMillan at Hull Train Station (Gary Calton)

He is known as the Bard of Barnsley and has long eulogised the beauty of regional dialects on his Radio Three programme The Verb.

Now South Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan is urging broadcasters to employ newsreaders who speak with northern accents.

The celebrity wordsmith – who still lives in the village where he grew up – said television bosses appeared to believe people outside the southeast could not “be trusted with t'autocue".

He added that if the media truly wanted to help level up the country, it was crucial to have more presenters speaking in a similar dialect to viewers all over the country.

Writing in the Radio Times, he said: “The north is a ventriloquist's dummy and the south is in control of the speaking mouth.

"Newsreaders from the north aren't reading the news about themselves because, well, there aren't any.

"And there haven't been since the sainted Wilfred Pickles, unmistakably from Halifax, last read a bulletin on the Home Service during the Second World War."

The 64-year-old – who has spent time as poet-in-residence at both Barnsley FC and Humberside Police – said that people from the regions should not just be limited to appearing on local broadcasts.

"So come on, people in charge: let a northern voice read the news, and not just the news about the north," he wrote. "Let's pervade the airwaves like bindweed on an allotment."

Responding to the piece, Chris Mason, one of the BBC’s few news anchors who does speak with a northern accent, said he felt the poet had a point.

Speaking on Radio Four’s Today programme, Mr Mason, who is from North Yorkshire, said: “How many people on the national news airwaves – BBC or beyond – have a distinctive regional accent?

“There are a handful of us, I think... And I think it becomes a self-fulfilling thing. If you grow up not hearing them – I grew up not hearing them – then you might reasonably conclude that either you have to change how you sound, which would be terrible in my view, or you have to do something else.”