The Guardian has a general policy against reproducing people’s accents in print. Mostly, I presume, for ease of understanding and smoothness of communication – there’s a reason we took to standardised spelling after all – but partly, I suspect, because it allows prejudice and mockery to slip in. Either from the writer’s side or from the reader’s. We are free, but everywhere we are in sociolinguistic chains.
Which makes reviewing the opening episode of the four-part documentary Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars (BBC Scotland) a very interesting proposition. It concentrates largely on the part that accent and language play in how we differentiate social classes and – crucially – in stopping us moving between them. His own accent (McGarvey was born and bred in the notably impoverished area of Pollok, Glasgow) is inescapably present throughout and gives further torque to what is already an impassioned and more rigorous examination than we customarily get from documentaries about this perennially fascinating subject.
When he tells us about the number of times he has been congratulated on how he has managed to become so articulate and notes that “Ma accent conveys somethin’ entirely different from wha’ ah intend” it has real force behind it. Obviously my efforts to convey it in print are shabby, but to have written “My accent conveys something entirely different from what I intend” would have been so too, in another way.
McGarvey’s first port of call was Professor Jane Stuart-Smith, a specialist in Glaswegian dialects. His interview with her yielded exactly the kind of precise, tangible detail that most documentaries, never mind those about the notoriously fuzzy subject of class, fail to give. Glasgow, she explained, flew in the face of historical convention by becoming more, not less, vocally distinct from its neighbours. Deprivation breeds a tight community and a desire to fight back against oppression by an ever stronger expression of identity. You couldn’t flatten the city’s accent any more than you could flatten its people. “Good to know,” said McGarvey, with a grin, “that Glasgow pride isn’t 100% hubris.”
The professor pointed out that he and his fellow Glaswegians pronounce their Rs exactly like the French do – and nobody looks askance at that. McGarvey himself later took the point on. “I don’t speak or rap that differently from how Robert Burns writes, but things receive cultural prominence because upper-class people like them; middle-class people mimic upper-class people, and this becomes the canon.”
McGarvey moved surefootedly through the webby mass of social signifiers, problems of intention and reception and more, creating a dense but accessible hour using a mixture of vox pops, further interviews and interrogation of his own movement up the social ladder.
There was a brief moment when you feared a descent into Hyacinth Bucketism, as he pitched up at Lauriston Castle, over in Edinburgh, to be taught upper-class social mores. It was gimmicky but paid dividends when butler Simeon, assigned to initiate him into the secret world of aristocratic manners, turned out to be a man from a decidedly non-crenellated background himself but who had taken absolutely the opposite tack from McGarvey in his response to it. “When I look at someone wealthy and that,” he said, “my chip has always been: I will be the first one up in the morning and the last one to bed until I am that person … It’s open to anyone to work their way out.” It was a fascinating face-off between the belief in individual responsibility and in the power of systemic oppression.
It was an hour that married granular detail with overarching theory and wide perspective, personal insight with politics, via polls on whether Greggs or fish and chips are working class, and following multiple causes through to their multiple effects without remotely threatening to sprawl.
McGarvey’s intelligence and scabrous commentary held it firmly together, from his conversation with the journalist Hugo Rifkind – a member of the Scottish upper middle class – about the need for people of his ilk to recognise the silent power they wield, to McGarvey’s own reflections after enjoying a game of cricket. Accepting an ascribed identity in any form, he suggested, almost inevitably requires suppressing your true interests and, in some sense, your authentic self.
He ended with a consideration of his own success and relative financial comfort. “Some I earned, some I didn’t. It wasn’t just down to me; I had a ridiculous run of luck.” Not something the truly middle class would ever say, of course.
