POSH TOSH ?

A few days ago  the BBC broadcast a programme about George Bernard Shaw and Channel 4 broadcast a play "Derry Girls".

In the BBC programme there was a segment on Shaw's play Pygmalion. In this play Shaw showed how people who are described as "upper class" show their upper class by the way they speak and create class divisions by pointing to other people as inferior by the way they speak. He despised the whole process of course.

"Derry Girls" presented viewers with a story of children whose language - and social customs - mark them out as quite special. Words that RTE, BBC, ITV , the Irish Times,  consider so unmentionable in good "Society" that they primly refer to them as the F word, the C word, peppered the script, or perhaps may have been  inserted during production to liven things up a bit.

Or to make clear to viewers that children from  a certain area, with a certain financial standard of living, of a certain religion really talk like this and can be defined and recognised by it. In Shaw's play a flower girl has a way of talking that may have been real or not but defined her as a person of lower standing in what was called "society".  In the Channel Four programme  a limited  stock of words to talk with, considering  wildness a great thing, relieving oneself into a trash can,  by these characteristics  you may  recognise the Derry girls'  world. Nothing easier than that.

Shaw is more clever about  all this than " Derry Girls". He shows why speech and accent are used to define what class you belong to and whether you are acceptable to people considered more elevated. Within the viewing area of  Channel Four's  programme there may now be people who really believe Derry speech and manners  would exclude Derry children  from "polite society" as it used to be called.  Are they being encouraged  to think that way?

After the first episode of "Derry Girls" one could wonder if perhaps that young man isolated in a male-loo-less  convent school who seemed to have a somewhat across the water accent might fall in love with one of the girls and apply the rules of Channel Four civilisation to her with disastrous results because of  alienation and possible exile for the poor girl through not being able to talk to  (or shout at) her own people any more.  Shaw's character, through learning  "correct" speech, could have lost out that way and we are never sure whether she did or not but the danger was there.  Perhaps the writer of "Derry Girls" has more strings to  her artistic bow than Shaw and   may  invent  a reasonably normal happy ending out of the play's cultural chaos.  

Years ago I spoke to an audience that  included a titled lady and a West- Minister.  I talked to them about their  floor arrangements for the Opening of their Parliament. The monarch sat in grace away up there, the lords, ladies and high clergy  seated in front of the monarch,  and away at the back, standing, were the elected representatives of the people, the Commons, the common folk.  A striking symbol of the shape of the British power system,  monarch at the top whose power and comfort are devolved  "downwards" eventually reaching the common folk, diluted. Drinking tea afterwards the titled lady was heard to say loudly : " Doesn't he know that things have changed, enormously changed  - the House of Lords has changed enormously, why,  you can tell by their accents .........."

As Shaw with typical Irish wisdom pointed out, speech is used to classify people as belonging to "Society" or not. And that is a nonsense.

 There was a time - which we old folk well remember - when the BBC and the Theatres allowed a Belfast, Ballymena or Derry accent to be used only for laughs or whimsy. Those times changed, eventually the BBC had to allow local accents to be not only used but respected.

When Radio Éireann and RTÉ came along there was discussion about them in Dáil Éireann. A  T.D. complained  : "These broadcasters", he said, "have accents that are not redolent of the soil........".   A brave effort to turn old snobbery on its head  even at the cost of creating a new one, but recognising the importance of speech and accent in letting other people decide whether you are "respectable" or not.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the Derry Girls.  One of them perhaps, poor Derry girl converted to gentility but sadly trudging off into the sunset where  her every  word must be  acceptable to polite society but her community and friends cannot talk with  her any more. Like in Pygmalion.

Incidentally, do Derry children  really keep talking like that ?

And do  they really  have nuns with starched faces ?

And do they really shout at each other even when only a couple of feet away ? 

If not should we let  Channel Four know ?