I still buy it - in the Summer for local cricket coverage and in football season purely for local football / local sports coverage Mid Comb etc etc. Don't bother reading Villa match reports....
The funniest and most observant articles I,ve read about Brum , ever , IMHO ............Godzvilla!The Weekly Times Comment Column by Jeremy Clarkson .Work on the accent, Brum, and Tom Cruise will be in for a balti Published: 24 February 2013 If I may be permitted to liken Britain to the human body, then Scotland is the brain, East Anglia is the stomach, North and East Yorkshire are the breasts and London is the heart that pumps vital nutrients and oxygen to the fingernails and the ears and Preston. Which leaves us with the garden shed we built years ago when we decided to take up metalworking: that’s Birmingham. In recent years it’s been tidied up. Earnest locals have fitted funky new lighting and a bar. They’ve polished the lathe, too, and turned the vice into an amusing beer pump. But still nobody’s interested. We don’t do metalwork any more. So, neat though it now may be, the shed remains rather unloved. Early last week there were many big news stories to titillate the nation. A meteorite had crashed into Russia, a film had been made about Tom Cruise visiting a curry house last August in St Albans and people were very interested in the dramatic downfall of Oscar Pistorius. But even so, the eighth-most-read story on the BBC website was: “Why does everyone hate Birmingham?”Twenty years ago it was very probably the worst place on earth. If you fancied eating something that wasn’t a curry, you’d set off on a long and fruitless walk that would culminate in you being vomited on. And then stabbed, for daring to get in the way of someone’s sick. There was only one hotel where you had even half a chance of not catching lice and only one nightclub where you wouldn’t necessarily be glassed. Not that you could find either because a few years earlier someone had decided the city should have a series of underpasses. Unfortunately they’d got a bit carried away, so that visitors would turn off the M6, disappear immediately into a hole and not emerge until they were past Kidderminster. Birmingham, then, was difficult to find and horrible if, by some miracle, you succeeded. The reasons for going? Well, Brummies were keen to point out they had more canals than Venice. By which I think they meant, more shopping trolleys in their canals than Venice. And, er, that’s it. Birmingham was just an industrial city that had no industry any more. Today, though, everything’s changed. There are bars and nightclubs and Selfridges. And all the old industrial buildings have been turned into loft apartments for thrusting young executives. So why do we still have a problem with it? I realise, of course, that it takes a while for people to realise there’s been a change. We still, for instance, think of Stella Artois as reassuringly expensive rather than a drink that causes you to beat up your wife. But continuing to think of Birmingham as a wart is as daft as continuing to imagine that York is full of oxen. You simply can’t not like the city any more. And it’s hard to dislike the people either. Chiefly because they are usually more British than we’ll ever be. Show a Brummie a spectacular house and after he’s arranged his face to register a complete and absolute lack of interest, he will say, “I wouldn’t want to hoover a sitting room that big.” Show him an amazing garden and he will say, “I bet that takes a lot of digging.” Put his wife in a pretty frock and he will wonder what happens when she spills her balti on it. In short, a Birmingham person is born with an inability to say, “That is amazing.”The British have a global reputation for keeping their emotions hidden. But Brummies have taken this to a level that would flabbergast even the Duke of Marlborough. Their emotions are not just hidden. They are locked in a safe and buried under 20 tons of concrete, in a well, at the bottom of the garden. You know Michaela Strachan? The bubbly, enthusiastic former children’s TV presenter? She’s not from Birmingham. We know this because she released a video called Wild About Baby Animals. If she’d been a Brummie, it would have been called Not Bothered Either Away About Baby Animals. Of course, this refusal to find anything wondrous can be rather irritating. Especially when you are with a Brummie at the Grand Canyon and he’s facing the other way, checking his text messages. I’m not saying who that was. Only that his name begins with R and ends with ichard Hammond. However, when you see a party of Americans whooping and high-fiving one another about something as trivial as a tropical sunset, you crave the company of a Brummie, who’ll wilfully face east and tell you he’d rather be in Moseley. I’d be happy in the trenches with a Brummie too. Because the upside of his downbeat nature is that he doesn’t find things spectacularly bad either. You get the impression a Brummie would be capable of sitting there watching a rat eat his gangrenous foot without moaning anywhere near as much as, say, me. So. We go back to the original question. Why, if the city’s improved and the people are stoic, does the rest of the country have such a problem with the place? Well, there’s no easy way of saying this. But, um, it’s the accent. In the complex world of advertising, a Yorkshire twang is perceived to be honest. Which is why Sean Bean is used to promote every single thing. It’s the same story with the Scotch. Gavin & Stacey has made the Welsh accent funny and likeable, and now that Cilla Black has taken her mocking tones into retirement, posh is OK as well. A Birmingham accent, however, makes you sound thick. If Einstein had been from King’s Heath, no one would have taken the theory of relativity seriously. If Churchill had been a Brummie, we’d have lost the war. And if you don’t believe me, just get someone from Castle Bromwich to read out the “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. That’s why people hate Birmingham. It’s because they think everyone who lives there is a bit daft. Happily, though, I have a solution. If the council really wants its city to thrive after the second phase of HS2 has turned it into an oxbow lake, it needs to stop giving the locals more bars. And send them for elocution lessons instead.
I think Clarkson ius right. When out of Birmingham - which I have been mostly for 15 odd years now - as soon as someone knows you're from Birmingham they have to do a pee take on the accent. Okay, its usually a Black country noise that they come out with but our accent does sound thick. However we may not want it to, however much it doesn't sound as backward as a Black Country accent, as much as we'll defend Birmningham, we can't defend how we sound. And Clarkson's right it does have an impact on how people perceive us. I have come across the odd person who says they like the Birmingham accent and when they say that to me I immediately think they are either taking the proverbial, or that they are clearly stupid. I think its a good piece by Clarkson. My wife is too amazed by my inability to not find even the most wonderous sites truly magnificent in our worldly travels in the same way she's amazed I won't get flustered by any ensuing panic or calamitous setback.Being a Brummie is ace. Our accent? Not so.
Let people think we're thick. The joke is on them.
Quote from: Ads on October 08, 2013, 08:23:12 AMLet people think we're thick. The joke is on them. Yeah, until you're applying for jobs.
Quote from: LeeB on October 08, 2013, 08:24:58 AMQuote from: Ads on October 08, 2013, 08:23:12 AMLet people think we're thick. The joke is on them. Yeah, until you're applying for jobs. I cannot imagine that a company that would ignore your qualifications, experience and personality because you pronounce "loike" instead of "like" is really one worth working for.I loike where I work and they’re all scally Mancs and Dippers.
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Topic: The Sunday Mercury, as even-handed as ever. (Read 21366 times)
