Via Backword Dave, this is funny:
[I]f you can’t mimic niceness, you can mimic Liverpool, which was what John Peel did. Well, sort of. In fact, he was a public school boy, a Salopian. He could never have got through Shrewsbury intact sounding like the scouser he later became. His Merseyside accent, studiously acquired in Texas, was entirely phoney, even if the character speaking it wasn’t.
Wilfred Pickles’s accent was also contrived: when he began his career as a BBC newsreader during the war, he spoke Received Pronunciation burnished with just the lightest dusting of Yorkshire. It was only as his career headed for light entertainment that the accent became less Crystal Palace and infinitely more eeh ba gum lass, trouble at t’mill. Pickles went on to present patently risible programmes – but people still liked him, simply because he was patently a thoroughly decent man.
Similarly John Peel. Yet his palpable niceness was not in itself sufficient to explain his popularity. What gave him his enduring appeal was that he was England’s greatest anorak. England is a land of bird-watchers, of trainspotters, of aircraft-number jotters. Only that bizarre tradition of collecting meaningless things could elevate to national celebrity someone who dedicated his entire life, every breathing moment, to trawling through thousands of hours of anguished youthful vacuity, shouted and set to drums. Yet John Peel could do so with unfeigned relish, and hail much of the bilge he heard with awe and respect.
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