Roughly speaking

I can't get away from Arthur Smith, the comedian. I spend much of my time listening to Radio 4 and 4 Extra, depending on whether I want to be informed or entertained. (When I'm trying to concentrate on work, it's a choice between Radio 3, Classical, Chill or silence.) 

Smith seems to be a nice enough hail-fellow-well-met character, the kind of guy you'd happily spend an hour or two down the pub with bemoaning the state of the world. I haven't heard his comedy act and nothing he says makes me feel I'd react with more than a wry smile, but no doubt he has his fans. The problem is, his gravelly voice and his South London accent grate in my ear and more I hear him, the more quickly I switch off the radio. (After weeks appearing relentlessly on on 4 Extra, he's now non-stop on 4 reporting from the Edinburgh Fringe.) It's a great - or should I say grate - voice for a character actor, but for the role of host and presenter, it's too prominent for someone who should recede into the background.

It's not the gravel that irritates me - plenty of men have throaty voices (Leonard Cohen comes to mind) - that are acceptable to the ear. Nor is it the accent - Saf London can be as weloming and unobtrusive as RP; it's the combination of the two in Arthur Smith's voice. Nor is he the only irritating announcer on Radio 4. There's a Neil Someone who occasionally pops up between programmes, speaking slowly and with a large stone in his mouth. (I've also heard him on the World Service.) Every time he annouces another programme, I tell him to take the damn pebble out from between his teeth and to stop sounding so pompous. Regrettably, he can't hear me.

The fact is, the older I get, the more some accents irritate me. I find working-class Strathclyde one of the uglier forms of English known to humanity (I'm from the East Coast of Scotland where our tones are softer), a disappointing development from the warmer Glasgow accent of thirty or so years ago. Thick South African and antipodean English are equally ugly. I cannot take seriously the sing-song of most south Asian accents. Extreme Southern US is laughable. Geordie hovers on the edge of annoyance. Some Irish accents irritate (others pull you in). African English comes across as indistinct - another case of the speaker being encumbered by something in their mouths that garbles their words.

Of course I like some accents, or at least find them inoffensive. North-eastern England, the west of England, most London speech, most varieties of West Indian, the various Canadian accents, most US speech, Welsh sound patterns and the lilt that has almost disappeared from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland are all easy on the ear. So too is the RP of today, in comparison with the RP of the 50s, which now comes across as stilted and artificial.

It's not just varieties of English that either please or annoy me. Most foreign languages come across as exotic, their personalities spanning the spectrum from romantic to robust, but there are a few exceptions. The Spanish from Latin American and the south of Spain is musical, but the accent of Madrid and neighbouring regions is a staccato monotone that drills into my head like a machine-gun. Newsreaders on Chinese television sound like sergeant-majors barking out orders. Some forms of Arabic sound as alien and unwelcoming as Klingon. And so on.

So why do I find Kirsty Wark soothing but Ant n Dec ennervating? What do Huw Weldon and Jim Naughtie have in common? There's something going on here and I'm not sure what it is, but as someone who wants to appear on radio and to extend his own range of accents, I ought to find out what makes an attracive voice. After all, although many people say they like my dulcet tones, there may be hundreds, thousands, millions who find my voice drives them up the wall...