Presenting a radio debate with a Yorkshire accent! Whatever next? A Yorkshireman reading the news on the telly: Anthony Clavane

Any Questions?, the highly-respected Radio 4 show which has been on air for 72 years, features four panellists, well, answering questions. It’s a simple format, without any airs or graces and, in an age of toxic clashes – especially on social media – provides reassurance that discussion programmes can still be civilised, illuminating and engaging.

The panels are rarely, if ever, controversial. The one tonight features three MPs and the veteran commentator Simon Heffer.

The host, however, is another matter.

His name is Chris Mason. The bespectacled broadcaster is a rising star, an occasional presenter of BBC Breakfast and a contributor to the well-received Brexitcast podcast.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Mason might be a congenial chap, with a nice manner about him. He might be respected across the parliamentary spectrum, with the website The Conservative Woman describing him as an “experienced and highly competent political broadcaster”. He might be, as the radio critic Gillian Reynolds wrote last week, “best known as a reliable political reporter”.

Why arts degrees have a value that go far beyond graduate salaries: Anthony ClavaneBut, as Reynolds also felt it her duty to point out to Sunday Times readers, he has – wait for it – “a slight speech defect and a faint Yorkshire impediment”.

Speaking with a Yorkshire accent! Whatever next? Will he start wearing a flat cap on the show? Will he bring his whippets into the green room? Will he start banging on about living for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank?

Ever since he replaced Jonathan Dimbleby last year, there have been grumblings. To some, his appointment was yet further evidence that the BBC, supposedly the guardians of Received Pronunciation, had gone downhill; that, in its desperation to promote regional diversity, the broadcaster had abandoned not only its clipped tones but also its Reithian principles.

Presenting a radio debate with a Yorkshire accent! Whatever next? A Yorkshireman reading the news on the telly? Now that really would be dumbing down.

According to the poet Ian McMillan, however, this wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Writing in this week’s Radio Times, the Bard of Barnsley observed that some broadcasters believed people outside the southeast couldn’t “be trusted with t’autocue…the north is a ventriloquist’s dummy and the south is in control of the speaking mouth.”

How Coronation Street prepared me for life in Parliament as soap celebrates 10,000th episode – Tracy BrabinHis plea to TV bosses to employ newsreaders with northern accents was supported by Mason. “I think there could be a far broader range of voices than we hear on the national media,” declared the Yorkshire Dalesman. “It’s absolutely absurd. We’re broadcasting to a country with this incredibly rich diversity of voices and accents, and we hardly hear any of them broadcasting on the national airwaves.”

McMillan ended his piece with a call to arms: “So come on, people in charge: let a northern voice read the news, and not just the news about the north. Let’s pervade the airwaves like bindweed on an allotment.”

This seemed a strange choice of analogy – unflatteringly comparing northerners to an annoying weed which spreads in the garden and suffocates plants – until I remembered how the critic Rachel Cooke used to regularly berate Ian as a Professional Yorkshireman back in the 1990s.

In one article she mocked his “ecky thump” vowels, claiming he had “crept all over the BBC schedules like bindweed on an allotment”.

Why Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar remains the quintessential Leeds novel six decades on: Anthony ClavaneSo the moral panic about Mason’s “impediment” is nothing new. In fact, as far back as the 1940s, the appointment of

Halifax-born comedian Wilfred Pickles as a radio newsreader provoked an outcry in the press. After his first wartime bulletin, the continuity announcer cued in On Ilkey Moor Baht’At. On one occasion, Pickles upset traditionalists by signing off with a cheery “good neet”. The social experiment was deemed a failure and Pickles, the first national newsreader to speak with a northern accent, was relieved of his microphone.

“The north-country dialects are forever being ridiculed,” he reflected in 1949. “But if they go, much of our character goes, too.”

It is extraordinary that, more than 70 years later, this is still an issue.