Eh? Whit did ye say?

Sometimes I feel like Sheldon: No, I'm not crazy - my mother had me tested!  In my case, it's: No, I'm not deaf - the audiologist says I have pretty good hearing for my age.

So why am I having to watch TV drama with the subtitles on? Last night it was an old edition of New Tricks that I'd missed first time around. The lead male actors were fine: James Bolam, Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong - all clear as a bell. Amanda Redman - well, it depends who she's opposite: she takes her tone from the other actors. And some of the other actors are terrible. The women have obviously been trained in drama college to lower their voices about an octave for TV so they don't sound shrill. They've also been taught that TV is more intimate than the theatre so they now speak so softly it's just about impossible to make them out. And then there are the mutterers. Even Dominick Cumberbatch (not sure of the spelling here) does it in Sherlock. There was a time, maybe up to the 80s, when classically trained actors tended to declaim on TV. You know the style: everybody sounded a bit loud and over-enunciated, like the cast of Downton Abbey shouting to each across a large drawingroom (or drawringroom, as they quaintly call it). Not at all like real life. Now, everybody has gone to the opposite extreme. The ends of sentences just disappear. In fact, whole sentences disappear.

Which reminds me: there's an American series called Elementary. I tried watching that. The entire cast were all muttering away. I couldn't make out a word and there were no subtitles. It might be quite good. Who can tell?

So it's a relief to read that the director general of the BBC has declared war on muttering actors:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-23328037

Now can he do anything about two of my friends? One I've stopped talking to on the phone because she speaks so softly I can't hear her at all. The other starts a sentence face to face but then looks down or looks away and drops her voice, as if she's letting me in on a Cold War secret. It's embarrassing to keep saying: Could you speak up? I can't hear you.

If the DG is short of things to do, he could try doing something about Judith the weather wumman on BBC Scotland who sounds as if she's chewing a wasp.