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Birmingham accent was ranked 'most hated' on BBC's unofficial league table, says Kate Adie
The Guardian
|April 12, 2025
The BBC had an unofficial league table of the most loved and despised accents, the war correspondent Kate Adie has revealed.
And the most hated? Brummie.
Geordie was liked, she told an audience in Sunderland, but from one end of the country to the other it was the accent of those from Birmingham that was particularly disliked.
Adie was speaking at an event marking the cataloguing of a huge archive of material documenting her life and career. From starting out at BBC Radio Durham to covering the Troubles, multiple wars and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, Adie was for years one of Britain's best known and most trusted television reporters.
Her archive of more than 2,300 objects includes dozens of notebooks as well as tapes, letters, photographs and video clips. It was donated to the University of Sunderland a number of years ago but funding to properly catalogue it only came last year.
Adie was brought up in the city but never had a strong accent, she said. Nor did her parents, who adopted her as a baby, "or their parents".
This story is from the April 12, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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