I'm listening to an ancient 1950 recording of The Mikado. Naxos have been reissuing them, and I got it (2 CDs of it) for £3 in the market.

I'm enjoying it very much, for many reasons, including that it enshrines the upper middle class English voice in its definitely previous manifestation to the present one.

Some time during or just after the nineteen sixties, the money earning classes of my country did a voice makeover. They squirted a more or less huge dose of Michael Caine into their previous John Mills not to say Donald Sinden vowels. This new voice has since spread throughout the new suburbs, to create a new, truly middle class English accent. You do it and you aren't a toff, because toffs are so weird and isolated from normal life that they still talk like John Mills used to in 1950 and sometimes even the way Donald Sinden still did in 1990. But you aren't a criminal stroke tramp either. You have GCSEs. Your parents understand what a mortgage is, and so do you.

But where does that leave the John Mills Donald Sinden accent? Well, nowhere, now that even the old toffs are dying out. Donald Sinden has run out of steam and is probably officially dead himself by now, and John Mills, although still alive despite being 110 years old, is enough of an actor to have introduced slight but definite modifications over the years, to have kept him in touch and make him an acceptable chat-show guest. But for us made-over upper-middles it's nice to hear The Voice in all its 1950 embarrassingness given an outing from time to time.

However, and here's my point, we made-over upper-middles do quite agree that The Voice was indeed embarrassing. If we didn't think this we wouldn't have abandoned The Voice (either with a Michael Caine Switch or with a John Mills Modified Makeover - my preferred route) in the sixties. Young pin-striped ginks trying to become Conservative MPs who haven't dumped The Voice, or who even deliberately taught themselves to sound like 1950 John Mills (or even Donald Sinden) are indeed truly embarrassing. You can't talk like that and mean it. I recall listening to an ancient BBC radio production of Hamlet, and the security guards at the beginning sounded like they were driving around in ancient sports cars in the 1950 London to Brighton ancient sports car race. Good god man!, as they would say, or, as their grandchildren would say: Give me a break! They sounded like Boat Race commentators, and may well have been exactly that in later years. What ho, Marcellus! Did you see the jolly old ghost last night? Gosh what an absolutely ripping show! Cringe.

But I do want to be able to listen to The Voice from time to time, for old time's sake, in all its unashamed embarrassingness. But I want to hear it in a setting where self-mockery is built in. Hence the pleasure of listening to The Voice doing The Mikado, rather than Hamlet.

"If you want to know who we are!!!! … We are gentlemen of Japan!!!! …" That generation saying serious stuff with The Voice is too much to bear. Noel Coward explaining in all seriousness why he is fighting the Second World War, dressed as a sea captain. Please. Donald Sinden trying to be even more serious, in The Cruel Sea. That is just too over the top, dear boy, and one simply can't, dear boy, take it seriously. But, dear boy, when one is sending oneself up, conceding with one's every inflection that the British Empire is folding its tents even as we speak in this peculiar way, dear boy, and that this whole way of talking will soon be a thing of the past, dear boy, well, that doesn't date. Or rather, it does date but in a completely satisfactory way, that I at any rate can still now enjoy.

One of the huge changes that has come over History, no less, is that we now have genuine recordings of how people really spoke, from about 1900 onwards. In my recent piece about Hamlet on Samizdata I included the guess that Shakespeare as originally spoken probably sounded more like modern American than modern posh English. Wow, said someone, is that what people really now think? I think they think this, but both halves of that are just guesses, I'm afraid, and I hope to muster the guts to admit it over there some time soon. But what wouldn't we give for a scratchy old gramophone record, like my Mikado CDs, of Shakespeare himself reading one of his bits? A photo would be fantastic. But a sound recording, now I think about it, and if I had to choose, would be even better. The pictures of Shakespeare that we do now have give us a pretty good idea of how he looked, but a recording of the man would cause an earthquake in Shakespeare scholarship and Shakespeare interpretation, and probably in History itself.

"Three little girls from school are we, come from the ladies' seminary …"

Gels, that is, with a elongated short "e": "Ge-e-e-e-e-ls". You know. The Voice. The ladies did it too of course.

"We're very wide ar-wake thar moon end ay."

The moon yes, but not you granny dearest, not any more. You're dead. As is the Queen Mother. But you live on in electro-vinyl, I'm very happy to report.