{"id":520,"date":"2018-12-30T21:32:09","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=520"},"modified":"2018-12-30T21:32:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:32:09","slug":"the-kings-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/30\/the-kings-english\/","title":{"rendered":"The King’s English"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Apart from not capturing the King’s English — either then or now — The King’s Speech<\/a><\/span><\/strong> does rather simplify and even trivialize speech defects, speech therapy, and, no doubt, George VI’s struggle. But the two principal male (and female) roles are well (if inauthentically) played. (Colin Firth mastered the royal mispronunciation of “r,” but not the Windsor accent.) Derek Jacobi, however, is simply dreadful as the A of C, and Timothy Spall’s face and facial expressions were terrible as Churchill. The anachronisms — e.g., I rather doubt that the royal family’s locution “the firm” dated as early as the 1930’s, but the urge to slip it in prevailed — are sometimes intrusive, and I’d certainly hate to be one of the portrayed parties having to view this. Nevertheless, overall, the film works.<\/p>\n

But two obvious strategies to make the task of public speaking (and especially public broadcasting) easier for the king were never tried. And leaving us to wonder why cannot but reduce the drama of the struggle:<\/p>\n

(1) Why insist that broadcasts be done live, rather than recorded in advance (with multiple takes and edits)?<\/p>\n

(2) If playing loud music in headphones while reading a speech inhibited the stammer, why not use that during the speech-making, rather than only as therapy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apart from not capturing the King’s English — either then or now — The King’s Speech does rather simplify and even trivialize speech defects, speech therapy, and, no doubt, George VI’s struggle. But the two principal male (and female) roles are well (if inauthentically) played. (Colin Firth mastered the royal mispronunciation of “r,” but not … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The King’s English”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}