Loved that video..

Anyone ever seen a Raycophone Piwi receiver?

A bit worried about the fellow pulling the chassis out of the cadmium-plating bath with his bare hands. Isn't cadmium a heavy metal with cumulative poisoning effect on humans exposed to it?

Have to love those narrators rolling their "r"s and trying to crack Pommy, but still lapsing into broad Aussie vowels half the time. But we should make some allowance for the low frequency range of the recording and reproduction systems, which fudged a lot of consonants too much to convey natural speech patterns reliably. Formal elocution had a practical purpose in noisy places and across noisy transmission media.

Maven

Cadmium certainly is a heavy metal and in the right dose, poisonous.

With regard to pommie accents, it was fashionable for narrators, voice-over announcers and news readers to stack on an accent when doing their job, even if they were ocker in real life. It was part of the job until the female gender started to encroach and then the habit seemed to disappear.

Ian Ross, Brian Henderson, Roger Climpson, James Dibble and to a lesser extent, Richard Morecroft all had Australian British accents on the set.

James Dibble and to a lesser extent, Richard Morecroft all had Australian British accents on the set.

I'd argue that Dibble had less of an affected Pommy accent than he's been accused of over the years. I'd class it more as a cultured Australian accent.

For mine, the absolute worst examples of this phenomenon were some of the narrators on Aussie newsreels.

I'm not sure that I'd put any changes down to more women in broadcasting. I think the key has been more poorly trained journalists (and I use that term loosely) doing their own pieces to camera whereas we used to have to listen to the newsreader's voice for most of the bulletin.

Some (most?) sports broadcasters have dragged the situation past Ocker down to bogan territory.

I'm not sure that I'd put any changes down to more women in broadcasting.

It's true that this isn't the cause of the change. The change seemed just to happen about the same time, including a lot of other changes such as live reporting.