ABSTRACT
When an organization – and not only the BBC – announces a ‘major new…’ anything, we tend these days to become suspicious. The odour of hype, of overselling, and of slight hucksterism hangs round the phrase like cheap perfume. Sometimes, though of course, it is perfectly valid – no-one would complain that the great Radio 4 series A History of the World in a Hundred Objects was anything but ‘major’. And in many ways the same can be said for Voices, a somewhat less trumpeted yet equally ground-breaking initiative on dialect and local language undertaken by a lot of BBC people, but, critically, steered by a small, committed handful, in 2005.
