One of our most important evolutionary features is the gift of speech, a gift that is now a fading heirloom. Which means that we are awash in half-actors and half-singers, and half-newsreaders... all half-speakers. It is becoming commonplace for those who can hear to turn on closed captions or subtitles when listening to the screen. The sound is like a blurred photo. Isn't reading ink&paper still wonderful after all?. With the torrential downgrading of art and media to the lowest common denominator, so-called elitist pursuits such as cursive handwriting and elocution have disappeared from American public education. We're inundated with children who cannot write with their prehensile thumbs and who speak-mumble through their numbed noses. It began in the 1950's when adolescent music-making swished into the mainstream and said: "It ain't about the music, it's rock&roll." And when country-western music-making twisted into the mainstream and said: "It ain't about the music, it's common-folk singing." And now it's revealed in today's disposable youtubed reality television which says: "Boring is good, anybody can be a star." That's what's real. Go back 65 years… The Golden Years of Hollywood were still shining. From the broadest Epic to the lowliest B-feature, actors delivered their dialogue with enunciated clarity, other than Marlon Brando. He had a trained vocal instrument which he displayed with his performances in "Julius Caesar" and "Desiree". Probably had to do with the fact that he was working with casts of almost all British actors. But for the broad, sloppy swath of his career, on stage and screen, he mumbled like a smack-addict in Alaska. Go back 65 years. Listen to American Pop and Jazz singers. I'll cite only three: Jo Stafford, she of perfect pitch fame, not a great "phraser" but she gave you every syllable, articulated and clean surrounded by her amazing gift to strike notes pinpoint pure. June Christy, she of 'cool jazz' fame, a protégé of Stan Kenton, clarity was her hallmark. And then there was Frank Sinatra. For me, unarguably the best pop/jazz singer ever recorded. He wasn't well educated but he did have some voice training. He reached a level of musicianship, singership, unmatched to this day. His ability to phrase was simply a remarkable gift of magic, and he gave you every syllable, every letter, every overtone, every undertone. Like most singers of his day, the lyric was everything. I could go on and on. But let me touch on a few current interesting ironies. Most television series, broadcast and cable, American, British, French and others are ridden with performers who don't speak well. It doesn't seem to matter. The dialogue is a toss-off, the visuals are everything Then again, there was the madly successful "Game of Thrones". Amidst its stuffed-pizza script and video-game plots there was the relief of a group of actors who not only could speak but could use their voices as instruments. It's because most of them (not all) are trained British actors. And those that are not are forced to reach the bar. Australian Broadcasting is an ear-shaking mélange of accents and words coming through the TV speaker. Spoken Australian English is not the most pleasant spoken language on the planet… its enunciation is squeezed, twisted, and filtered through the sinuses. It has much in common with the environment in which it thrives. The sportscasters are the worst, no, awfully worse. They don't just mumble, they clamp their teeth and squeeze out their words as they chew the pebbles and mash the potatoes that fill their mouths. It is a grateful viewer who has a mute button. BBC, that fountain of the Queen's English, once delivered with the sincerity of the great Big Ben. Now, in their race to catch the train of multi-cultural diversity, BBC has dropped its standards, faces without voices. Olympus cries when it hears the mutilation of what was once clean, clear, broadcast words. Even France24's worldwide English broadcasts have better, more articulate voices. So much for the Chunnel across the channel. And while we're bemoaning performers' voices, let me cite one atrocious aspect of current cinema... the dubbing of voices in films when they are presented in foreign markets. No comment here on clarity, just marketing and, well, stupidity. Half of a film-actor is his/her voice. Cover it in a film with a dubbed voice in a foreign language and you can lose up to half of his/her performance. It's not just the translated changes in dialogue. It's the loss of the actor's voice with all of its inflection, innuendo, mood, and subtle reinforcement of the visual acting. It sometimes results in losing half the film. Subtitles are annoying but they're enhanced, even when translated, by the actor's voice. Of course, you have to look, hear and read at the same time. That is a problem for the mass of non-thinking, quick gratification viewers. So much for our disposable modern cinema. As the great articulator Lenny Bruce would say, "And that's that!"