Annie normally is the most wonderful and supportive of women, but I have noticed occasionally she seems to provoke me by deliberately muttering a simple question such as, ‘what shall we watch tonight?’ to the point where I am forced to ask her to repeat herself. Sometimes, by interpolating what she might be asking, I take a wild stab at an answer, but this always seems to produce an incredulous look rather than a recognising nod, for my guess is invariably wide of what was really said. This does not go down well and is guaranteed to annoy, especially when Annie accused me of getting deaf.
I used to argue against this, refusing to accept yet another infirmity on the road to decrepitude, while certain that she just needed to articulate more clearly; although I concede that, for some time, to follow a television story is helped by having subtitles switched on. These subtitles are a marvellous boon, for one can take them in at-a-glance while still watching the action and catching the actor’s articulation; without them, it is harder to follow a plot line. The subtitles are remarkably accurate and taken in many cases directly from the script, which adds interest for we viewers to spot where the actors ad lib, often improving the original.
This contrasts starkly with subtitles over news programmes where there is no script, so some text-recognition algorithm, or possibly a poorly paid stenographer, is vainly trying to keep up with a fast-breaking story. Indeed, subtitling is so bad it lags several seconds behind the words and is often a garbled mess of weird spellings, suddenly cut off when the stenographer (or software) loses track of where they are. This lack of sync gives the newsreaders a more vital role, for we hard-of-hearers must rely on their voice alone to make sense of the world outside; but therein is the problem. For those who suffer high-pitch hearing loss, female newscasters become, if not inaudible, then certainly unintelligible. Male newsreaders such as Clive Myre and Tom Bradby shine as beacons of clarity, their words distinct as they expound the woes of the world. But females operate at a disadvantage, for we sufferers can’t hear them: their words become blurred, indistinct and quite divorced from any clue from the subtitles.
Of course, many news programmes now include a little person in the corner busy signing which is doubtless of great help to the profoundly deaf who presumably prefer it to subtitles, but this is of no benefit to fogies like me who are never going to learn signing. My mother showed another way to hear. At fourteen, she left school to work in the cotton mills in Burnley. Visiting my grandparents in about 1950, I remember peeking in the back door of a Burnley mill out of curiosity, for in those days a child could wander alone and unrestrained. The noise was like nothing I’d heard before, a wall of sound so loud I could never dare penetrate it, so I understood why she learnt to lip read; the girls held full conversations without hearing a word. This was a faculty mum kept all her life: she could hear whispered conversations, or see people talking in a restaurant, and knew what they said, something we children found scarily impressive.
So many detective series now have female protagonists interviewing female suspects that, without written cues, I would miss half the action. And it was subtitles that brought my deafness to a head, for besides dialogue they include background sounds such as ‘dramatic music’ to build up the viewer’s tension, and simple sound effects such as ‘telephone rings’. When one announced, ‘horn blaring’, I asked Annie if she could hear a car horn? Of course she could, so I determined the time had come for an aid, making an appointment next day. Sure enough, the testing lady confirmed I have high-frequency hearing loss; the drooping curves on her screen clearly fell below the threshold for several highlighted conversational sounds: f, k, p, s, and t would all be inaudible to me when spoken by children’s or female voices. So that is why Annie was mumbling – all those sounds were being struck out from my ears like so much unwanted grass before the strimmer. I looked forward to regaining a lost sense, for in childhood I could hear the bats chirp. Perhaps, with my new aids, I would again hear the birds sing and enjoy the news from more than two newsreaders.
