Ian McMillan: To erm is human

I know: odd, isn’t it, seeing the way we talk written down like that in all its hesitating and syncopated glory, or non-glory, depending on your point of view. I know not everybody speaks like that, and that some people are capable of talking in complete sentences with the clauses following each other in a stately procession like the wagons of a slow freight train through Doncaster station. Those people are few and far between, however, and most of us rely on the stumbling half-dance of language to get to the place we wanted to get to at the start of the sentence.

The problem for the writer is, how do you replicate ordinary speech? Look at the soaps on TV, supposedly full of versions of the people you’d see on the street or in the pub? I’m not denying that the soaps are well written, because they are, but the people in them only speak realistically up to a point: there’s not much of the (to borrow from the Radio 4 programme Just A Minute) hesitation, deviation or repetition that you would get if you were overhearing a conversation in a queue at a sandwich shop. I guess one of the reasons for this is that it would get tedious, and another reason is that on the television or on the stage or in a radio play you’re not watching real life or anything like it and the characters are characters not people.