Hay Festival 2013: Sir Roy has Strong words for broadcasters "I think there are prejudices," he said. If you have what's classified as an upper class voice, they don't warm to you very much. "You hear people adapt their voices, don't you?" he said. They used to have a run of weather broadcasters, where I would listen twice to what they said and I still didn't know what the weather was. They have such an obsession with regional accents, where you can't understand a word they say. He added: "I think the BBC have a rule that anyone over the age of 32 should be excluded." In a wide-ranging talk, he called the dismantling of the grammar school system "wicked" and claimed a modern aversion to a meritocracy was "stopping people rising" socially. Speaking of his rise from a working class family in north London to a respected academic he lamented "the destruction of the grammar school system, which was a manner of ascent in so many ways." "The English don't like intellectuals," he said. It's a very shallow society and I find it all rather sad in a way. A BBC spokesman said: "Our programmes always strive to reflect as broad a range of diversity as possible including age, background, ethnicity and gender."