The north of England has been prominent in news bulletins all year, from the Tory demolition of Labour’s “red wall” to the wrangling over HS2 and the flooding in the Calder valley.

Why then, the Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan has asked, are there no newsreaders with northern English accents?

Writing in the Radio Times, McMillan said that although the north was now central to the news agenda, people from the area “can’t be trusted with t’autocue, tha knows”.

He argued that while TV commissioners understood the importance of representing the north in drama – whether leafy south Manchester in Cold Feet or the love lives of ageing Yorkshire folk in Last Tango in Halifax – they are hesitant to employ people with northern accents to read the news.

“Seismic and nuanced shifts in political culture are happening at the top end of England and this historic earth tremor will be rattling the pots on the sideboard for years to come,” he said.

“The north is a ventriloquist’s dummy and the south is in control of the speaking mouth. Newsreaders from the north aren’t reading the news about themselves because, well, there aren’t any. And there haven’t been since the sainted Wilfred Pickles, unmistakably from Halifax, last read a bulletin on the Home Service during the second world war,” wrote McMillan, the author of Collins Chelp and Chunter: a Guide to the Tyke Tongue.

“So, come on, people in charge: let a northern voice read the news, and not just the news about the north.”

There have been prominent newsreaders with northern English heritage, such as the late Peter Sissons who grew up in Liverpool as a friend of the Beatles. But while a Welsh burr appears welcome on the News at Ten – at least when it belongs to Huw Edwards – Sissons had long cast off his scouse accent by the time he made it on air.

When northerners do make it on to serious news programmes they are occasionally mocked for their accents. Reviewing Radio 4’s Any Questions? in the Sunday Times this weekend, Gillian Reynolds described the presenter Chris Mason as being “best known as a reliable political reporter with a slight speech defect and a faint Yorkshire impediment”.

Mason, who grew up in Grassington, North Yorkshire, has previously spoken of how, in an age when there is a greater awareness that broadcasting needs to sound like its audience, speaking like a northerner helped him get the job.

Shortly after taking over as presenter of Any Questions? last November – a marked change from his predecessor, Jonathan Dimbleby – he told the Radio Times: “When have you ever heard on a news programme somebody with a West Country accent? I can’t think of a single person, and that’s mad. How many people with a Brummie accent? Or a geordie accent?

“There’s hardly any. It’s absolutely absurd. We’re broadcasting to a country with this incredibly rich diversity of voices and accents, and we hardly hear any of them broadcasting on the national airwaves.”