David Blunkett's idea to dub foreign TV would restrict viewing pleasure

Live subtitling certainly has its problems, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater – dubbing strips away nuance

'Blunkett’s beef is really with live subtitling, where time pressures create the kind of exaggerated typos he singles out'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

David Blunkett is correct to point out the shortcomings of television subtitling, which he has said is not meeting the needs of deaf and hearing impaired people. He is right also to say that foreign-language dramas – he must have in mind hits such as The Returned or the original Danish version of The Killing – require dubbing if they are to be intelligible to the blind. And he is not alone in identifying a prejudice by programmers toward the younger end of the market. "Today, the way TV executives worship the cult of youth seems to be an unstoppable fetish," he complains.

Reading his thoughts, though, it's hard not to wish someone was subtitling or dubbing them into a coherent argument. The problem is partly that he is conflating separate issues. A failure in subtitles doesn't happen because everyone has left the magic subtitling machine unguarded while they're off trying to please the 18-24 year-old demographic – and Blunkett's beef is really with live subtitling, where time pressures create the kind of exaggerated typos he singles out ("looking for the prince of chemical and bionicle weapons" instead of "principally chemical and biological weapons").

Most garbled of all, though, is the logic he applies to dubbing. Foreign dramas should, he says, be widely dubbed in order to increase accessibility – which is like insisting that print be replaced by braille and audiobooks for all. Surely the idea must be to raise the entire audience to the same standard where possible, not to flatten out the experience for everyone by restricting pleasure across the board.

Dubbing will be anathema to anyone who values the differing cultural textures available to us in international cinema and television. Accent, pronunciation and cadence provide invaluable subtleties of meaning; to bland those out, to buff down the rough edges into a single language, is to emasculate, inhibit and compromise. One doesn't even need to be an arthouse buff with an Institut français membership card to appreciate this point: watch (or rather, listen to) the dubbed American versions of Mad Max or Gregory's Girl and it becomes clear how significant a contribution is made by the simple match between actor and voice, dialect and locale.
Not all countries enjoy the UK's purist approach to the matter of dubbing. Some of us will have had the experience of going to the cinema in France for the first time to see an English-language film, only to neglect to differentiate in advance the meaning of "vf" ("version francais") and "vo" ("version originale") in our copy of Pariscope. My first and only time was seeing The Quick and the Dead, in which a very young Leonardo DiCaprio delivered his lines in the tobacco-ravaged tones of a man several decades his senior.

In many countries, Italy and Germany in particular, the dubbing of foreign-language films is routine and comprehensive; there is even a continuity in the process, so that the same dubbing artists will be brought back each time for their corresponding actors. In other words, there are European voice actors who "play" Will Smith or Julia Roberts or Robert De Niro in each of those actors' films.

Italy is unusual, though, in even dubbing (or "post-synching", to use the correct term for dubbing within the same language) its own films. This has a historical explanation – it is said that Mussolini insisted on foreign films being dubbed into Italian to stifle any subversive messages, and the practice simply spread to the domestic product. But there is also a scurrilous one: rumour has it that the inability of Italian crews to keep quiet during takes is one of the reasons that widespread dubbing became necessary.

It is important, though, that dubbing remains out of fashion in the UK. On a fundamental level, the dislocation between sound and image in even the most accomplished dubbing jobs undermines the verisimilitude of the viewing experience; suddenly what you see is no longer what you get. You're being fobbed off instead with the Reader's Digest abridged text, the Top of the Pops album cover version. Closed-captioning and audio description for those with visual or hearing impairments must be improved with some urgency. But allow us our differences. We will all be the poorer if we start hearing the same homogenous soundtracks