It is every British TV viewer's inalienable right to watch their favourite programmes while leaning in closer and closer to the screen while screwing their faces up, but perhaps not for much longer. BBC director general Tony Hall has vowed to put an end to actors who insist on mumbling incomprehensibly throughout their scenes. With an entire species under threat of extinction, all we can really do is celebrate these lazily enunciating thespians while we still can. Here, then, are the five greatest TV mumblers of the modern age. We may never see their kind again.

Ray Winstone, Great Expectations

The majority of the BBC's 2011 Dickens adaptation was upsettingly comprehensible. Gillian Anderson gave it a good go as Miss Havisham, clearly pronouncing the first syllable of each word and then collapsing into a fit of exhausted sighing, but only Ray Winstone's Magwitch was truly impossible to understand. Less a reading and more the sound of 12 tectonic plates simultaneously clearing their throats, it was always completely impossible to work out what Winstone was saying. Good for him.

Idris Elba, The Wire

He may be gruffer as DCI Luther, and working with a less recognisable accent in his new Mandela film, but Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in The Wire managed to hit the mumbling actor's holy trinity – drowsy mouth movements, an affected accent and slang that you couldn't unpick even with subtitles (watch one minute, four seconds into this video). His star is on the ascent, but Elba's best days as a world-class mumbler are sadly long behind him.

Joey Essex, Towie

Proving that actors aren't the only TV stars to talk as if they've got 20 hot chestnuts packed into their mouths is Joey Essex from The Only Way is Essex. His turn on last year's Towie live special (watch from 52 seconds in to this video) was a masterclass of the form. Every sentence started with a noise like a peeved cat, or a baptist healer in the throes of glossolalia, then built to a wordless shambles before dying of loneliness. Experts could spend decades trying to work out precisely what Joey Essex was trying to say, and they'd still end up none the wiser.

Everyone in the penultimate scene of every episode, Doctor Who

The theory goes that if anyone actually hears a single word that is spoken during the penultimate scene of any Doctor Who episode – the scene where everything gets explained – then everyone would see the show for the sham that it is and stop watching. This is why everyone involved colludes not only to mumble their lines in this scene (watch from 18 seconds in), but to babble them as well. And the show has a failsafe in place, just in case the actors slip up and accidentally say something clearly – the score gets jacked up to such an absurd degree that viewers are forced to abandon any pretence that they know what's happening. Perfect.

Eddie Redmayne, Birdsong

And then we have the great granddaddy of all television mumbling: the BBC's adaptation of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Never have so many dedicated such effort to being understood by so few. It's almost as if Eddie Redmayne was allergic to microphones, such was the herculean effort he put into his mumbling (start watching seven minutes in). He didn't move either his jaw or his tongue for the duration of the entire thing, preferring to deliver his lines via a series of strangulated squeaks from the back of his throat. At times it was impossible even to know which language he was speaking, let alone what was going on. Congratulations, Eddie. Or, as you prefer it: cghhluhn uhduh.

Name your favourite TV mumblers below