The BBC had an unofficial league table of the most loved and despised accents, the war correspondent Kate Adie has revealed. And the most hated? Brummie.

Geordie was liked, she told an audience in Sunderland, but from one end of the country to the other it was Birmingham that was particularly disliked.

Adie was speaking at an event marking the cataloguing of a huge archive of material documenting her life and career. From starting out at BBC Radio Durham to covering the Troubles, numerous wars and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, Adie was for years one of Britain’s best-known and most trusted television reporters.

Her archive of more than 2,300 objects includes dozens of notebooks as well as tapes, letters, photographs and video clips. It was donated to the University of Sunderland a number of years ago but funding to properly catalogue the items only came last year.

Adie was brought up in Sunderland but has never had a strong accent, she said. Nor did her parents, who adopted her as a baby, “or their parents”.

She said: “It is one of this country’s complex matters. Accents vary hugely and how they are received varies hugely.

“Years and years ago the BBC had an unofficial league table of the most liked and the most hated accents.

“The view was that some of them drove people nuts up and down the country. Geordie did pretty well. It’s liked.”

Adie asked the audience to guess what the most disliked accent was. A chorus of “Birmingham” followed. They were correct, Adie said.

“From one end of the country to another, it’s Birmingham! Michael Buerk, who comes from Birmingham, was once asked why he didn’t use the accent. He said, ‘I didn’t want death threats’.”

She said dissertations could be written on news programme accents, recalling her days at BBC Radio Durham when a locally accented producer would read the bulletin. “We got complaints from everywhere. The whole range of audience. They felt it wasn’t right for news. It is a curious one.”

Her big break came as duty reporter in May 1980, during the Iranian embassy siege. Her coverage was groundbreaking but did not make her an instant star, she said. “I was sent off to a pools winner the next day.”

The archive includes a bullet that grazed Adie when she was reporting from Tiananmen Square but said her worst moment was in Belfast where she thought she had been shot in the face, dropped down and assumed she was going to die.

Then she heard her cameraman shouting: “Get up! Get up! You’ve been hit in the face by a potato!”

The archive shines a light on Adie’s happy childhood – “lots of tennis” – and her time at the National Youth Theatre, which was not quite the Shakespearean study group her teacher had imagined.

It was instead a large group of “randy 17- and 18-year-olds,” she said. “We had fun.”

Adie recalled the theatre having people from all backgrounds. She remembered meeting a memorably quirky girl. “I wonder what happened to Helen Mirren?”

The University of Sunderland said the cataloguing essentially “unlocks” the Adie collection. It includes images from her first BBC job in 1968 at Durham where her annual salary was £934 a year and its first story was a pigeon race.

She went on to BBC jobs in Plymouth, Bristol and the south coast where she was tipped off about a double murder in Brighton. She and her crew captured great footage but her news editor in Southampton was unimpressed – she was meant to be covering an embroidery exhibition in Ditchling.

She was sacked, she said, but by chance a national news editor rang her to see if she was free for a shift and she told him about the murder and she joined the London newsroom.

David Bell, the university’s vice-chancellor and chief executive, said Adie was one of the most talented broadcasters of her, or any, generation and there were plans to digitise key strands of the collection.

“By unlocking the Kate Adie collection this way, the university hopes to educate and inspire audiences, both young and old, with the accomplishments of a Sunderland-raised pioneer in her field.”

Adie admitted she was something of a hoarder. “I’m just one of those people who goes to clear the attic and then never does.”

Adie is 79 but can still be heard presenting From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.

Asked about the state of news reporting today, she said she would love to see a small radio station in every UK town providing local information.

“I think every area of this country, except London, is badly reported. I think a lot of places are neglected, seriously. I’ve seen a thing in New Zealand where the local newspaper is on the same building floor as the local TV and the local radio. They all work together and it works. It is wonderful and it is not expensive.”