On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 5:30 AM, Dave Sikula <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jan 29, 10:03 pm, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: >> I have to believe that even UK audiences recognize how bad this >> is, and I wonder why a show that otherwise seems so dedicated to quality >> would do this. Prior to this season I suspected it was part of their >> anti-Americanism, and the bad accents (and often, bad acting) helped them >> make their point that Americans are assholes. Sarah Caufield went over the >> top, even for this (unless it was just their attempt to bend over backwards >> and show that they hate Americans in the Obama era as much as in the Bush >> era). Or is there some union rule that UK television can not use American >> actors? > > Based on the shows I've seen in the West End, there's no deeper > explanation than, generally, British actors just cannot do American > accents. (Even the Americans I know who work over there find their > dialects traveling across the pond.) This especially colored (or > "coloured," I suppose) a production I saw of David Mamet's "Oleanna." > David Suchet had a pretty good dialect, but the woman who played > opposite him had some weird Brooklyn/midwestern hick hybrid, which > made the character seem unutterably stupid, completely throwing an > already-problematic play out of balance. (That said, the dialects in > "Enron" were superb.) > > If nothing else, the word "coffee" -always- trips them up.
I watched a fair amount of British TV in the eighties and the American accents are noticeably awful. I assumed speech coaches pointed out the differences between the accents, like the American stressed R and the flat short A, and the actors figured they'd sound American by exaggerating those differences. The thing is, British audiences watched enough American movies and TV and seemed to accept the actors' accents. As far as I know, it didn't bother them like it bothered me. Today, there are enough American actors living in Britain and British actors living in the US that I thought the accent problem would have gone away. I would also think that speech coaches have gotten more sophisticated. And I think of the converse situation of American actors putting on British accents. Withing two years of living outside of the US I could easily differentiate southern, midland, and northern English accents, and I was beginning to tell apart Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle accents. I don't remember any American made production where those accents were used (apart from work about the Beatles) or if there was ever the sort of dissonance where an American actor played a character who said he was from Manchester and spoke with an East Anglian accent. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
