On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 1:45 AM, Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm not going to disagree that on British television we do get a certain > number of awful American accents. Given the amount of US TV we see, most > Brits can spot a poor American accent at 100m. > > But the odd thing is sometimes they come from actual Americans. There seems > to be a limited pool of genuinely American actors who reside permamently in > London, and who turn up as "token" Americans all the time. I don't know if > it's because they have British spouses and their accents have worn off, but > even their accents seem fake. > > That said, with voice coaches, there are plenty of Brits plying their trade > in Hollywood who seem to have perfectly fine accents. Hugh Laurie's might > not sound great to my ears, but he seems to do well. Then there are people > like Stephen Moyer (guess what I was watching over the weekend), Dominic > West and Idris Elba in The Wire, Joseph Fiennes, Eddie Izzard, Damian Lewis > and Joely Richardson to name but a few. I want to clairify that my original point was not that British actors stink at American accents - I am quite prepared to believe that they are better at the American accent than most US actors are with various flavors of British accents. There are a lot of British (and Australian, which for the purposes of this discussion is about the same thing) actors working in US televsion who do fair to great American accents. I did not even reazlie until Adam mentioned it above that Dominic West was British - his accent sounds great to my (Californian) ears. I was always impresssed also with Jamie Bamber's accent on BG, so much so that when I see him occasionally on L&O:UK my first impluse is that he is putting on a British accent. My comment was generated by the fact that there are A) a lot of British actors who do American accents either well or quite passably, and B) a lot of American actors. Given that, and given that Spooks is in every other way a show marked by its commitment to very high quality (writing, acting, directing, production values), it just seems to incongrous that they would have so consistently such really lousy American accents. A US program like 24 (a show that I enjoyed, even though it was the subject of some ridicule on this channel) would be more likely to have the kind of actor who would do a bad British accent - but then it would be much more likely to hire a British actor to do it. -- 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
