to hate how British people are portrayed in American TV programmes?

[500DaysofAutumn]

I've just finished watching an episode of Desperate Housewives, and it the one where Ian who is English has his English parents come and visit him and Susan.

They have a barbeque and Ian's father says -

"So one puts one meat on top of the burning coal? How wonderfully primal"

.... erm ... we may not have hot weather all year round but I'm sure most of us in the UK know what a barbeque is.

Also Ian won a poker games with a hand of "sevens and knaves" to which Carlos replies "we call them JACKS!"

• I've never known Jacks as Knaves.

Don't even get me started on Emily from Friends.

(I know it's just fiction but still )

Grapes, I haven't been everywhere in Scotland but in the places I have, other than Glasgow, I've been able to understand people. I'm just pointing out that saying I should have qualified my comment in terms of knowledge you have but I don't is odd and not possible. I do not live in your head. Similarly, again, you have knowledge I don't about some other parts of Scotland. That's interesting information, which hou are able to contribute to the discussion but utterly bizarre to expect someone else to have exactly the same knowledge base.

That's fine to say as long as its not the case that the only other place you've visited is Edinburgh.
Anyway, I guess my point was a bit defensive of my DH because he does come up against this a lot from people who have only ever heard a lot of slang accents or have an image of Rab C Nesbitt in their head. He has had colleagues express surprise that they can understand him despite never visiting the city and another two who were worried about a weeks work based at the university. He was actually dismayed when they turned to him and told him they thought they might need him to interpret for them but that was not the case.

It's the same as the poster earlier on saying that she's from Essex but sounds nothing like people's perception of an Essex accent.

Meant to add that I'm from Surrey and the only UK accent I have ever struggled to understand was the accent in Aberdeenshire. I think they have their own distinct dialect which is different even from people living in the city of Aberdeen.

It's to do with Doric isn't it?

Have you ever heard the actress Joyce Falconer speak? Her accent is very distinctive!

Yes, just texted DH and he said its Doric. He says it's like a semi language in that some words sound English with an accent and others completely different. Though I guess that's the same perhaps to a lesser extent, with most dialects.

YANBU, it's bloody annoying, they seem incapable of catching on that we don't all talk identically in the TV studios! What gets me is that I realise that there are hundred sof dialects and accents in other countries depending on region, this is obvious because it happens in our own country, so why do TV producers not seem to understand this?
Though the same goes for many other stereotypes though. The Middle Eastern ones terrorist in the making to most tV channels piss me off the most though.

mrsjay: Omid Djalili has played everything Middle Eastern but an Iranian it seems The US's equivalent of him, Maz Jobrani, has refused to play stereotypical Middle Easterner's for a few years now as he was getting pissed off with it!

coola: He was brilliant in Bones (RIP Mr Nigel Murray, I cried).

Clara: did not realise that Andrew Lincoln was a Brit! He looks completely different to his character in teachers and pulls off an American accent very well!

Beyond: I've seen and heard American's complaining about Hugh Laurie's 'British Accent' before, had a full blown argument about it that only ended by me dragging the girl to the IT lab at college to convince her. She suggested that whoever wrote the wikipedia article was confused

Flobba: That nanny is ridiculous, and the actress is supposedly British!

Grapes: I struggle with strong Glaswegian and strong central Scottish accents. I can understand them but I have to really concentrate and take a moment to think about the context

I'm from Essex and sound nothing like a stereotypical Essex-girl! Most of the time people don't believe me when I say I lived in Essex for the first 18 years of my life! The disbelief got a lot worse when TOWIE started though

I had a Canadian get very angry at me for not being able to tell she was Canadian by her writing style once. Now that is far-fetched!

I love love love the British ER Doctor in Nurse Jackie...

Can't remember her name or the actress but she is fab.

There's a funny scene in The Wire where McNulty (Dominic West, putting on a [not-so-great] American accent for the rest of the series) goes undercover as a sort of Hugh-Grant-style foppish English businessman complete with horrendous generic 'English' accent. They are really playing up to the usual representation of British people on American programmes.

"I am a Canadian. Most of the time I cannot tell the difference between a Canadian and American accent. I'm a bit that several people above on this thread claim they can do it!"

But Canadians have that very specific pronounciation of 'house', 'mouse' and 'about' that Americans don't have. Chances are you won't hear them say that in a one-off conversation! But if you work with one, or spend any sort of time with one, wouldn't you soon pick up on that?

I do sort of know what you mean though..l Atfter 13 years of living in the UK i couod spit a tegional accent at a 100 paces, but on returning home I did sometimes find it difficult to distinguish Kiwi and Australian accents.

The thing about our accents - and I think this applies to Australian ones as well - is that there are no really distinct regional variations (yes, OK, Southerners roll their Rs). Instead, people have varying degrees of the accent. Some people have really quite soft accents... And others have very, very strong, nasal, twangy, vowels-doing-all-sorts-of-weird-contortions accents.

So if you get a soft-accented person, it's not always easy to distinguish. And yes, the Border Control peeps do generally have stronger accents!

The worst accents I have heard on tv recently were in season 3 of Sons of Anarchy. I absolutely love the show, but they had a few episodes where some of the club had gone to Belfast for some shady gun deal with the IRA. The accents of some of the Irish characters made my ears bleed. I know its not an easy accent but they seemed to veer from Belfast to Newcastle via the West Country. Arrrrggghh! And the fact that other than some shots of random blokes on motorbikes driving through NI, most of those scenes were clearly shot in California.

Thankfully the worst offender was killed off- probably by the accent police

Ok then, I'll share another raging cliche that I have experienced personally... visiting Inverness where some bloke said to me (exactly as I'd been told someone would), 'do you know where the very best English in the world is spoken? Do you? Inverness!'. I don't know if there is a team of blokes employed especially to approach visitors and tell them this. I suspect they are self appointed.

What defines best?

Ok then, I'll share another raging cliche that I have experienced personally... visiting Inverness where some bloke said to me (exactly as I'd been told someone would), 'do you know where the very best English in the world is spoken? Do you? Inverness!'. I don't know if there is a team of blokes employed especially to approach visitors and tell them this. I suspect they are self appointed.

lottiegarbanzo I have been told that very thing by several Inverness-ers too! When did they decide this??

I live in Inverness and various locals have told me the same thing. I don't know who decided it but I'm fairly certain they were mistaken.

MarthasHarbour John Cleese didn't play Stephen Waltham in Friends. It was Tom Conti. But yes he was a bumbling drunk.

Surely it's because the average American can't understand a localized UK accent? I've lived in the US for 6 years and I struggle to understand then now too!!

John Cleese, played Lyle Finster in Will and Grace, he was Karens ex husband, his daughter was played by Minnie Driver.