James Bond and Saintly legend, Sir Roger Moore, has recently had a pop at TV for the apparent demise among the acting profession of the RP Accent (received pronunciation) or “Queen’s English”, as it’s often called.
For Queen('s English) and country: Jolly old not-so-jolly Roger Moore
Sir Bond is ever so miffed at this and claims that more actors are being denied work because their spiffing accents are, well, too posh for those cantankerous casting directors.
He goes on to say that his daughter, Deborah, has been turned down for acting work in as she “is not regional in her speech”, and goes on to cite TV as the main culprit. Shows like Holby City and Casualty that peddle the proletariat “Estuary English” are apparently the offenders in chief.
Hang on. Estuary? That phrase sounds like it implies “dirty English” to me, but it was actually coined by Liverpool born Phonetician, John C. Wells.
Anyway, I find this moan frightfully spurious indeed. Actors are required (supposed) to switch their accents whenever the role requires, after all.
Now, I don’t want to witness the demise of the traditional English accent, nor do I want to unduly have a dig at Sir Roger, but I’d never have sat through Snatch if everybody in it sounded like Leslie Phillips. You see, regional accents should be celebrated, regardless of how common or confusing they may seem to some people.
Conversely, I would have actually made it through Pirates of the Caribbean if Johnny Depp could do a real “Landan” accent …me old mayte.
I wonder what Sir Ian McKellen (or Magneto and Gandalf in Hollywood parlance) would make of Sir Roger’s recent rant. After all, he speaks awfully good Queen’s, yet when he appeared on Corrie (Coronation Street, the longest running soap opera in the world), he did so with a thick northen (Yorkshire) accent, liiike.
You could argue that television (and the entire acting profession) has simply caught up with real life and as such, has all but ditched Sir Roger’s beloved “west end” accents in favour those who can do more suitable, cooler and (say it quietly) more credible accents.
Do you think the Queen’s English is “real English”, as Sir Roger Does, or do you think such snobbery is poppycock (nonsense)? Leave a comment.
English has now virtually become a universal language, and is one of the most widely spoken language in the world, second to Chinese Putonghua. Affected by local culture, Spoken English deviates by different loacalities, mostly in terms of accent, some have even merged with the local dialects and developed entirely new languages though based on English. Even in Britain, I understand that the younger generation can no longer pronounce English words properly as their older generation once did. Language always evolves in time, I am quite sure that Queen’s English today might be taken as a foreign language for Englishmen who lived a millenium ago. So why bother preseving it?