A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a "brilliance that isn't there", says Stephen Fry. So is a British accent the route to success in the United States? "Gee, I just love your accent.
" Any Brit crossing the Atlantic will have heard that line many times. Like the rest of us, Americans are rarely immune to the charms of an accent different from their own. There's the amusement value of listening to someone who sounds like they might just punctuate their sentences with "oh, behave".
And a British accent can conjure up a stereotype of a polite, droll, self-effacing race. "I shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there." Fry - who puts his own melodious tones down to having "vocal cords made of tweed" - made the suggestion after seeing a "blitz of Brits" scoop many of this year's Golden Globes and Oscars.
His comments come as a new generation of British stars are trying to prove themselves in the US, while staying true to their regional roots (and more are landing plum jobs in US hit shows with accents other than their own). About to try their luck are Ant and Dec, who will record the pilot of a new ABC game show - not a bad score in a country where they are best known for a brief cameo playing themselves in Love Actually, and as tone-deaf American Idol contestants playing a joke on judge Simon Cowell, currently the US's favourite pantomime limey baddie. The network hopes they will enjoy more success than previous imports Anne Robinson and Johnny Vaughan - his 2005 game show My Kind of Town was cancelled after four episodes, with entertainment industry paper The Hollywood Reporter describing the Londoner as "heavily accented (and equally heavily annoying)".
Another Brit currently feted in the US is Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen, who gave Rolling Stone a rare interview as himself, rather than in character. The magazine was much taken with his "deep, genteel British accent", which in the UK might be described as educated north London. "For most Americans, there's no distinction between British accents.
For us, there's just one sort of British accent, and it's better than any American accent - more educated, more genteel," says Rosina Lippi-Green, a US academic and author of English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. "It's a way of speaking that is all tied up with the Old Country, the Queen." This perception extends to any UK accent, she says, divorcing the voice from any regional or class associations it might carry for a fellow Brit.
"There was a sitcom called Dead Like Me with a Brit [Callum Blue] in it. He was a scruffy, 20-something drug dealer. Even he had that sort of patina - his was not an RP accent, it was a working class London accent.
" As for Parminder Nagra, plucked from Bend It Like Beckham to star in ER with her soft Midlands accent intact: "Oh, she's thought to be very, very classy, very Oxbridge." And Simon Cowell, currently minting it as an American Idol judge? "He's the classic stereotype of a stuck-up Englishman - and stuck-up is something that goes with that perception of Britishness.
" As is the English butler. Henry Pryor, the founder of primemove.co.
uk and the Register Of Estate Agents, worked for Savills International in the late 1980s and early 90s, helping wealthy US buyers purchase flashy apartments in Docklands, gracious town houses and country piles in the UK. "Our accents added a huge amount to what they thought they were buying into. This was the age of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Brideshead Revisited - and Arthur, in which John Gielgud played a butler.
They approached having an English broker in the same way as having an English tailor or butler - it was a trophy of sorts." And with a classic public school accent, Mr Pryor played up his Englishness. "It added cache - you were buying a piece of English real estate from a guy who spoke just like Hugh Grant, and might look foppishly like him.
I suspect it's the flipside of what my mother's generation found during World War II - the English seduced by American accents." Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman is currently recording his fourth series of the US version of the BBC show, Dancing with the Stars. He describes his own voice and choice of phrases as Cockney.
"Part of the reason they wanted me was my accent. Along with Bruno Tonioli, who's Italian, it lends the judging panel a cosmopolitan edge." But he has modified the way he talks.
"I do have to speak more slowly, and I play up to it. I might say 'that wasn't my cup of tea' or 'give it a bit of welly'. They love those quirky phrases.
" As one who could never be described as sounding like the Queen (or Hugh Grant), Goodman finds that his regional accent often confuses listeners. "I get asked if I'm Australian." So does Alison Walters, an immigration lawyer in Los Angles.
"They don't know how to distinguish between a regional accent and a 'neutral' British accent." But she enjoys feeling unique, and says that people are more friendly, and treat her with respect. "You do get preferential treatment and more of people's time, but I do think that is also down to our manners - saying please and thank you.
" Then there's the perception that a British accent equals a brain the size of a planet - a perception reinforced by the not-uncommon belief that for the British, English is a second language. "From time to time I was complimented on how quick I was to quick up the language," says Mr Pryor. Ms Walters adds that as the average American has a hard time following what she's saying, "perhaps the perception of being more intelligent comes from the fact they only understand 50% of what you are uttering".
Add your comments on this story, using the form below. I've been living and working in the States for four years. People constantly comment on my accent and the company I work for like to have me answer their phones because they think my voice sounds professional.
I have been asked a few times where I learned to speak English so well before I moved to the States though, despite me saying I am from England.
Sarah, Louisville, Kentucky, US Married to an expat Brit, I can tell you he gets preferential treatment at a lot of places, especially during interviews for work. It's gotten to the point where I've thought about affecting a British accent myself (which I can impersonate quite well after ten years of marriage)just so I can get a cushy job as well.
Of course on the flipside, he often gets frustrated when the employees a the local McDonalds don't understand a word he says and they get his order all wrong and my order is happily correct...
Ainy, Baltimore, US Oh how true! and how unfair! My British wife still bowls over the gullible Americans at every turn with her cute Scots-Irish accent.
Free coffees, better tables in restaurants, better service, and on and on ad nausea. Our recent four years living in York got me no such treatment in kind with my cute and quiet American accent. Oh well, time to just give up and cheerfully hang on her coattails for the perquisites.
News RSS