Re: "Melodramatic" 's a word I rarely use when out 'edgeng, whoa ho.

It's always been a puzzle to me why we have so many different accents in TA.
It's not just where Ambridge is, somewhere SW of Brum in my mind's eye, it's
the difference between how the long term residents speak. All the Archer
family to a greater or lesser degree have home counties accents, apart from
Roof of course, poor girl, not her fault. The Grundies have mixed Brummie/
Mummerset accents, and Moike sounds Gloucestershireish. Neil (Where he?)
sounds like he came from Norfolk. The Archer family have been farming in the
area since God was a lad as far as I know, so why no local accent for any of
them? Perhaps it's to do with how often they are abducted by aliens and how
long said aliens keep them away.

It's a funny thing that even in this most politically correct era, one
figure it's still possibly to portray in insultingly naff caricatures
is the Yokel. They would never dream of having (say) an Asian
character played by a non-Asian actor, even if the character had no
Asian accent, or someone non-posh playing a posh character unless they
could manage the accent convicingly, but any old nonsense will do for
the labouring classes. A few ooh-arrs and Bob's your uncle. So you
have characters who have grown up in the same village or even the same
house all speaking with these wildly different accents, everything from
Wummerset to Brummie to Lancashire (in the case of Tom and Kirsty).

Another notable phenomenon is that only very common people speak with a
local accent. Anyone with any education or money, and any kind of
authority figure higher than a traffic warden, speaks posh: vets,
doctors, estate agents, magistrates, men from the ministry, inspectors
and experts of all sorts. "Foreign" accents are allowed -- Irish,
Scottish, Yorkshire or whatever -- but not local ones. The SWs can
cope with the idea of people in other places growing up speaking local
and still getting "good" jobs, but not in Ambridge where the same dated
old upstairs-downstairs mentality exists, no matter how with-it and
realistic the SWs would like to think they are in social matters.
There are occasional vulgar nouveau-riche types like Woolley and
Crawfurd, but they are foreigners, big-city types. Even that
Malcolm(?) bloke, Tom's burger-van rival, talks like a bank-manager.
And you can bet any actual bank-manager will have been to Eton and
Oxbridge. A notable exception is Roy Tucker, a yokel who has acquired
a degree of some kind and is presumably on course to manage a posh(ish)
hotel one day. But if he'd entered the series already in that
capacity, you can bet he wouldn't speak like that.

I vaguely recall that David, Shula, Kenton & Lizzie all went to posh
schools.

But their parents were already posh (stratospherically so if you listen
to the "lost" 1960s episodes). Where did *they* acquire their toffy
tones? Certainly not at university -- has any Archer been to
university, unless you count Harper-Adams, and in fact did anyone in
Ambridge study for a degree before Debbie and Roy? Not counting
whatever evening-classes Pat attended in her feminist phase. Dan and
Doris were card-carrying cowpokes but all their offspring (I don't
remember Jack Archer) are straight out of Borsetshire Life.

Harry

.

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