I'm good at some accents - but Geordie, Welsh and most American accents defeat me

Some accents just come to you out of the blue – for instance, you think “Brummie”, open your mouth and, after about ten seconds for adjustments, out comes a pretty decent Brummagen accent. Liverpudlian is the same: I do a pretty decent Stephen Gerard post-match interview – you know, whiny and tired and a bit depressed (and that’s when his team has won). When BBC TV News were looking for someone to do an Ulster accent for a John Cole tribute video, I got the gig. I can do a Bernard Ingham-style Yorkshire accent and a broader, all-purpose working-class Northern one. My Cornish is sort of okay, and I do a Mummerset one that would pass muster on The Archers.

Given I’m half-Scottish – and that half mainly from Glasgow – it’s not surprising that I can manage several varieties of Glaswegian, from sing-song Billy Connolly to dead-pan Alex Ferguson to refined “Kelvinsaide”. I can also do a bit of Highlander, but it tends to fall apart after about 30 seconds. And as I’ve lived most of my life in London, I can do a variety of cockney accents. And, as I’ve spent most of my life among middle-class English folk, I can do middle-class, clipped military and posh (though the demotic accent now affected by young Royals chums defeats me). As for old-style posh, the inability of many young British actors (apart from those who were brought up speaking it at home) to get anywhere close to pulling it off is a source of irritation (as is the ridiculous tendency to cast non-Scottish actors as Scottish characters – I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t enough decent Scottish actors available).

So I’ve got quite a good ear, and I’m not a bad mimic. In that case, why are there so many British accents I can’t tune into? For instance, my Welsh and Geordie always end up sounding like a truly dreadful attempt to imitate Peter Sellers on “Goodness Gracious Me”. And I can’t even get close to the appalling “innit-speak” of the modern urban teen (perhaps because I find it so ugly and rootless and hugely unappealing).

Apart from Welsh and Geordie, the accents I’d really like to be better at are American ones. I can do Mafioso, FDR/Katharine Hepburn patrician, uptight mid-West business types, a bit of frontier gibberish (“Consarnit!”), and a few other bits and bobs. But I cannot, for the life of me, just open my mouth and do any of the country’s main regional accents. I love the South – but my southern accent(s) suck. (The furthest south I got on my first visit to the States was Maryland – i.e. Merlin – and I was fascinated by the pronunciation of road as, approximately, “ra-oood” or “rowd”, but I can't even do that properly.)  I watch Fox News quite a bit – but I can’t do that ubiquitous, standard-issue, white-bread, newsreader accent which every British actor now seems to have mastered. And I can’t do any form of black American accent or Boston or Brooklyn or wherever. As for my Canadian, it’s unconvincing – H.A.L. the computer with the “out” sound replaced by “oat”.

I suppose it’s futile to ask why we can master some accents and not others: some people take to playing the piano instantly but find the violin or the guitar difficult, just as some find French easy to learn but can’t even begin to get to grips with German. Anyway, if you’re in the least bit interested in accents – Bristish or American - here are some YouTube videos I found helpful. I'll start with an English girl talking about the differences between standard and Southern American:

Here, in the second in a series of videos, is a Southerner on how to speak Southern:

Now, an English actor on how to do Geordie:

A Canadian on Received Pronunciation (not bad - but he needs to downplay the "en" in "heaven", and his Scottish accent is truly abysmal):

Finally, a demonstration of the impenetrability of some English country accents: