Watching Jamie Redknapp and his cousin Frank on the television at the weekend I found myself asking the rhetorical question, where did they get those accents?
Jamie was born in Barton-on-Sea, the same small town as Janis, he went to school in Christchurch, at the same school Nathalie attends and spent time with his Dad in Seattle before a professional career that took in Bournemouth, Liverpool, Spuds and then Southampton. Now he speaks with the same Cockney accent as his Dad who was born in Canning Town and spent the first thirty years of his life in the East End.
Now take his cousin Frank. Well like me Frank was born in Romford and he famously attended Brentwood School whose alumni include Jack Straw, Sir Robin Day, Grigg Rhys Jones, Noel Edmonds and Jodie Marsh. Yet to listen to Frank you'd get the impression that he's desperate to 'get down with his homies' and sound just like JT who must be a rival to Paul Merson in the Mr Thickie competition. Frank was a stellar student, Frank snr doesn't speak like the son of a docker and yet Chelsea's finest just talks with that lazy accent beloved of wannabee East Enders.
It made me think of the whole accent concept. When we were in Paris, Nathalie and I were waiting to go on the Big Wheel and this woman in front turned to me and said "Excuse me are you Steve?" When I said, "Yes, but only if you're Claudia," she said, "Oh Sorry, it's just that he would be you age and you sound like him." - It's okay I lied about the Claudia bit. Well I've lived all but seven years of my life in Dorset, surrounded for the most part by people who were born and bred in the county but when I hear my voice on tape I hear somebody who grew up in the Home Counties.
So I guess that just like Frank and Jamie, I'm concealing the real me beneath the accent I feel gives me some sort of credibility and the one I think people should hear.
5 comments:
I once knew a bloke with two accents. He had one for conversing with people in general and then another for use when at home in a tiny tucked away place where the locals have a distict accent.
Strange.
My old boss used to change his voice when he talked to 'posh' clients - I think it was more subsconscious than anything else but it used to amuse us no end.
Now you see I totally disagree with you on this. I can't imagine how Scottish people who have lived in say High Wycombe for 35 years still have a Scottish accent!
I'm English. My family went to Australia when I was a kid, I was 90 when we went 15 when we returned. For a few months I sounded like an Aussie.
Then that was it. I sounded like every other stuck up kid in a British boarding school. Then I went to Uni and mingled a bit.
Now I sound like the person I am talking to. Exactly. Always. I can't help it. My current accent is always the last one I heard.
Totally confuses the aspirational 'Enry 'Iggins's amongst us!
Not 90 actually! 9!
I had a girfriend who went to Oz when she was 3, came home when she was 12 and sounded Australian for about a year.
I think Jamie must be some sort of human sponge, he's never lived in London - even when he was at Spuds he didn't live there - but he sounds like a Londoner.
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