Desperate Housewives
Bree (Marcia Cross) marries a possible murderer (Kyle MacLachlan), Mike (James Denton) is stuck in a coma and Dougray Scott pulls out the worst English accent in living memory. It's worse than Dick Van Dyke.
Goose (Tony Siragusa) has had a great time in London this week. Being a gregarious sort, he likes to barrel up to people and offer to buy them a pint in his best Dick Van Dyke 'English' accent. He seems puzzled that the response is not universally enthusiastic. "People seem to think I might be after their money or something."
"The science of speech. That’s my profession. . . . I can place any man within six miles.” That’s Henry Higgins, in Act I of “Pygmalion,” about to transform a lowly flower girl into a proper Edwardian lady. If you are a Manhattan-born starlet making your Broadway début as said flower girl, he is precisely the sort of man you don’t want in your audience. In a play about upwardly mobile speech, the accents have to be right: you don’t want to wind up sounding like Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins.” And so a real-life Higgins is called for, in this case—the Roundabout’s revival of “Pygmalion,” soon to open at the American Airlines Theatre—Majella Hurley, an English dialect coach who was brought in to help Claire Danes, as Eliza Doolittle, perfect her “not bloody likely”s and “How do you doooo?”s.
"Still, you have to wonder: Is Jupiter aligning with Mars? Is this some kind of karmic payback for Dick Van Dyke's atrocious British accent in Mary Poppins?"
"Mr Edward's altruistic behaviour appeared to have the full backing of his wife. Talking in the kind of accent not heard in London since Dick Van Dyke's 'Bert' in Mary Poppins, Jane Edwards said..."
"This summer, Radio One hammered a tune called LDN Is A Victim, which satirised how privileged and monied people have co-opted the Big Smoke's music scene. Cribbing its tune and title from Kate Nash's Caroline Is A Victim and Lily Allen's LDN, it attacked the prevalent Dick Van Dyke-style faux Jamie T/Mike Skinner patois."
