Posted by Peter Hyland on May 08, 2012 at 03:54:27 user Peter_H.
In Reply to: Re: S&A 1974 Film - a retrospective view posted by Peter Ceresole on May 07, 2012 at 13:55:20:
'Bleckett' would be a pretty typical pronunciation.
Maybe, but not in the north of England. I shouldn't have used the word "refined" - this is a regional issue not a class issue. Even if Nancy had been sent to boarding school and been taught RP, she would have used short 'A's. Newsreel commentaries at that time were spoken by actors in London and the south, and yes they did pronounce a flat 'a' as an 'e'. But anyone going round the Lake District calling themselves "Nency" and saying "on the port teck" would have sounded very pretentious.
For that reason I think Sophie Neville got it spot-on. Accents are tricky in a 'period' story like SA, but here the children used RP without the quirky 'e' for 'a' with the result that viewers today can relate to them just as they did in the 1970s. Perhaps because Kit Seymour was a bit older than the others, she couldn't lose those 'e's. It is a very minor blemish.
(By the way, even the Queen has mostly lost her old 'e for a' accent. Listen to an old recording of her soon after she came to the throne!)