Historian Says Posh Accents Ruin Period Dramas
At this year's Hay Festival, Jane Tranter – former executive vice-president of programming and production at the BBC and current producer of Austen adaptation The Other Bennet Sister – said actors 'start speaking posh' when they get a Pride And Prejudice -era script in their hands.
'Not everybody spoke posh in those days, so you have to work with that as well,' she shared (via The Times).
Pinched voices, fussy hairdos, and 'weird hats' can risk leading to 'such a fetishised approach that it becomes a barrier between the audience and what is going on,' she adds.
So, we spoke to author and historian Katie Kennedy (of viral account @TheHistoryGossip and new SKY History series History Crush) about what we lose when costume drama accents all start to sound the same.
It's not an isolated trend
Kennedy tells us the tendency isn't limited to period costume dramas.
'It is widely known that the acting industry is dominated by the middle and upper classes,' she says.
In 2024, the Sutton Trust found that people from working-class backgrounds were four times less likely than their middle-class peers to work in any creative industry.
BAFTA-nominated actors are five times more likely to have gone to private school than the general public.
'While this is an issue in itself,' Kennedy continued, 'it also heavily influences how history gets portrayed on screen.
'We've been sold this idea that everyone in the past was super polished and polite, and we've equated that with the classic RP [received pronunciation] accent.'
That's not to say you can't change up voices, actors, stories, or perspectives, especially in looser adaptations like Bridget Jones (expertly nicked from Pride And Prejudice) – but would-be 'faithful' adaptations tend to sound distractingly, and sometimes inaccurately, similar.
Take, the historian says, the 2022 film Emily.
'The Brontës are portrayed with soft-spoken middle-class voices, even though they most likely would've had an Irish or at least an Irish/Yorkshire mixed accent as their father was Irish,' she shares.
Indeed, Charlotte Brontë's friend Mary Taylor said the author 'spoke with a strong Irish accent,' while the British Film Institute admits star Emma Mackey 's 'Yorkshire accent sporadically wanders down the M1″ in the movie.
'A lot of the time' in period dramas, 'the working-class accent has been attributed to comic relief, or a character who has had a troubled life,' she tells HuffPost UK.
'When everyone in a period drama speaks the same, you're not just losing historical accuracy, you're also reinforcing the idea that the only 'serious' or 'worthy' people in history were the ones who 'spoke properly.''
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