Bloomin' accents American TV can't seem to resist that British inflection. Imported actors are popping up in all the hot shows, and the BBC has just landed. What's the attraction?


By Lance Gould
FOR THE INQUIRER

Imagine: The camera's eye, deep in the African savanna, captures a lion stalking a gazelle. Suddenly, the apparent prey turns to face the hunter, and you brace yourself for one of nature's brutal survivalist encounters. "Good day, Clive!" says the gazelle. "Say hullo to the missus, Nigel," retorts the King of the Jungle.

No, that will never actually transpire on camera -- even though the Discovery channel and the British Broadcasting Corp. are now a team.

Last month's $565 million deal that brought the BBC to these shores (BBC America has begun rolling out across the country and can now be seen in San Francisco, Chicago and Kansas City) is merely the latest circumstance to upset the natural order of Americ an entertainment. The U.S. is arguably in the middle of another pop-culture British Invasion -- this one subtler and more insidious than the one launched 30-odd years ago.

There are no cute moptops or ghastly paisley pants this time around. Instead, all that's needed to satisfy the purveyors of popular art and the American public, it seems, is an accent.

The trend is most conspicuous on television, where, apparently, just casting a Brit can raise a show's ratings.

NBC signed popular English actress Helen Baxendale to a six-week stint on Friends as Ross' love interest. (The network's first choice, popular English actress Patsy Kensit, had a scheduling conflict and backed out.)

In the hottest show on network television, Fox's Ally McBeal, Ally has sought the counsel of a "smile therapist" portrayed by British comic Tracey Ullman.

The hottest show on cable, Comedy Central's South Park, has a recurring animated character called Phillip, or Pip, whom the other chaps, er, kids, ridicule in increasingly harsh ways. In June, the cable network will introduce the animated E nglish series Bob and Margaret.

Even the nation's highest-rated TV program, NBC's ER, couldn't help but tinker with its lineup last fall; the producers imported British actress Alex Kingston, who plays Dr. Elizabeth Corday, to the Chicago-based medical show. On a recent episode, Corday's character went so far as to drag her colleague and lust object, Dr. Peter Benton (Eriq La Salle), to a British-style pub for a game of darts and two pints of Pimms.

On CBS alone, Northern Ireland's Roma Downey stars in Touched by an Angel; England's Jane Seymour is Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and London-born Charles Shaughnessy, as Mr. Sheffield, will soon wed his children's caretaker, The Nan ny.

'Characters and eccentrics'

NBC's Frasier features England's Jane Leeves as indispensable home health care aide Daphne Moon. On ABC's The Drew Carey Show, Drew's officious boss, Nigel Wick, is portrayed by Craig Ferguson, who hails from Glasgow, Scotland. And Anth ony Stewart Head, who played an all-American guy in a famous coffee commercial, is using the clipped speech of his native land on UPN's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he plays a "watcher" named Giles.

What's the appeal?

"There is a general view of Britain as a theme park of quaint characters and eccentrics," said Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist and self-described "immigrant" by way of Portsmouth, England. "Audiences have some familiarity and affection for thi s slightly cracked, slightly offbeat English stock character, and it is easily understandable to Americans."

Hitchens also thinks Americans suffer from a classic class envy.

"If you're a developer in, say, Texas," he said, "and you want to create a new suburban community, it's as likely as not that you are going to call it Waverly, Salisbury, or Stratford. Americans use the term 'class' to imply that something has class. The world of Martha Stewart, Oxford marmalade, Shakespeare, Beefeaters, gardens, thatch and tweed, single-malt Scotch. That is their vision of Britain. Masterpiece Theater is the perfect example: the leather armchair, the books all bound in lea ther, the military photographs, the mahogany furniture -- it is a knockoff of an English country house. You know you are in safe hands."

It seems there is a certain snob appeal about a British accent that Americans really respond to. The accent bestows an immediate sense of superiority in culture and intellect that the shows' producers and writers can semaphore to the audience with mi nimal effort.

"It's that old cliche that a British accent represents intelligence, breeding and refinement," agreed Jonathan Bernstein, an entertainment writer from Glasgow now living in Brooklyn. "A British accent is also a good punching bag. Someone with a British a ccent is usually stiff, reserved, pale, and a good butt of a joke. You want an authority figure to mock. I think Brits come in handy for that."

Laurie Gilbert, the agent for a number of British actors in Hollywood, Helen Baxendale among them, said, "The talent in London is so incredibly trained that it was just a matter of time before American executives discovered them.

"Here in the States, there has to be a hook for someone to get their own show -- either they were a stand-up comic or a failed film star. That seems to be the trend here. They'll give someone a TV deal who has never seen a microphone before. But in Brit ain, they have to really, really work. They work anywhere they can. They become stars just by sheer hard, hard work. It is hard to become a star overnight there -- the Spice Girls notwithstanding."

Case in point: In a popular recent commercial, even the flag-bearer of American TV himself, Jerry Seinfeld, had to immerse himself in British culture so that he could learn the proper way to get laughs on the other side of the Atlantic.

Note to NBC executives: having lost Seinfeld and football, you may want to consider pursuing the broadcast rights to cricket matches.