On 31/5/04 11:28 am, in article , "Kay
Easton" wrote:

In article , Sacha
writes
snip
Irish and Cockney accents
for Diarmuid and Joe - nothing else left, really. ;-) Somehow, Geoff
Hamilton got by with a spade and fork and dirty hands. Nowadays, they'd
probably tell him to have a perm, or something. Even Tommy's had a 'hair
do'.

Hey - that's overstating it a bit! Irish and cockney accents a
'gimmick'? - (good job you didn't say 'lancashire' else you'd have been
well taken to task ;-) )

LOL. Gimmick in the sense that I think the ethnic bit is rather over-played
as part of a personality cult - we have the fiery, argumentative Irishman
and the cheeky chappie Cockney stuff. I don't like Diarmuid Gavin's voice
because I find he swallows his words and is hard to follow which rather
defeats the object of a telly or radio commentator and for me all this
having to be a 'personality' is really just annoying and a distraction from
the business in hand - gardening. Perhaps that's why I and many others
appear to prefer Monty Don - he doesn't wear weird clothes, pull strange
faces and muck about with fellow presenters - he talks about gardening. Or
- wait! Maybe there's a sinister plot! Maybe that's his gimmick. ;-)
Come to think of it, if they did a serious veg gardening programme, perhaps
they *would* use a northern accent - northerners being perceived as thrifty,
hard-working wo/men of the soil as opposed to the flighty southerners
worrying about their pelargoniums. ;-)

--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds after garden to email me)