I Am Very British

aka: Received Pronunciation

"People tell me, 'Oh, I love your accent!' So I tell them, 'Well, actually, I don't have an accent; I'm from England. This is just how words sound when they're pronounced properly.'"

— Jimmy Carr

The tendency of English or British characters in American works to speak with upper-class accents (the academic term is Received Pronunciation; more colloquially, it's called the Queen's English or BBC English) even when played by actual Brits, who may well "posh up" their accent. It's a case of Britain Is Only London but even more so. It's like Britain Is Only Mayfair, a very high-class area of London.

This trope is about Hollywood thinking RP is the only British Accent, or that it's the only one the educated English use while everyone else talks like they had the collected works of Charles Dickens rammed down their throats.

To contrast, the trope is often lamented by Britons who speak one of myriad other accents available and rarely get recognition, and can fuel stereotypes and people assuming there's a (nonexistent) 'British Accent'. As the page quote suggests, this might stem largely from the fact that many people think any 'non-rhotic' accent (where the 'r' is pronounced 'aa' as opposed to 'arr' in words like car and guard) is English (Estuary accent, as a result, is often confused with RP itself). In reality, both the UK and the USA have their fair share of both rhotic and non-rhotic accents to go around (for example, most Scottish accents are rhotic, while many New England and New York accents are non-rhotic).

On the other hand, this trope is heavily justified in England itself. If someone mentions a "correct" pronunciation, or if they say they have "no accent", they generally do mean RP, which is both relatively posh and the de facto formal standard, also known as "Newsreader English". This is similar to how Americans say they have "no accent" when they are actually referring to Lower Midwestern US pronunciation. Not so very long ago, people often paid for elocution lessons to learn to speak "properly", and actors from all over the UK were encouraged to lose their natural regional accents in favour of RP - for example, Patrick Stewart is a Yorkshireman by birth, but speaks like, well, Patrick Stewart. It should be mentioned, though, that modern RP is significantly less posh than the standard 'English' accent you will hear on American TV. A very pronounced RP accent tends to be tied to a Private or Grammar School education (or the desire to pretend to have had one), and it is entirely possible for people with a trained ear to identify students of particular schools in a city or region by their pronunciation.

A Running Gag among Britons (and somewhat Truth in Television) is that Americans will always assume any British accent other than the posh 1950s one is Australian, Scottish, or Irish.^note And to add to the confusion, a posh Australian accent sounds very similar to a posh English one. Somewhat forgiveable with Estuary English, but completely bizarre when applied to Oop North. Referenced in, among other things, Top Gear. The Quintessential British Gentleman probably speaks this way.

Also consider that Europeans often learn this variety in school, especially at university, where RP is the standard; the same is true in Africa, most of the Middle East, and in South and Central Asia. Other countries, like those in Latin America, for obvious reasons, learn American English, and still others, like those in the Sinosphere (China, Japan, South Korea, etc.) can't decide which one is the right one to teach. Interestingly, American English is more popular in Israel despite the British Mandate (or possibly because of it, although it's more likely that it has to do with the massive Jewish population in the US—until about 2000, there were more Jews in the US than in Israel, and even today the Jewish populations of the US and Israel are about equal—with which Israel has deep ties and—perhaps more to the point—it's a fair bet that any given Israeli has at least one American cousin or some such).

Finally, it must be mentioned that both RP, and attitudes towards it, are inextricably tangled up with the British class system, so the consequences of having it wax and wane with period and setting. In works set anywhere earlier than the 1950s, or within the confines of the upper classes, a character whose accent is just slightly wrong may well be treated like someone who showed up to interview for a middle-management position wearing a stained Che Guevara T-shirt and flip-flops; conversely, in something set in an inner city sink estate, breaking out any version of RP might be seen as - linguistically - chumming the water for sharks.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The English dub for Yu-Gi-Oh! gave Bakura a Very British accent as a cultural counterpart of his very polite speech patterns in the Japanese script. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series (made and voice-acted by a Brit) parodies it by giving him lines like "Cor blimey! That was a smashing manoeuvre! Good show, chaps!" and "Lashings of hot ginger beer for everyone! ...I'm British, you know." It then gets further lampshaded in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions as the reason why Bakura's such a Chick Magnet.
• Surfaces in the original Dic Entertainment dub of Sailor Moon as the accent used by Minako when speaking English. Justified as, in the anime (but not the manga), she did live in London for a while...

Audio Plays

• The Sandman (2020): Joanna Lumley uses a posh RP as 19th-century English noblewoman Johanna Constantine.

Comic Books

• Asterix in Britain has every single Briton talk like this, complete with expressions like "goodness gracious", "jolly good fellow" and "Stiff Upper Lip". This is particularly notable in the English translation, to distinguish them from the Gauls. (In the original French version, much of the distinction is created by having them speak French with English syntax.)

Fan Fiction

• Child of the Storm has this even extend to the Lemony Narrator, with the author being a self-admitted product of the British private school system and diplomatic class.
  • It features the traditional example of Asgardians speaking The Queen's Latin, with word choice and phrasing being modified to suit.
  • Peter Wisdom a.k.a. Regulus Black apparently used to have this accent, but discarded it in favour of a rougher London accent, as part of his That Man Is Dead attitude to his former identity - though bits of this creep through when he's stressed and not paying attention.
  • Doctor Strange, despite technically being Welsh (or at least, he was born in what is now Wales 1500 years ago) and, more to the point, raised by a fisherman, has the kind of accent which Harry Dresden notes that dozens of classically trained actors would have died to achieve. It's revealed in the sequel that he can adopt a modern Welsh accent any time he pleases, and presumably his original accent too.
• In Loaded Bones this is played for humor. Ryou is British like in the dub, and loves fairy cakes, Doctor Who, tea, and other stereotypical British things.
• In Final Stand of Death, the Fusion Gundam are all British, thanks to their accent and sporting the colors of five English Football Clubs (soccer teams). Hawk is even seen drinking tea while watching a Bar Brawl, and speaks with RP accent.

Films — Live-Action

• Keira Knightley in most of her movies. Not so much in Real Life. This makes it extremely jarring to hear her speak in an interview for the first time.
• Inglourious Basterds example: when Hicox is getting briefed for his mission, they all sound so English it hurts. Then you suddenly recognize Dr. Evil talking, and you realize that everyone in the room is a Fake Brit. Fifty years ago, even more people talked like that, and whilst the common soldier would sound far more ordinary, the top brass would be more likely to be made up of the upper classes.
• As was pointed out in an episode of QI, the classical English pilot of the movies talks in this fashion because the actors who played them were almost invariably upper class fellows like David Niven. In Real Life, the RAF of World War II drew most of their pilots from the middle and lower classes, but ask anyone to do an impression of an RAF pilot and they're practically guaranteed to attempt a Received Pronunciation "Tally-ho." 1/6 of the RAF's actual pilots were from the British Commonwealth (including India) and occupied and neutral countries such as Poland and Ireland (respectively) and so would have sounded (GASP) foreign.
• Selena Gomez in Monte Carlo (2011) when she's playing an American character pretending to be a different, British character, taken to an extreme when she momentarily forgets to do the accent and tries to retroactively make up for it. Also, the British character Gomez's character is pretending to be, also played by Gomez, but justified in that she is a posh heiress and her accent is more convincing than the American's.
• The first half of Oliver!, where the difference is made stronger due to a juxtaposition of 'proper' and Cockney.
• A Royal Night Out both plays it straight and averts it. The royal family speak with this type of voice, but a variety of other English accents are heard - despite the film never leaving West London. Likewise the second any other Londoners hear Elizabeth speaking, they instantly know she's from a posh family.
  Jack: Family well off by any chance?
  Elizabeth: We manage.
• Richard E. Grant's super-posh accent in most of his films (e.g. as Withnail) stems from his childhood in colonial Swaziland speaking exaggeratedly upper-class "period English," overlaid with drama-school RP.
• Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery in Patton. Patton even mockingly imitates him in one scene.
• Chris Egan's ridiculously poshed-up accent in Letters to Juliet (Egan is Australian by the way). Even more noticeable when he's speaking with Vanessa Redgrave, whose accent is clearly what he was going for but doesn't quite make it.
• William Moseley in Walden Media's The Chronicles of Narnia films speaks on a completely different level of English-ness than his fellow cast members (including his own siblings). With his few lines in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader he still manages to out-Brit the rest of the cast. Funnily enough Richard Dempsey who played the same character in the BBC adaptations of the books did exactly the same thing. This could have something to do with the fact that the character of Peter is often thought of as trying to be just that little bit better than his siblings. In other words, he's somewhat of a pretentious wally.
• English actor Burn Gorman does such a terrible attempt at a "British" accent in Pacific Rim. To contrast, listen to his normal accent playing Owen in Torchwood.
• One of character actor Terry-Thomas' trademarks was his very British RP accent. He is quite possibly the trope codifier; most people that pretend a RP accent these days are doing an impression of him.
• X-Men: First Class explains why Charles Xavier (who is American in the comics) has a Received Pronunciation accent. He is half-British, half-American,^note his American descent is confirmed in X-Men: Apocalypse when he mentions his grandfather planting a tree on the Westchester estate and his speech pattern was influenced by his posh English mother. It was later reinforced when he studied at the University of Oxford.
• Angel in the Wing Commander movie. Saffron Burrows tried a French accent for her first scene or two, but quickly gave it up as a bad go. Worth noting, in the games and novels, Angel is Belgian.
• In the 2015 film adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd, Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts does a creditable job at RP English in his performance as Gabriel Oak, but can't quite conjure up the rural West Country accent the character really should have.
• Night at the Museum: Ahkmenrah speaks with an RP accent, explained in the film by the fact that he learned to speak English from Cambridge professors in the 1940s.
• Frequently and throughout Star Wars:
  • Almost every Imperial officer in the Original Trilogy has an RP accent. Peter Cushing as Tarkin in particular stands out. This tendency among Imperial officers carries over into Rogue One, while also spreading it to Rebels such as Jynn Erso and General Merrick.
    • Also on the Rebel side is Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Carrie Fisher adopts an RP accent as Princess Leia for part of A New Hope^note Carrie explained that it was the first scene she shot and she had been educated in England, and accidentally lapsed into an English accent whenever she had to be angry for a scene. Explained much later in supplementary material as the Princess mocking Tarkin's accent. Fans possibly thought she was doing the Mid-Atlantic accent once common among American actors, and which James Earl Jones uses consistently as Vader, since Star Wars was supposed to be an old-style adventure film.
  • Rey in The Force Awakens speaks with a strong RP accent, as do General Hux and Captain Phasma. Daisy Ridley has explained that she uses RP as Rey because her natural, less posh accent was difficult for Americans to understand. John Boyega notably has a more typical London accent, and as such he's a Fake American.
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: Iris Carrol, Lockwood Manor's housekeeper, speaks with a Received Pronunciation British accent and lectures Maisie on the "proper" way to pronounce "bath", dismissing the North American pronunciation as barbarianism.
• The accents heard in Heavenly Creatures are extremely important and denote class and social status. They were discussed at length on early fan sites and elists. Kate Winslet as Juliet is doing a very upper-middle-class RP accent and you hear Melanie Lynskey as Pauline begin to imitate it and spruce up her speech in general.
• Holly Slept Over: Holly, who's English, speaks with an upper class accent.

Literature

• Redwall uses a wide variety of accents: searats Talk Like a Pirate, moles are country bumpkins ("burr aye, zurr" - based on The West Country accent - the double r is to emphasise that it is rhotic), and hares use the "tally ho, wot wot"-type of speech (based on the WW2 RAF no less). Scottish accents show up in later books for the characters who hail from the Northlands.
• In the Doctor Who novel The Pirate Loop the Doctor and Martha meet a group of Badger-headed pirates, most of whom speak in an English -specifically Southampton- accent.
• The Dresden Files has the character of Chandler, whom Dresden nicknames "Steed" due to his Quintessential British Gentleman dress, accent, and love for tea. Later, Chandler writes Dresden (a born-and-bred American) a letter and capitalizes random words, adding in a postscript:
  Why, yes, I can capitalize any words I so choose. The language is English. I am English. Therefore, mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.

Live-Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks: The visiting English headmaster in "Hello, Mr. Chips."
• Doctor Who:
  • The series plays with this constantly; the Doctor has been played by over a dozen actors, but remains as British as an alien can be. Most Doctors have used RP, with a few exceptions: Sylvester McCoy and Peter Capaldi use their natural Scottish accents, Ncuti Gatwa uses his natural mild Rwandan accent with Camp Gay inflections, David Tennant uses Estuary (despite being naturally Scottish), and Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker use their natural Northern accents.
    Rose: If you are an alien, how comes you sound like you're from the North?
    Ninth Doctor: Lots of planets have a North!
  • They draw the line occasionally though, like when Donna tries to adopt a posh accent during a cocktail party with Agatha Christie.
• All the candidates of One Hundred Greatest Britons.
• Dollhouse: The Trope Namer is Adele DeWitt, who is played by English actress Olivia Williams, but with a poshed-up accent. One episode has her semi-delirious from a drug, during which she says "Still you have to admit, I am...very British."
  "I don't say hahd 'r's!"
• Jane Parsons (season 1) and Peyton Driscoll (season 3) in CSI: NY.
• Averted with Daphne in Frasier, who speaks with a Mancunian accent. Or rather, what is supposed to be a Mancunian accent. Averted with almost every English character in Frasier, though Daphne's family suffer a greater accent-drift than she does, making you wonder if they're doing it on purpose.
• Alias: The suave terrorist Sark is a young man of indeterminate nationality who was educated in the UK, is cool under pressure, always polite and who always has an English quip ready at any time. Marshall's analysis of his accent reveals that Sark's RP accent isn't perfect in the vowels, indicating he spends a lot of time living in Ireland. This is an in-universe acknowledgement of the imperfections of David Anders' attempt to mimic the RP accent: while excellent and fooling a very casual listener, he does sometimes make common vowel mistakes (such as the pronunciation of "data") which give him away. However, his RP accent is so good that when he does deliberately use his native accent in one episode, the result is very jarring to audience ears.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Giles speaks with an RP accent, and is a restrained, quiet and unfussy character; quintessentially English, something that is commented on in-universe from time to time. Although the actor is British, his native accent is different, so he's putting on the RP for the role. The character is also playing a part, as he was a rebellious youth into dark magic and nick-named Ripper. It took him a long time to put that reputation behind him and become the responsible, reserved Watcher that Buffy and her friends are used to. All Watchers in the show therefore have this same upper class accent, even if they look and act like mafia thugs.
  • Inversely, Spike is shown in flashbacks to speak with an RP accent, having grown up well-educated in high Victorian society. After being turned into a vampire, he adopts a much rougher accent, one Fake Brit James Marsters based on the natural Estuary accent of Anthony Stewart Head (Giles).
• Angel: First introduced in Buffy, Wesley's character development in the spin-off underwent a dramatic change over the course of the show, switching from an uptight, reserved, rules-obsessed academic into an earthy, badass monster-killer who was willing to achieve a result by any means necessary. His accent changed accordingly across the show, from perfect RP to a slightly looser, less formal English that was designed to reflect his personality change and the years the character had spent in the US.
• In yet another Joss Whedon-produced show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. both at first both averted this trope and played it straight with the two British leads: Fitz is played by a Glaswegian actor with a moderately strong Scottish accent, while Jemma Simmons speaks in the more typical RP of a British character in a US show, despite Elizabeth Henstridge originating from Sheffield. As the series went on, Simmons' accent gradually settled back towards towards Henstridge's natural tones. Likewise, Nick Blood as Lance Hunter speaks in his own more common, unaffected Londoner accent. Supporting characters Anne Weaver and Sunil Bakshi play it slightly straighter; Weaver has her actress' natural accent but is far more Stoic in speech, making it sound more high class, while Bakshi's is played straight.
• Dr Helen Magnus from Sanctuary. Justified because she is very old so it's her real accent, not a put-on.
• Marcus from Babylon 5, in an attempt to sound Arthurian. The show does lampshade the fact that Marcus isn't even really English, being born and raised on a small mining colony with his family several generations removed from the British Isles and Earth.
• Bones:
  • Anyone aside the main cast in "Yanks in the U.K."
  • Gordon Gordon Wyatt, though this is mainly because it's Stephen Fry.
  • Averted later on by Mr Nigel Murrey who speaks in his own Midlands accent throughout his appearances on the show.
• The Daily Show — It just goes to show the power of the trope that in this bit on UK politics, Jon Stewart completes Gordon Brown's sentences in a posh accent. Brown is Scottish.
  • For those of us who can't access the video or aren't familiar with Gordon Brown, this is Brown's real accent. Compare that to the Very British accent if you can.
• Higgins in Magnum, P.I.. He was played by Texan John Hillerman, who had appeared on Ellery Queen speaking in a wartime American radio accent that sort of aspired to this.
• In one episode of Murder, She Wrote we have a father-daughter pair where the daughter is a social-climbing gold digger who has taught herself to speak like a lady, where the father still speaks like a workingman.
• Arrested Development:
  • Wee Britain is a neighborhood of Very British People, with the only possible exception being Rita's uncle, who is played by a Canadian and sounds more Australian than British. Theron as Rita's attempt at an English accent are cringeworthy.
  • One story arc involves Tobias pretending to be a British nanny (the characters and narrator all lampshade the fact that it's a blatant rip-off of Mrs. Doubtfire). His accent and attempt at slang are terrible. However, this fits in with the rest of his Paper-Thin Disguise; all the other characters immediately know it's Tobias and only pretend to be convinced so he'll do their chores.
• A new arrival in Colditz is suspected of being a spy precisely because he's such a stereotype. Nope, he's just really, really posh.
  Pat: I didn't realise anyone was that English these days.
  Player: You don't think he's... too English, do you? [...] Seems to me he's a German's idea of what an Englishman looks like.
• Top Gear: During their visit to Reno a couple of drunken casino-goers "helping" James May with a slot machine ask him if he's Australian because of his accent. Then again, they are very drunk, since one of them also asks him if he's John Lennon.
• Friends:
  • An episode has Monica and Phoebe getting annoyed when a friend of theirs returns from living in England with a "ridiculously fake British accent". Their attempts to imitate her result in this trope. Ironically when the friend actually appears, her accent is quite decent.
  • Zigzagged when Emily is on the show. The character is said to be from Shropshire and played by actress Helen Baxendale, who does not put on an accent (she's from Yorkshire). Her stepmother is played by Jennifer Saunders likewise using her own accent but her father is played by Scottish actor Tom Conti putting on this voice to of course sell the character as a pompous snob. Her uncle, who appeared earlier, is given a posh accent too.
• DI Richard Poole in Death in Paradise speaks with a Received Pronunciation accent that marks him as wildly out-of-place on the Caribbean island where the show is set. None of the other British characters speak like this, so it seems to be Poole's natural way of speaking, which fits with his very proper and straight-laced personality.
• Averted with Alfred Pennyworth in Gotham, who speaks with an East London Cockney accent instead of the Received Pronunciation heard in most adaptations.
• A very good non-British variant - call this I Am Very Northeastern American - comes from George Feeny, the high-school principal on the classic TGIF sitcom Boy Meets World. It's educated Bostonian - the actor William Daniels picked it up when portraying John Adams in 1776 - but it sounded very peculiar in a modern American context, especially on a program where all the other characters' accents (except for the very Joisey Mafia-like delinquents) were either Californian or vaguely Midwestern. Equally oddly, Daniels was born in Brooklyn, New York!
• Tahani al-Jamil in The Good Place, which fits her previous 'life' as a socialite. Lampshaded in Episode 1 when Eleanor points out that she's the only person in the Good Place whose accent is left in by the Translator Microbes. Jameela Jamil, who plays her, does hail from Hampstead, one of the posh parts of London.
• Game of Thrones uses an Accent Adaptation with a dash of Fantasy Counterpart Culture. Southern Westerosi characters speak in this type of voice to establish them as more privileged. Low-born Southerners such as Gendry, Davos etc do not use this accent. The Northern characters speak with Oop North dialects. Non-Westerosi characters speak with other accents. The exception seems to be Melisandre, whose origins are vague and she's played by the Dutch Carice Van Houten using her own voice to make the character sound more mysterious.
• Honeysuckle Weeks' character Samantha Stewart of Foyle's War has an impeccable Home Counties accent.
• The L Word: Helena is English and speaks with an upper class accent.
• In an episode of New Tricks, the tendency of actors to be required to adopt RP gets a thorough ribbing from Alun Armstrong's character, Brian Lane; watching auditions for a play, he critiques an actor for trying to hide his natural accent (something Armstrong was, as a young actor, frequently asked to do) and loudly and proudly delivers some Shakespeare in his natural voice, proving that Shakespeare doesn't have to be stuffy. Naturally, the people running the audition think he should change his accent.
• Done deliberately on Call the Midwife, where nearly all of the midwives, who are not Poplar natives, speak with upper-class accents, while their patients speak with working-class ones. This is meant to highlight the stark class divide between them that often leads to clashes in culture and priorities. This is Played for Drama with Jenny Lee, the POV character for the first few seasons, who speaks with a crisp, educated accent befitting her background and does a lot of middle-class moralizing. More Played for Laughs with Chummy, who speaks with a heightened RP accent because she's from a high society family. Though she is enthusiastic and not at all afraid of getting her hands dirty, her mannerisms and ways of speaking (lampshaded in the 2013 Red Nose Day Special as "reassuring posh 50's speak") often get her weird looks and reactions.
• Goosebumps (1995): In the episode "A Night in Terror Tower", Eddie and Sue switch to this dialect when the spell wears off. In this case, it's a Justified Trope: Edward and Susannah aren't just revealed to be two random British children, they are explicitly royal heirs.

Music

• Professor Elemental.
• Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer
• The English Vocaloid Oliver.
• The lead singer of The Streets sings in a very local British accent.
• The Beatles did this a few times too.
  • "Good Morning, Good Morning" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
    It's time for tea and Meet the Wife ^note  Meet the Wife was a BBC sitcom at the time. A reference everybody outside the U.K. missed.
  • "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" from Magical Mystery Tour are both about locations in Liverpool.
  • "I Am The Walrus"
    Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun
    If the sun don't come, you get a tan from standing in the English rain
• PJ Harvey's White Chalk marked a notable shift in the singer's sound. She abandoned her Alternative Rock origins and made an album completely in the style of traditional British Folk Music and chamber music. The title itself refers to the white chalk cliffs in the beach side of South England. Normally she didn't refer to her native country at all in her lyrics.
• Laura Marling speaks and sings in slightly Estuary-tinged RP. This is actually her natural accent: even if her father wasn't a baronet, her native Berkshire is RP central. It's particularly noticeable in her turn in Mystery Jets' "Young Love," where she sings with William Rees, whose middle-class London accent is more of an RP-tinged Estuary.
• Unknown P.

Pinball

• In Diner, Babs (a caricature of Margaret Thatcher) speaks with a very proper British accent.

Professional Wrestling

• Sir Allen Garfield, one of the National Wrestling Alliance forerunners, who we must stress is from Greater London England.
• William Regal poshed up his Lancashire accent when he was first in WWE as his "character" was meant to be a proper British upper class twit and would naturally have a posh accent. He dropped this around 2004-ish and has used his normal accent ever since.
• 2003 saw the arrival of another London, Greater London, England resident, Nigel McGuinness, to the USA independent circuit and with it, several insults the fans really didn't understand but threw back at him anyway in Ring of Honor.
• Katarina Waters aka Katie Lea Burchill/Winter has an RP accent but did posh herself up considerably when she was in WWE and then again in TNA. Any non-kayfabe interviews will show a big difference between her real accent and the one she uses in promos. Possibly justified because in professional wrestling, the wrestlers are taught to speak slowly in promos and enunciate so that the audience can hear them clearly. Katie Lea's "real" accent is actually very Germanic, as she was raised in Germany. In a Colt Cabana podcast she relates that to English ears she sounds German but she gets away with it in America.
• Hade Vansen, "leader" of the British Militia in WWC, though it's easy to put yourself over as "very" British when "the rest" of said militia isn't even.
• Booker T and Sharmell gave themselves over the top British accents when they became King Booker and Queen Sharmell and started acting like bumbling upper class twits.
• Layla El is British but has lived in America for a long time so her accent has faded quite a bit but she did posh herself up when she hooked up with William Regal as his "Queen". She did a similar thing when she formed LayCool as a listen to one of her promos from then and a regular interview will show a huge difference.

Tabletop Games

• There are two accents in Warhammer 40,000: Ork (cockney/Talk Like a Pirate) and everyone else (posh). The video games occasionally add others (Dawn of War II memorably features a Violent Glaswegian Baneblade).

Video Games

• Metal Gear usually plays this straight where English characters have English accents, with varying levels of justification. Major Zero is an ex-SAS man from Exeter and Liquid Snake is... well, Liquid Snake. Slightly less justified is the supposedly Mancunian Strangelove. The only exception is the Praying Mantis advert narrator.
• The Icarus from Sacrifice is an obvious 'stereotypical RAF pilot' reference and speaks in an extremely posh upper class accent (in contrast to the rest of the Yeomen, who mostly speak with various lower-class accents from both Britain and the USA).
• Venus Dare from Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is one of the few characters in the game not to have an American accent, and she speaks in incredibly plummy RP. It appears to be an affectation, since she loses the accent in a moment of Tranquil Fury and one character calls her an American in passing.
• The translations of the Dragon Quest games generally avert this, featuring Irish, Scottish, RP and other accents in NPCs and PCs alike.
• Likewise generally averted with the Xenoblade Chronicles games; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 features a variety of Southern Englander accents from Cockney to Estuary to RP, while Xenoblade Chronicles 2 expands on this with Northern Englander, Scottish, Welsh, Australian and American accents, to the point that one can count the number of RP-speaking characters on one hand. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 features all of the aforementioned accents, and the main protagonist of Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed has a Roadman accent.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Averted in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Edward Kenway, the game's protagonist, was originally planned to speak like this, but when Matt Ryan was cast they decided to keep his natural Welsh accent, and change Edward's nationality to match. This change is lampshaded in-game - as part of the game's meta-plot, Abstergo plans to re-dub Edward's lines with "a voice like James Bond". Played straight in Assassin's Creed III with Edward's son Haytham.
  • Played straight in Assassin's Creed Origins. Every Roman character has a Received Pronunciation accent including Julius Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, Flavius Metellus and Lucius Septimius. Even Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII speak with an RP dialect despite being Ancient Egyptians just like Bayek and Aya.
• The title character of Bayonetta speaks with a very posh English accent.
• Two characters that feature in a side mission in BravelySecond are a clear reference to the Sherlock Holmes franchise, Sholmes and his assistant and friend, Whitson, who are two of the few characters in Luxendarc to have very firm British accents. Too bad they both lack the skills of a true Private Officer !
• Ace Attorney: Fanon pegs Miles Edgeworth as having an RP accent despite the logistical unlikelihood of such a thing (he is an American raised by a German Amoral Attorney); it's probably the cravat, tea-drinking habits, and other posh mannerisms that give him a "Very British" air about him. When he eventually got full voice acting along with the other characters, he was indeed given a canonical, posh British accent.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Zelda, as befitting a Princess, speaks in a received accent, though her father king Rhoam oddly doesn't. The Zora princess Mipha also speaks with a British accent; opinions may vary on her brother prince Sidon.
  • Zig-zagged with her ancestor Sonia in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, who seems to speak with a mix of an American and British accent that almost edges on an Indian lilt, whilst maintaining a mature, motherly tone of voice.
• In Slipstream 5000, both Eddy Royce and Victoria Venice are distinctly British in accent and phrasing — "For queen and country!", "toodle pip", and so forth. It's unclear how much is real and how much is just keeping on-brand.
• Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure: Fittingly for a Gentleman Adventurer, Henry's Speaking Simlish grunts have a distinctive RP flavor to them, as does many of his antagonists.

Web Comics

• Mixed in Polandball. The United Kingdom speaks posh (he wears a top hat and monocle, after all), but his individual components do not. England speaks like a chav, and Wales is usually some variation of incomprehensibility, for example.

Web Original

• The Lets Player ElectricalBeast, made famous by Retsupurae, speaks in a seemingly exaggerated cockney accent.
• A Running Gag in The Stinger of the first two episodes of Decline of Video Gaming that counts as a Take That Us. At one point Dan remarks "We're so incredibly English!"
• James Bond's superior, M, as portrayed in this episode of sketch-comedy podcast Superego: "Just one more thing, Bond: How British am I?"
  "You're the tickity-tock of Big Ben's cock, sir!"
• Film reviewer MikeJ on Channel Awesome, whose opening catchphrase is "Hello, I'm a British person!"
• Whenever Regular Car Reviews covers a British vehicle, every time Mr. Regular encounters some strange/stupid design decision, he growls "SO VERY BRITISH" in a posh accent.
  • He also invented his own measurement of Britishness called the Stephen Fry Unit (S.F.U.), Fry himself, for reference, is 1 S.F.U.
• In his review of K-9 and Company, Nash responds to an incredibly stereotypical old British guy by saying a bunch of stodgy, British sounding gibberish while holding a pipe, then says, "Have I mentioned I'm very British?"
• Whenever Helloween 4545 comes upon a "Space British" (the term he uses for this accent, in a mockery of how non-English it sounds to his ears), Hilarity Ensues.
• Lampshaded in The New Humans where Lawrence self-deprecatingly explains that upper class Australians try to sound as British as possible. But at this stage in his life, it would be just as artificial to throw around bush-slang.
• Soviet Womble has a very middle-class sounding RP accent with a hint of "Estuary English", which is apparently his natural one as he grew up in Brighton.

Western Animation

• South Park: Zig-zagged. First, Pip has this accent. In "The Snuke," the Queen has one too, but her underlings don't. They also give Gordon Brown a London accent that sounds a bit like their version of Russell Crowe even though Brown has a fairly pronounced Glaswegian (i.e. 'Scots', think Billy Connolly) accent. Finally, they don't give Richard Dawkins this accent even though he does have one. (When asked about his portrayal in Real Life, Dawkins responded that they could have at least hired an actual British actor.) Malcolm McDowell makes a surprise guest appearance on the episode "Pip," beginning the episode with, "Hello. I'm a British person."
• On Phineas and Ferb Lawrence Fletcher, the dad, has this, but Ferb seems not to, though as a child that has spent his formative years in the United States he can reasonably not have one.
• In an episode of Pinky and the Brain where Pinky assembles the world leaders, Prime Minister John Major has a stereotypical English accent instead of the South London accent he has in real life.
• Thomas & Friends: Extremely noticeable with Gordon in later episodes. He is even based on the same model as the Flying Scotsman, an actual steam locomotive that was manufactured in Britain.
• One of the Sports Popples, Big Kick, talks with a British accent.
• Axe Cop.
  Axe Cop: "What's wrong with your voice?"
  Isabella M: "Nothing. Everyone from London, England has to talk like this."
• Subverted in The Weekenders where the Bahia Bay hotel receptionist speaks with this accent - but Carver immediately tells him it sounds fake. When the receptionist orders security to throw them out, he reverts to an American accent.
• Downplayed with Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh. Every Disney adaptation has him voiced with a slight British accent, and he certainly retains certain of his British quirks from the source material; Honey Tree in particular shows a stereotypically British top hat and scarf hanging by his front door.
• Mom from The Brak Show became one when she was recast in the second season, even saying "rubbish" in one episode.
• In a What Could Have Been example, The Cleveland Show was going to have a British family live next door to the Browns. Unfortunately, since all they could write for them were examples of this trope, they scrapped them and replaced them with Holt.

Real Life

• Inverted by George Thomas, 1st Viscount Tonypandy, who, when he was the Speaker of the House of Commons, said in his native Welsh lilt, "There are many accents in this house. I sometimes wish I had one myself."
• British actor Terry-Thomas made a career of it.
• John Cleese is a modern day example. He is often cast to portray an English gentleman and looks like it when he wears a bowler hat and umbrella.
• Deborah Kerr was Scottish born but had this accent trained into her getting her education in England. As such when she went to America, she got heavily typecast as English Roses in Costume Dramas - that she mockingly called "poker up the arse parts". It took playing a Fake American adulteress in From Here to Eternity to convince Hollywood to give her more varied parts.
• Defied by Robert Carlyle who actually walked out of his drama school when they tried to make him lose his Scottish accent and adopt this type of voice. His condition for returning was that he be allowed to keep his accent. As such you'll rarely hear him do this in films - if he plays English characters they're usually Oop North. He tones the accent down to play Mr Gold in Once Upon a Time but he's still clearly Scottish.
• Anna May Wong was mocked for her natural California accent when she first appeared on the stage in London. As such she got vocal training at Cambridge to develop this type of accent. As she already had it by the time she starred in 'talkies', it's unknown what her original accent sounded like.
• Inverted by Rose Leslie, who has this type of accent naturally (she's Scottish aristocracy in real life).^note As mentioned elsewhere, higher-class Scots tend use RP, especially ones with ties to the peerage. As her father is a clan chief, she's definitely in this group. She's frequently cast as low born characters and as a result has to common down her voice. Her two most famous roles - Gwen in Downton Abbey and Ygritte in Game of Thrones have her using an Oop North dialect.
• Similarly inverted and deliberately averted by Robbie Coltrane. A Clydeside native, he comes from money (though not aristocracy) and went to public school. As a result, when he started at the Glasgow School of Art, his classmates ridiculed him for sounding like Prince Charles; he quickly adopted an "educated Scottish English" accent as his default, but not before earning the nickname "Lord Fauntleroy".
• Many actors who have regional accents (particularly those from Oop North) will have to put on RP when doing Theatre In Education (putting on plays for schools in France, Italy etc) - on the basis that the children won't be able to understand their normal accents.
• Liverpudlian actor Luke Anthony Jr has been vocal about how he was told he wouldn't work in the industry unless he lost his accent.

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