Pronunciation

[Phil]

while phil is a lothian man

Not from choice skauwt. Originally a weegie but had to come here for the work. What you were saying about locals being priced out of homes by incomers reminds me of a place called Seil Island south of Oban. I genuinely thought the couthy looking people in the wee but & bens there were locals until they opened their mouths and turned out all to be "white settlers" as the locals call them. You know - the Barbour jackets & green welly brigade. Have you ever noticed, too, whenever the TV interviews Orkney people there isn't ever a local accent. I can understand people wanting out of the rat-race down south but when they come with their big money from selling a pokey London flat it just doesn't seem right. Rant over.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

I sympathize completely with Phil and Skauwt-- The Beeb is focused on London and the Six Home Counties, and resists programming from anything north of the M25. Hence, everything has the same estuary accent and London point-of-view. When a program is commissioned by Broadcasting House from someplace like Scotland, it happens only because the program is seen as having a good potential for a pre-production "sell thru" to the USA-- Monarch of the Glen being the perfect example of this. American television signed on before a single frame of film had been shot.

The "Incomers" are a different matter. When I sold my home in Co. Wicklow, it was bought by an English merchant banker. The west of Ireland is full of summer cottages owned by Germans, and Dublin has a population of several thousand "Block Heads"-- the local term for those who have arrived from the former "East Block" of Soviet occupied nations. As in rural Scotland there is a fair degree of resentment about these people coming in and driving up the prices of housing-- rentals or purchases.

I think what is most objected to isn't the displacement of locals who have moved away for reasons of their own, but rather the attitude that the incomers bring with them-- that their way is "right" and our way is "wrong". Very few of them try to assimilate community standards; they tend to be patronising; and they complain about everything. And it's not just the Londoners. To be fair, the fellow who sold his terraced house in Glasgow, or made a killing off his flat in now-trendy Leith, tends to be every bit as bad, or good, as the couple who have just moved up from Simply Wonderful One.

[Laird O'the Cowcaddens]

Lady & Gentlemen,
Ye aw browt a teer tae ma een an a chortle tae ma thrapple. I wiz a wee bit doon at the mooth, but yer discourse huz gied me a lift up ye ken. Lang may yer Lum Reek.

[Phil]

Please don't get me started on the media. Broadcasting in Scotland is controlled from London with very little of any hoime-grown local value or relevance being produced due to most funding being funnelled down south. Whenever anything significant (from a south of England perspective) happens in Scotland they even have their own "Scotland correspondent" to report on it, despite there being established broadcasters aplenty already in Scotland. MOR's example of "Monarch of the Glen" is a typical case in point with its main characters, Richard Briers, Susan Hampshire and Julian Fellowes being imports from the south of England. Excellent actors but why not employ Scots? I mean Susan Hampshire even had her organic food shipped up to Scotland because the local stuff wasn't good enough for her! How patronising is that? The sad result was a cringe-making pastiche from a Scottish viewpoint, little better than an embarassing stereotype such as "Brigadoon". At least they avoided blatantly ludicrous characters like "beam me up" Scotty from Star Trek or that Australian, Mel Gibson, with their phoney Scottish accents but that was only because the kind of "toffs" being portrayed mostly have southern accents anyway.

[piperdbh]

We have the same thing here in the U.S. that Phil writes about in Scotland. If you hear a Southeastern accent (whatever that is) on TV, it's usually a comedian, or a caricature of the stereotypes we've been portrayed with. While some of those stereotypes have a good bit of truth in them (and I try to live up to a lot of it), after a while seeing and hearing it on TV gets old.
About "Monarch of the Glen": Why were the American characters not played by American actors? Their affected "American" accents were so fake that it made me wonder if the BBC has any dialect coaches, and if so, are they all from London.
For the past several years wealthy folks have moved into the mountains of western North Carolina (which is the greatest place on Earth) and have driven up property values to the point where local folks who have lived here for generations can no longer afford to live on their own land. People move here for the scenery and "quaint" small town life, then tear the tops off the mountains to build their houses and set about changing things in the small towns to suit their fancies. Human nature, I suppose.