Lisa would have liked to have rid me of the habit of speaking with accents when we started to spend a lot of time together. It drove her nuts. On one occasion in 1998 we were walking past the shopping centre on Kingsland Road and I was chirping away, pretending to be a Frenchman. 'You're attracting attention!' she complained, 'people are looking!' I really didn't think that anyone was paying any attention, I thought she was joking, I didn't know her so very well at the time, so I persisted. This made things worse and then she really lost her temper. It must have been very irritating, after all.
Yes, I was quite good with accents I thought, quite convincing, and it was all down to practice and dedication. Howard and I, for example, were Australians for a whole fortnight, day and night, while helping to construct a film set in Ealing Studios. From time to time I like to try out a Russian, German, Birmingham or some other foreign accent today still.
I also used to like hitch hiking, Glasgow to Cambridge being my greatest achievement. Once, when I still lived in Huntingdon, Tony and I were waiting near a slip road, having already hitched half way from our boring home town to London. Tony, no doubt, was wearing his long herringbone coat, and we would have been rolling cigarettes and chatting about the kind of things that we chatted about as teenagers, friends and music. I remember that Tony was standing half way up the roadside embankment and I was getting on his nerves with a French accent monologue when a car pulled up.
I got in the front passenger seat, Tony in the back, and I made the mistake of introducing myself as a French national. Unfortunately the kindly driver's daughter had only just been married that previous weekend to a Frenchman and so, naturally, he was very curious about France and pressed me on many topics. I had to fabricate a lot. And then we came to a near stand still in a traffic jam on the M25, Tony fast asleep on the back seat, me keeping up this damn French accent for hours and hours.
He was a very good man, our benefactor, he even bought us lunch at a motorway junction restaurant. I was relieved that he didn't notice me inadvertently slipping back into my natural accent when we were saying our good byes, when we finally got close enough to central London for me to be able to escape my French-accent nightmare by tube train.
Yes, I was quite good with accents I thought, quite convincing, and it was all down to practice and dedication. Howard and I, for example, were Australians for a whole fortnight, day and night, while helping to construct a film set in Ealing Studios. From time to time I like to try out a Russian, German, Birmingham or some other foreign accent today still.
I also used to like hitch hiking, Glasgow to Cambridge being my greatest achievement. Once, when I still lived in Huntingdon, Tony and I were waiting near a slip road, having already hitched half way from our boring home town to London. Tony, no doubt, was wearing his long herringbone coat, and we would have been rolling cigarettes and chatting about the kind of things that we chatted about as teenagers, friends and music. I remember that Tony was standing half way up the roadside embankment and I was getting on his nerves with a French accent monologue when a car pulled up.
I got in the front passenger seat, Tony in the back, and I made the mistake of introducing myself as a French national. Unfortunately the kindly driver's daughter had only just been married that previous weekend to a Frenchman and so, naturally, he was very curious about France and pressed me on many topics. I had to fabricate a lot. And then we came to a near stand still in a traffic jam on the M25, Tony fast asleep on the back seat, me keeping up this damn French accent for hours and hours.
He was a very good man, our benefactor, he even bought us lunch at a motorway junction restaurant. I was relieved that he didn't notice me inadvertently slipping back into my natural accent when we were saying our good byes, when we finally got close enough to central London for me to be able to escape my French-accent nightmare by tube train.
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