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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
National
Abigail Nicholson

Best and worst Scouse accents we've heard on TV shows and films

Over the years hundreds of people have tried to perfect the Scouse accent as they take on roles in TV shows and films.

Replicating the accent can be rather difficult, with many actors being tripped up by it. So much so, people took to Liverpool's Reddit to share their personal favourite attempts and also some of the worst.

Martin Freeman won lots of praise for his Scouse accent in BBC crime drama ' The Responder ', which hit screens in January. The series was written by ex-police officer Tony Scumacher, and was filmed in Everton, St Helens and Wirral.

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No-one who heard Yosser Hughes’s catchphrase "gizza job" thought actor Bernard Hill wasn’t a native Scouser, except maybe writer Alan Bleasdale who employed him and therefore no doubt knew his overcoat-wearing hero was actually from Manchester. One Reddit user said: "Today I learnt that Bernard Hill is not a scouser".

Another user commented that many people think John Simm is a scouser after his performance playing Danny Kavanagh in The Lakes. The series was first broadcast on BBC One in September 1997 and follows the story of a hotel porter, compulsive gambler, and philanderer who escapes from the dole queues in Liverpool to live in the Lake District.

A number of people spoke of their respect for Aaron Johnson playing John Lennon. The Buckinghamshire-born actor is more than believable as the ambitious and troublesome young Lennon, while his attempt at a 1950s Liverpool accent is not bad at all in the film Nowhere Boy.

Another respectable scouse accent was Ben Kingsley in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ben Kingsley's character Trevor Slattery first appeared in 2013's Iron Man Three.

The character - an actor who gets caught up in a terrorist plot - was revealed as a Liverpool FC fan, while the 2014 short film 'All Hail the King' featured this very newspaper. In the short, a photo of a young Trevor and his mother outside Liverpool's Royal Court theatre was said to be "found in the vaults of an English newspaper called The Liverpool ECHO”, suggesting that Trevor grew up in this very city.

You might not have guessed it from Ben Kingsley's accent, which bounces all over the place across his first two appearances.

However, the next Slattery appearance - 2021's 'Shang-Chi' saw Kingsley return to the Marvel universe with a modified accent, which does at times sound rather Scouse. More so than his previous attempts anyway.

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