This is intriguing stuff, and representing accents always fascinates me; it’s bloody hard to do in print without resorting to phonetic misspellings that make the dialogue hard to read.

George Macdonald Fraser could capture the sound of an accent with great skill, but (a) you needed to have heard what sound it was before reading and (b) the punctuation and odd spellings used to capture it could indeed be bloody hard to read - check his last book, “The Reavers”, for evidence of that.

It would be fascinating to chat with Erik Singer (or indeed any other dialect coach) and find out how they do their job: contant repetition of the script lines, language-lab immersion or what? However I’m wondering why “Belfast” accents instead of “Irish” accents get mentioned in this short film, because there isn’t a single recognisably Belfast accent in it.

In “Far and Away”, Tom Cruise’s character (from Galway? Connemara?) has a generic “Suddern Oirland” sound far removed from the northern urban which makes Northern Ireland into “Norn Iron”.

Brad Pitt’s accent in “Snatch”, also isn’t “Belfast” but was trying for Irish Traveller.

His IRA man in “The Devil’s Own” is supposed to be from West Belfast (Pitt went there to sharpen his accent; it stayed blunt) but sounds like an American trying to “do” Norn Iron and getting no further than Dundalk.

It’s the equivalent of someone from over here trying to “do” James Cagney and coming out like John Wayne because they both have an American accent, don’t they?

Even Liam Neeson, from Northern Ireland, doesn’t have a Belfast accent; he has (or had) a Ballymena accent, which is quite different (Brooklyn and Boston start and end with the same letter, but their accents can’t be mistaken for each other. Can they?)

Singer comments on Angelina Jolie’s accent as “Maleficent” being a slightly old-fashioned British posh (RP / Received Pronunciation, as used by the old BBC). She was re-using the accent from playing “Frankie” the RAF squadron leader in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, something she researched by speaking to actual WW2 pilots. Jolly good show.

Despite the Irish oddities, Kevin Costner’s weird midWestern Robin Hood, and Mickey Rooney’s Japanese (!?), nobody in this selection matched the glorious badness that was Dick Van Dyke’s cocked-up “Cockney” in “Mary Poppins”.

There should be a Part 2 - Accents the Dialect Coach wants to Forget…