Pushy guests just watch

Just watching the Slim.nLift show withe the guest wh has to be Leighton Denny's mum. I must admit to thinking that there is a particular type of woman of a certain age who seem to typify the guests on QVC Lately. Don't get me wrong I am the same age (mid-late 40's) but do they all have to pushy over familiar northerners with the irritating accent? I don't expect all the guests to be as twee as Claire Sutton (a presenter, yes I know but I can't remember all the guests names)can we ae more guests like Rosa andstephen from Yankee candles ago the guy with the amazing voice from Aurora or

I think Rosa is originally from Burnley and she must fall into the mid-forties age group!

I'm not keen on the slim and lift guest but I can't say I've picked up on all these overfamiliar northerners, though I suppose what irritates us seems to jump out at us. For me one of the more annoying guests is Mrs "sharoffsky crystals" and you can't get much less northern than her. However most of the guests just seem fairly normal in terms of accent.

I think if I had to narrow my intolerance of QVC guests down to just a couple of characteristics, it would be over-excited Americans. That covers about half a dozen of them - shouting, hard-selling, talking gibberish and trotting out the same d*mn sales spiel (sp?) every time.

Having said that, every single one of them also displays characteristics that I like.

So much for generalisation!

Yes, let's get rid of all us Northerners on tv and return to a world of Received Pronunciation!

Sigh.
I am from "the north" and don't find those accents irritating at all. Flat vowels surround me every day and it isn't unusual, pushy or annoying.

Jill Franks is pushy and she has an accent from the South. It is a characteristic, not an accent.

Hey oop chuck I`m as Northern as Northern could be and much as we have our fair share of annoying people up here, they also have their fair share down there too. I think it`s attitude and sales techniques which makes some guests annoying, along with equally annoying presenters and not many people are as annoying as Lenny and he isn`t even British !

I'm also surrounded by north(east)ern accents and I don't find northern accents per se irritating, but the pushiness of the spanx woman is off-putting. She's far too much in-your -face, and she carries on as if this is what we all expect and want. Not all of us do, lady, please remember that.

Actually isn't Clare Sutton from Rochdale? That's pretty northern.

Northern accent/friendliness is supposed to put you at ease. They are considered trustworthy and that is why they keep throwing them on the telly nowadays. Being an Ex-Geordie/Yorkshire woman I don't find having so many Northern accents strange any more (it was novel at first lol).
My abiding pet hate, whatever the accent, is saying 'Haitch'. We are bombarded with talk of HD on the goggle box but it feels like 95% of the population now have no idea how to pronounce the letter H. Teeth grindingly irritating!

I love that Britain has so many regional accents in such a relatively small space. Personally (although I am from the North Midlands and so self-preservation might have some bearing on this) I find no one accent more or less irritating than another but am pretty sure that there are just as many people in the North who find 'cockney' or Essex accents every bit as irritating as do those in the South who complain about 'Northerners'. No accent is more or less correct than another. Surely there is room for everything?
Before the Great Vowel Shift, which took place over a couple of hundred years, accents were very different and in 'standard English' all vowels were a lot flatter and more 'Northern' sounding than they are today.

Loud or pushy guests are another matter entirely, and this is to do with manner, not accent, surely? Embrace the differences between us!

JF is a scouser.

The "haitch" thing isn't a regional thing, it's origins are based in religious differences. It still annoys the heck out of me, and puts me off watching an H2O mop demo on QVC.

In the English-speaking world the Northern vowels prevail, with many non-English speaking students learning American pronuciation rather than that of Southern English/Australian longer vowels.

I like regional accents but for a person appearing on telly they should at least speak with inteligance, correct grammar and use of vocab which isn't the preserve of any particular region.

As a Lancashire lass living down South I've insisted on my children pronouncing their consonants (I'm less bothered about their vowels). Whereas their peers may, for example pronounce "Mill Wall" as "Miw Maw" and "South" as "Sowf", I wanted them to have clear diction. Equally I don't want to hear them say "ain't" or "don't" where they mean "isn't" or "doesn't", or "them" instead of "these". All the regional words still used in the northern counties of England have strong links with Anglo-Saxon words which add to the richness of the English language and I loved the fact that relatives of my grandparents generation in Yorkshire still used the singular of "you" and "yours", saying "thee" and "thine" which today sounds archaic to my kids, but then I hear their contemporaries saying "yous" as a misguided plural of "You" but not because they have heard it in Celtic-originating regional usage (common to Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Merseyside, Australia). Maybe they yearn for a distinction between "you" singular and "you" plural which we've lost?

I don't mind my kid's speaking in their current vernacular as long as they don't write in it and understand the difference. I am a language snob and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but how dull it would be if regional richness is watered down.

Meanwhile, back on QVC I don't mind Ann Dawson's strident voice and quite like Craig's soft Bristolian delivery; it's usually the content or the tone of voice which makes me switch off not the accent.

My OH is from Wigan and his accent is often hard for me to understand and I`m from Bolton lol. It`s amazing how even Northern accents vary so much in such a short distance. He says I talk posh ( like hell !) but compared to his way of speaking I think it`s because as a child my Dad always insisted we spoke properly and didn`t use shortened versions or phrases. My OH spent 30 years as a miner and his colleagues were all from the same area and all spoke the same way. In my house lobby was a hallway, in OH`s house lobby was a stew, in my house we didn`t hear thee, thine, love, owdo, the Mrs, downt thill, buzz stop, nowt, etc etc, in his house he did. My first husband was a Glaswegian and understanding OH no 2 is a doddle compared to understanding my late first husband and his family !

Actually, re-reading this thread made me realize something else about the presenters: there are those (and the slim-n-lift or whatever she sells lady is a prime example) that give me the impression that they're pushing their accent, their way of life, their dress code onto me, whether I like it or not. With some of them, it does seem to be a lifestyle choice in one loud package that we're exposed to and it doesn't make me personally buy anything, in fact it has the opposite effect.

Imo there is nobody more pushy than that awful Ultra Sun woman Abi Cleave, she acts like crazy cult leader when trying to flog her product. I have never seen anything like it before.

It isn't the Northern accents per se that annoy me , I am from Manchester. It's the affected over- done, over -camp, In Yer face over familiar apparent commonness in some presenters style that grates on me. It is a Fairly recent thing, I do think, as someone else said above, the powers that be must think that this is a very approachable trust inducing accent. But NOT for me.Oh dear my snobbiness is in full flow perhaps I need to get off my high horse since I am way off being perfect myself.

I think I know what you mean, inverted snobbery really annoys me and that does include over-playing the accent or pretending to be less educated and more "street" than you are. Obviously no one on Q is "street" but you know how kids who can speak perfectly well usually, suddenly regress to a twit saying "innit" when they're with their peers!

The worst person I have ever seen in this respect is Nigel Kennedy. If you see any old clips of him as a child he is very posh but then he wanted to portray a football larger lout persona and suddenly his accent make the Eastenders sound as if they are straight out of Buck House.

loveallthingsitalian said:

The worst person I have ever seen in this respect is Nigel Kennedy. If you see any old clips of him as a child he is very posh but then he wanted to portray a football larger lout persona and suddenly his accent make the Eastenders sound as if they are straight out of Buck House.

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Funny, I was just about to post that myself! I think the last few posts have said what I said, but more to the point. I love hearing different accents, as long as they don't make me feel that they and anything else about that person is being forced onto me, which I do with some guests. We all speak with different accents, some of us with no accent, and some of us with a posh accent and it really doesn't matter what sort of an accent it is or where it's from, just be natural, not in-yer-face, not over-the-top, and don't try to speak down to me or anyone else. It doesn't work. More to the point, it's pretty obvious what game you're playing, so drop the whole facade and be natural.