British Accents

I've been watching back to back, 40 year old episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus on IFC this afternoon.  I remember back when friends first urged me to watch this show, and how I made a concerted effort to  watch and join in the water cooler conversations about how incredibly funny this show was supposed to be.

It was a learning curve for me, though.  British accents always gave me a bit of difficulty.  Maybe it's the way I hear things, but all my life I've had this slight aversion to British accents that I have trouble understanding.  It's just an annoying additive to communication that slows things down when I have to stop and think about what might've just been said...

But my main pique over the British accent isn't necessarily on a par with other dialects and accents besides British.  And by British, I have to include South African and Australian, too.  The problem, as it turns out after all these years of being annoyed isn't necessarily the accent itself.  It's the predisposition of PBS to present anything with British accents as being, somehow, a cut above anything without a British accent.

Despite my life-long dance with left wing thinking, there's always been something about PBS's love affair with anything British being a real sticking point for me.  It may be that this has changed in the past ten or twenty years, and that "PBS" may not actually stand for "Political Bull Shit" anymore, but I always had this nagging sense of the channel 2 and 44 crowd being a bunch of snobs.  And the predisposition to anything British being somehow "better" was always that niggling source for the idea.

Watching an endless flow of 40 year old Monty Python episodes today (well, dozing to them, actually), I've finally come around full circle on this stupid British accent thing...

It ain't so bad, after all.