BBC Radio West Midlands

Episode 4: Lilting & Melodious

Mark Byron Dallas is a dialect coach who grew up in Birmingham but now lives in Canada.

I help actors, mainly, sound like they're from other places. I get a lot of local ones from Toronto who want to sound more American to get jobs in the American market, but also a lot of people from all over the world. The Peaky Blinders series was phenomenal, and I think that it's a mixed bag, really, when it comes to the accents on that show. I mean, of course, you've got the experts like Benjamin Zephaniah, and Harry Curtin, obviously, because they're from Birmingham. They're Brummies themselves.

But then, I think also Cillian Murphy did a pretty good job too, right? I mean he’s consistently pretty good with the accent. He managed to prepare by hanging out in a pub on Garrison Lane in Birmingham and recording chats on his phone, so he put in a lot of work for that, and I think it paid off.

But unfortunately, over the years, the Brummie accent has been associated with lots of negative stereotypes and has regularly come bottom of surveys to find the favourite accent.

The perception of the Birmingham accent is different in different parts of the world. I mean, internationally, it rates much better in the polls internationally compared to within the UK. Researchers at the University of Birmingham, some years ago, found out that the Brummie accent was highly favoured by foreign visitors that were unaware of the negative connotations, and some of those even described it as ‘lilting’ and ‘melodious’. But as you know, it never does very well in British polls, and there is that layer of perception, which is based upon accent bias. So, you've got a lot of people that have these ideas of what a Birmingham accent is.

I've heard all sorts of really awful, insulting things about it, like “it’s very monotonous”. You and I know it's not a monotonous accent at all. It's got a lot of musicality in it. I've heard, “Oh, it sounds like you've got a cold, and your nose is blocked up”. What complete nonsense is that?

There was one woman—a teacher—who told me that she thought it sounded like someone strangling a cat under water.

And all of these are just sheer accent bias, really—like, really brutal, based on no fact—just opinion.

So, where did the negative perceptions of the Brummie accent actually come from?

What's really fascinating is that the Birmingham accent first hit national airwaves in the 1940s on a comedy show called Educating Archie. Linguist David Crystal made a really great point about that, which was that back then, in the ’40s, most people in the UK had never been to Birmingham. They'd have no cause to travel to Birmingham. So, for a lot of listeners, radio was their first ever exposure to the accent.

Educating Archie was huge, one of the most popular shows on British radio at the time, despite the fact that it was literally a ventriloquist act with no visuals at all!
Can you imagine that? A ventriloquist act on radio?

The important thing about this is that the character that mattered was Marlene, who was played by Beryl Reed, and she had two defining traits. One was that Marlene had a slow, exaggerated ‘Brummie’ accent, quite far from how most people in Birmingham speak. And the second thing was that this character was presented as being not the sharpest tool in the box. And of course, the character was hilarious, and audiences loved her. But that combination—that strong Brummie voice plus comic foolishness—lodged itself deeply in the national psyche? And that stereotype became a shared, national kind of shorthand, and became a kind of background setting, like a quick laugh queue. And that's why it's been so persistent. The problem for the accent is that, for decades, they had actors that weren't from Birmingham pretending to be characters that were from Birmingham, but nobody ever got to hear the real Birmingham accent until, probably, Crossroads came out in the 1970s. Then you started to get actors that were actually from Birmingham but then you also had wobbly sets and everything, and it was associated with that poor-quality show, unfortunately.

One big misconception when attempting to impersonate the Brummie accent is confusing it with the Black Country accent, which—as anyone in the West Midlands knows—is not the same.

There are differences in a lot of the vowel sounds. There's differences as well in the musicality, like the intonation of the accents as well. And I think that, um, that often gets portrayed. So sometimes somebody who's supposed to have a Birmingham accent will have more of a Black Country accent, or they'll have some kind of pastiche of it.

I think the Brummie accent is one of the most difficult accents to master because there’s features that are Northern, there’s features that are Southern because—you know—it's smack-bang in the middle of the country, and so what happens is a lot of actors will sometimes sort-of slide toward the North with more Northern features, and some of them will start to sound a bit more Cockney than it should be, and I think that also, in the past, a lot of actors, the way that they would learn accents would be from watching shows in which other actors were doing accents—putting accents on.

You know, there was a time before the internet when you didn't have all the resources at your fingertips like we do now, where you can listen to samples of people who actually grew up. speaking with the Birmingham accent like I did when I was a kid. I mean, I don't have much of that left now, but you know, back then, you would just try to sound like other actors that were putting it on, so it is a difficult accent to get right.

I think it's now finally come to the public that these actors in Peaky Blinders, they put a lot of effort into trying to sound like they’re from Birmingham, especially Cillian.

And that's what's really important. Whenever an actor is doing an accent—that they do it with respect, they do it with love. And neither of these things have been applied to the Birmingham accent over the past—what?—70 years.

So, how has Peaky Blinders changed the perception of the Brummie accent?

All of a sudden, this show portrays these kind-of, you know, sexy, dangerous people with a kind of Birmingham accent, and I mean, okay, sure, they're a brutal crime family, but still, it was a very different effect from the kind of ridiculous comedy characters that you had before that.

Episode 5: More than just the stories

Since it first launched back in 2013, Peaky Blinders has very much helped to put the West Midlands on the map and has helped to attract visitors to the region from all around the world. Dialect coach Mark Byron Dallas grew up in Birmingham, but now lives in Canada.

I think that it probably already has done some work for tourism in Birmingham, and it's hopefully gonna get people to go to Birmingham and see what Birmingham really is like, because most people—they just go past it on the motorway, and they… they don't see the best side of it. But people who actually go to Birmingham. They… they look around, they do some shopping, and they… they get to see. It's made it into a historical beast, right? So that people just don't think of Birmingham as just an old factory town that has got nothing to contribute.

Episode 6: A new generation of Peaky Blinder

Mark Byron Dallas is a dialect coach who grew up in Birmingham.

It's got something for everyone, so it's got stuff for the history buffs. It's got a lot of action in it. It's got the costumes. It’s got the old cars, the buildings, the old canal boats. But all of that is just the perfect setting for something that you can really get your teeth into.

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Dialect Coach Mark Byron Dallas from Birmingham now lives in Canada.

I would say Peaky Blinders is very well known out here. It is definitely well-received, and the thing is, like, everybody knows it for its brilliant storylines. It's got amazing actors. It's got fantastic production values, and it's got a rocking soundtrack as well.

[Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand plays]

It's just an amazing, perfect storm of production, creativity, and the way it's put together the way it's edited the way it's been directed and the whole thing just comes together as an amazing spectacle, right? So, I'm pretty sure that the movie that's coming out is going to be well-received over here as well.