Let’s embrace the bad accent on TV and film – at times, it’s actually the best

Not a lot of people know this, but Michael Caine’s accent was once considered too genuine by half. In the spring of 1966, the actor took a telephone call from Lewis Gilbert, the film director, who told him he was urgently needed at the studio to re-record more than 120 lines of dialogue for his new film, Alfie.

He was bemused at first, not least because the film was already finished, was cleaning up in British cinemas, and had just won a prize at Cannes. But as Gilbert explained, this was specifically for the film’s impending release in the United States, where test screenings had revealed that local viewers “don’t know what you’re talking about”.

So Caine dutifully toned down the twang to a level American ears could cope with – and when Alfie opened in the States that August, he became an international star. The proper voice would have only hampered his success.

That’s not a creative choice you’ll often hear being trumpeted these days, when authenticity in film and television has become a major selling point.

James Watkins, the director of the new BBC One crime drama Mcmafia, said audiences are now “too sophisticated” to settle for British actors either mangling or defying foreign accents, and cast accordingly, with Russian performers in Russian roles.

It’s certainly true that we expect any decent actor to get their character’s voice right – but that’s a relatively recent obsession, which came in during the Eighties with Meryl Streep, whose command of accents from Polish to Australian made it a non-negotiable part of every wannabe Academy Award contender’s toolkit. The problem is Streep’s vocal cords are as finely balanced as an antique Stradivarius, while many of her contemporaries are attempting the same work on the equivalent of a rusty kazoo.

Even the otherwiseunimpeachable greats have been known to come up short. Russell Crowe blustered out of an interview when his East Midlands burr for Robin

Hood was described as having “hints” of Irish, while Daniel Day-lewis’s Italian brogue in the musical

Nine was less Fellini than Dolmio.

So perhaps it’s time for TV and film to embrace the bad accent – or at least allow actors more wriggle room on accuracy if the result gives their performances distinctiveness and kick.

It’s a matter of uncontested historical record, for instance, that the Soviet military commander Georgy Zhukov did not come from Barnsley, but in the black political comedy

The Death of Stalin, the actor Jason Isaacs played him with a flat South Yorkshire growl. “In real life, Zhukov was the only person who was able to speak bluntly to Stalin,” Isaacs said, “so I thought, well, who are the bluntest people I’ve ever met in my life?”

In the thick of the film, that comes over in a heartbeat, whether you have a Streep-like ear or not. One Los Angeles-based critic thought Zhukov was supposed to be Scottish, but even reviewers who fluffed the geography got the point.

Odd accents regularly make bad films worse, but almost never derail good ones. They just become unexpected ingredients in a winning recipe, like Dick Van Dyke’s cockney-viacleveland chirrupings in Mary Poppins.

Imagine if Bert the chimney sweep had had the voice of Michael Caine: it just wouldn’t have sounded right.