The comment "Sometimes I wonder why most of the nice programs about archeology, environment, animals...etc..seem to require me to tune my ear to English accents and pronunciation..." is really interesting, to me at least.

In Oz we get a lot of British and American teeve broadcast at us as well as a fair bit of Oz and occasional NZ stuff and that means we're inundated with almost every version of spoken English, none of it requiring much in the way of concentration.

So I was a bit surprised to hear that Taggart (a Scottish cop shop thing on in Oz at the moment) required dubbing with American accents for broadcast there. I realise it's a common complaint among film/TV producers that the American market won't accept anything with accents further east than midAtlantic or further west than Hawaii but Bill's comment (which I'm not criticising) goes some way towards explaining the, apparently intense, resistance againt the "foreign" and focus on "local" that is sometimes detectable in the US.

The more accents the merrier, for me.

Cheers, Rowan