McG of H: "Any English actor / comedian turned actor trying to do an American accent pretending to be American in an American production it really makes me squirm."

Does that include Hugh Laurie in "House". I've no idea if his accent actually sounds "authentic" to native Americans, but I'd the impression it was quite widely seen as reasonably so.

Laurie sounds to do a reasonably good stab at it to me, too. Be interesting to have a US native confirm it, or otherwise.

How about Damian Lewis in "Band of Brothers" and "Life"? Again, he seems to do OK there, to this Englishman. And in "Dreamcatcher" he has to toggle between a US and English accent according to whether he's possessed or not at the time he's speaking.

I don't seem to have a problem understanding accents.

Although born well over the border into Yorkshire, I have no problem at all understanding the Lancashire "Ahve getten noan" joke posted in 2002 above. I don't believe any Yorkshire person would.

Brummie and Geordie are easy. I can tell the difference between a Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Kerry accent without much difficulty, though I was once caught out by a Glaswegian Scot when I asked what part of Ireland she came from. Good excuse though...her parents were from (London)Derry.

When working in Norway I was able to tell the difference between a fair number of local accents and dialects fairly quickly. I was stumped once, though, when our company was audited by a team from Statoil. I asked the Lead Auditor in a coffee break what part of Edinburgh he was from. His reply: "I'm from Oslo, but my wife's from Morningside"! He had it down perfectly. I suspect an Edinburgh native could have pinned it down to the district, but he was astonished that I could even name the city, as he'd always thought he had a neutral British accent.