What accent does Spike use?
A stage-school generic ‘English accent’. Hardly anybody talks like that in real life, but many people sound fairly similar.
BTW, I’m not a fan 
I suppose it would derive mostly from North or West London, but as GorillaMan said, like most English accents in an American TV series, no-one in real life talks like that (Daphne’s alleged Manchester accent in Frasier also comes to mind).
Presumably based on the North London accent, since Marsters apparently based it on Tony Head’s natural accent. (It’s not a very precise match, but Head’s was the start.)
Does it actually sound English to English people? I assume it does since neither of you said otherwise but I’m unsure.
If so, can you expound on the “no one really talks like that” idea? Would saying no American really sounds like Dan Rather, Connie Chung, or anyone using the newscaster’s accent be similar to what you’re saying?
IMHO it doesn’t sound English as such, and I think its ‘Mockney’
It sounds English. But it sounds artificial. (Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, sound authentic.) It’s partly a class thing - the north London connections suggested by others implies the accent is ised to suggest a fairly working-class connection, whereas my ‘stage school’ jibe was inverted snobbery about the actor. Basically, he sounds like a rich kid trying to sound ordinary.
‘As a lo’ o’ ro’, a’ is, guv’na. 
This is consistent with the character, BTW.
–Cliffy
Much what I think, he sounds lik a home counties guy trying to sound like a bit of a wide boy. Since I’m from home counties myself, I wouldn’t consider his accent strange if I heard it in a Slough or Windsor Pub.
Drusilla, on the other hand, has an accent that is hysterically funny “Spoike, Spoike!” and makes her sound even more demented than intended.
As an American (with a bad ear for accents), I find it amazing and fascinating that people, especially Brits, can tell where someone is from down to a city or a section of a city based only on how they talk. Even the Boston accent here is part of the greater New England accent and not a sure indicator of where someone is from.
How many regional British accents can a general Brit identify?
Rather, Chung et al speak a fairly standard Midwest (sometimes called by linguists “network standard,” though Rather still has a bit of Texas drawl that peeps through now and then). What makes newscasters sound so distinct isn’t their accent so much as their rhythm and intonation; people paid to talk for a living end up sounding that way, I guess.
Watching British drama, particularly the Grenada Sherlock Holmes series, I enjoyed keeping an eye out for Brit actors doing American accents. I pity the RADA-trained actors forced to ape a Southern drawl or a Texas twang; it can be quite painful.
It’s not any special talent of the English, it’s just that English accents vary a lot more than American ones do. I’m an American myself, and I can usually identify a Londoner as such and sometimes peg them down to a general area of town. Outside London I can’t usually do much better than “Northern England” or “Southern England”, but that’s because I’ve had much less opportunity to meet or even hear non-Londoners. (The Beatles being one notable exception.) I can tell there are differences, I just don’t have the experience to know which differences go with which regions.
Oh, from what little I’ve seen of Buffy, I must agree with klintypooh that the accent is ‘Mockney’ – obviously meant to be English, and equally obviously phony.
I know it’s not an especially British trait… I just put that modifier in there since this is a thread about their dialects, usually hear it in conjuction with them moreso than other cultures, and just don’t want to start a whole thread about it.
We Americans have some pretty outlandish accents and they are discernable from one another: Texas/Oklahoma is different from New Orleans, both are similar to but discernible from Mississippi accents. Farther north you have the Georgia accent and the Carolina accents, a Virginia accent, Kentucky/West Virginia accent (Appalachian), and Baltimore’s Chesapeake Bay waterman accent (Eastern Shore). New York obviously has accents by neighborhood (Dah Brawnks, for one) and New Jersey and Philadelphia are each subtly different (I’m not as good with these). North of there you staht to get a little New England accent until it blends with the Nova Scotian Canadian accent. Moving west you have a cool blend that starts in Pittsburgh and runs through Detroit (I can tell a Pittsburgher from a Clevelander if I listen to them talk for about five minutes). From the upper peninsula of Michigan through Minnesota and the Dakotas you have varying degrees of the accent made famous in Fargo and on A Prairie Home Companion. That’s about all of the US accents I can differentiate between, but I can place southerners in their state after five or ten minutes, and in Maryland I can tell someone raised in Baltimore from someone raised in Wicomico County.
It’s usually a combination of turns of phrase and vowel usage. Philadelphians say things like “I went over her house,” where a person from the Eastern Shore of Maryland might say “I’m goin over-on-down-to his house.” Notice the difference in preposition usage!
What the heck is a wide-boy?
Well, ummm, loads. And yes, it comes down to specific cities, counties and towns, although many are finely nuanced so that only a good familiarity helps (nobody from outside East Anglia manages to spot a Suffolk from a Norfolk accent, and only by living in Manchester did I learn to tell the difference between the different parts of the city). And, as I mentioned earlier, accents are about class as well as location, which makes it all the more complex.
It’s not about dialects - the words being used can be standard English, but the accent is still identifiable.
Now that is damning
I guess I’m not very attuned to English accents; I never suspected that Marsters wasn’t English until I heard him speaking without the accent while hosting some Buffy event. Perhaps it sounds a bit off because it’s actually a 19th century English accent rather than a modern one.
I never suspected that Jane Leeves’ accent wasn’t authentic until I read it here. I noticed that it’s different from the one she used on Throb but neither sounded artificial to me.
I suppose to an English person it must be like listening to Cary Elwes’ in Saw. It sounded exactly like what it was–an Englishman trying hard to do “American”, and not succeeding.
No, the worst thing about it is she’s trying to do a different English accent (and a working class one as well, when she’s middle class - see, snobbery is everything), and doing it really badly.