I happened across an episode of the old Patty Duke Show and wondered how “authentic” cousin Cathy’s accent was.
Of course, Duke’s accent varied from episode to episode, but considering she was born in Queens and only 16 or 17 when the show started, it was impressive enough that she could make Cathy and Patty Lane sound different.
In the first season, her accent was more what I (an ignorant Midwesterner) would consider to be almost Scottish. By the third season it had settled down to sounding sort-of-upper-class. (Here’s a bit from the third season.)
Whatever the accent was, it could hand-waved by saying that Cathy had lived everywhere from Zanzibar to Barkley Square and her speech reflected all those influences, but was the accent she settled on anything close to something authentic?
Why would anyone back then care about authenticity? That’s a 21st century bugaboo and if you asked the question when the show was on, you’d only get “are you crazy?” looks.
I see no reason to be snippy about it. After all, I’m asking during the 21st Century. Besides, Dick VanDyke did Mary Poppins even before the Patty Duke Show and his attempt at a Cockney accent was pretty widely mocked back then and ever since.
Sounds American to me. Like an American who is purposely suppressing or toning down her accent. Perhaps the way people do when they are overseas or have to give a talk/presentation.
In her autobiography, Duke said she learned an authentic Scottish accent for Cathy, because the character was supposed to have grown up in Scotland. But the network then nixed that idea, and decided that Cathy should be “from anywhere but here,” so Duke ended up doing a generic accent which, she says, offended her sense of professional acting preparation.
Meet Cathy, who’s lived most everywhere,
From Zanzibar to Barclay Square.
But Patty’s only seen the sights.
A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights –
What a crazy pair!
I’ve sometimes seen the third line as “But Patty’s only seen the sight.” but having the trailing S sounds better.
No, ASGuy, it is Berkeley Square. In various cases in British accents, the two letters “er” are pronounced like “ar”. This is true in the words “clerk” and “Derby”, for instance. If you’ll do a search on “Barclay Square”, you’ll see that there’s no well-known place by that name in the U.K., while there is a well-known Berkeley Square in London:
I’m going to stick with Barclay. Those lyrics were written by some American songwriter back in 1963 and performed by an American singing group, the Skip Jacks. So no British accent or dialect was involved in either the writing or the performance. As for there being no such place as Barclay Square, so what? Song lyrics now have to refer to real places? And don’t forget, this is television, you know fiction!
I can’t place it as anything identifiable or consistent. It sounds like a person trying to do some sort of English/Scots accent, but it wanders around and you can hear the trying.
It’s no Dick Van Dyke, but it’s not an authentic accent either.
Only tangentially relevant trivia: Per Patty Duke’s memoirs, Kathy and Patty each had their own dressing room. Her abusive manager/foster-father/acting coach was a control freak who insisted on approving every bit of wardrobe and dialogue for each character.
I remember that when they did an abysmal reunion movie, Kathy has a teenaged son with a thick Scottish brogue, a counterpoint to Kathy’s very American teenaged granddaughter.
So, your American songwriters got the spelling wrong too. Does it matter? Not in the grand scheme of things, no. But if it’s supposed to refer to a place in London? Then it is certainly the songwriter’s mistake (not the singers, it IS pronounced Barclay).
There’s another song about the same Square called. ‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.’ (note the spelling). I’ve never understood why it inspires so many creative juices.
Oh, and Patty Duke? She sounds like an American trying to soften her accent to sound more English. The odd word sounds a bit Scottish (‘letter’). But overall she sounds American to me. It’s her pronunciation of certain words that are the giveaway (eg ‘world’).
We don’t know that. The only thing we know is that online lyrics sites spell it “Barclay,” but those kind of sites are usually done by users posting the lyrics themselves, transcribing what they hear. Without seeing the original manuscript, we have no idea how the songwriter(s) spelled it.
Nevertheless, it’s clearly a reference to Berkeley Square. It’s a well-known location, and you don’t have to be British to know how it’s pronounced (which is indeed “Barclay”). That line (“From Zanzibar to Berkeley Square”) is obviously meant as a sweeping description of all the places that Cathy has traveled. From Zanzibar, symbolizing the exotic “wilds of Africa,” to the sophisticated elegance of the fashionable Berkeley Square in London. The contrast is deliberate, and only works if both locations are real places that the audience would recognize.
And if it means anything, the wikipedia article on Berkeley Square mentions Cathy Lane as a “fictional resident.”
Besides, Dick VanDyke did Mary Poppins even before the Patty Duke Show and his attempt at a Cockney accent was pretty widely mocked back then and ever since.