How about the designers from Changing Rooms, like Oliver Heath, Andy Kane, Graham Wynne, Anna Ryder Richardson, Linda Barker and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen? I can definitely tell their accents are different, but I can’t identify where each are from.
How about Gary Oldman and Clive Owen? I thought they’re supposed to be North London, but isn’t North London more Colin Firth - Hugh Grant - Emma Thompson posh? Is South London more typically middle-class or working class? And then the “Eastenders” are, of course, East London Cockneys and west London is Lady Diana Spencer Sloaney.
I thought Sean Bean was from Manchester, as is Timothy Dalton. Is there a big difference between Manchester and Liverpool, accent-wise?
Are most actors pretty good at accents from all over the country, or do they go for “posh” or “working class” and leave it at that?
There’s working-class accents all over London, including north & west. But not nearly as many posh ones down Sarrf Landon 
HUGE difference between Manchester and Liverpool. I’ve heard linguistic claims that the Scouse accent is due to the Irish influence on the native Lancastrian sounds, but I can’t hear anything in it that makes sense.
There’s also big differences across Manchester, with peripheral towns such as Bolton and Oldham having distinct sounds, and further differences between the north & south of the city. And the generational differences which were mentioned earlier.
Re the two cities: compare these kids from Salford with this Liverpudlian family
What’s RP?
I know Yorkshire accents from All Creatures Great and Small (the farm folk, not Herriot, who was Scottish or Siegfried or Tristan, who had upper class accents-no?).
What about a more contemporary movie–Love Actually. Are those “ordinary London” or is there more dinstinction involved? Alan Rickman, for example, vs his tart of a girlfriend vs Emma Thompson, his wife? Colin Firth’s? Hugh Grant’s vs his GF from “the dodgy” end of Wansworth?
help! (and does any of it matter anymore? I love the diversity and hope it continues–that link, GM , was great–but is one still hampered/helped by one’s accent?
What about Bridget Jones–hers vs Darcy’s vs her parents-- her mum and dad had different accents.
Also, how about Harry Potter et al–are those accents just upper class British? I know Professor McGonagall’s is Scottish (Edinburgh?), and the new Dumbledore is “Irish” (he doesn’t sound Irish to me, but I am used to put on Irish accents here on St. Patrick’s day!)–what of Hagrid?
Sorry if this is a PIA for you, but thanks for the help! All my life I have read of this or that accent, but since I don’t hear them often, it is hard to identify them. Cockney is easy, as is Yorkshire and Liverpudlian, but the rest all sounds like Masterpiece Theater or Shakespeare to me… 
RP is, I assume, “Received Pronunciation.” Here’s Kingsley Amis in The King’s English on Received Pronunciation:
Re: Sean Connery.
He has an Edinburgh accent. Not a fancy “pan-loaf” Edinburgh accent, but more the working-class type; which he was, being a milkman in Auld Reekie.
I have known several transplanted Edinburghers (Edinbuggers?) who have pretty much the same accent (including one man who used to work out in the same gym as Connery–who was “Mr. Scotland” at the time).
I had a voice actor do a recording of an interpretive audio script for use here at this historic site (where the Royal Navy and Royal Marines had a base); I had originally envisioned a Cockney accent for the station, but when the actor turned out to be from Edinburgh, I just let him go ahead.
It’s fun to listen to the accents in the Aardman Creature Comforts shorts. We like to try to place each one as we hear it, with varying success, I’m sure.
My favorite characters are the dog and the cat on the couch (probably a husband and wife IRL) as they bicker very mildly. I’m guessing - Manchester?
Received Pronunciation - the old ‘BBC English’, think what Queenie sounds like. Primarily characterized by the presence of long ‘a’ sounds in bath, grass etc and ‘deformed’ vowel sounds in ‘house’ which can even become “hice”. These vowel sounds sometimes give away the roots of place names such as Pall Mall in London which in RP sounds much more like Pêle Mêle (aplologies for spelling) and Charing Cross which echos Chère Reine.
Yes - but in a reverse snobbism. ie you are more likely to be judged harshly / dismissed by the majority of the population if you do have an RP or Oxbridge accent. About ten or fifteen years ago the BBC took a decision to allow and encourage more regional accents on TV so kids with those accents would feel ‘included’ and have role models.
(Although it is worth noting that older presenters, sports commentators aside, still water down or have done away with their accents - Huw Evans who reads the national news at six has a nice Welsh lilt, it’s less a lilt more a full blown accent when he’s on BBC Wales; similarly John Hymphries on Radio Four’s "Today’ programme sounds neutral until you see him in less serious programmes, his Welsh intonations can be heard when he gets excited.)
Sadly too many people still judge others on their accent or spout rubbish to the tune of “I don’t have an accent” - meaning they don’t have a regional accent - or “you don’t sound Welsh” because you don’t have the better known generic South Wales version.
Aside - for North Notts / Yorkshire think of Sean Bean and the lads from The Full Monty.
All sorts of assumptions can be, and are, made purely on the basis of accents. Already in this thread I’ve made comments about schooling and family backgrounds, including those of fictitious characters. Some of it is inverted snobbery, and a lot of it is bog-standard snobbery. Some regional accents, particularly rural ones, lumber people with a ‘stupid’ tag.
Do people have work accents and home ones? It makes sense to me that someone would have a stronger accent when on their home turf, so to speak.
I could see that happening–I speak differently at work than I do at home. Work is in a blue collar (working class) hospital–I change both my vocabulary and some of my diction while I am there. Sometimes, I get mixed up and people at home (upper income area) tell me I am talking like a truck driver. It wasn’t a concious choice–I just found I did better with the patients and cow-orkers. It’s a modified Chicago accent–I still get some funny looks from pts and familys.
My accent varies according to the company, and it’s not anything I do conciously. Spending the week working with kids, I end up sounding like a genuine local (I wasn’t born here, so I don’t count, you see). Go to the pub, likewise. Go for lunch with my non-Suffolk parents, or talk to colleagues, or whatever, and it disappears and I sound all proper.
Oh, and go abroad, and I sound like the perfect English gent, because it’s the only way to be sure of being understood…but the one thing I cannot shake off, no matter how hard I try, is using ‘cheers’ for ‘thank you’. It’s an involuntary spasm that makes me say it, and has resulted in no end of New World shop assistants & bar staff looking at me strangely. This summer, I decided to stop caring and let them think I was odd.
We [del]septics[/del]yanks do a similar thing. Linguistically it’s usually called register. The young- and mid- generation these days often use a formal register for workplace, family, or other specific social settings. For others (among friends), a much for informal register is used which sounds much more “street”, and incorporates a lot of slang and elements of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Perhaps this is not so much a matter of accent (although it often is), but certain grammar rules and sentence constructions that play a big part.
What seems so odd is that, despite thinking that I was an Anglophile, I had never even heard of this before the first time I visited England. And everybody said it. I don’t think I heard an actual “thank you” on that entire trip; it was always either “cheers” or “ta very much.”
I have a friend who is Scottish, although he was educated in England. He has two kids in elementary school who, though born in England, pretty much lived in the US most of their lives. When my buddy’s dad is visiting from Scotland, it’s just hillarious to listen to the accent shifting that goes on. My friend “normally” speaks with a standard sort of R.P English accent, but takes on a strong Scottish accent when speaking to his dad. The kids speak like any American kid, but switch to a English accent when they speak to their dad. I was dumb-struck the first time I visited them and saw this happen. This is all in the course of a normal conversation.
Are there regional variations of English in Ireland? When I saw The Commitments, the Northside Dubliner characters seemed to talk a lot more like the early Beatles than like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun (not that the latter is a good example of Irish English anyway).
How would you describe Patrick Mcgoohan’s accent? It seems all over the place
And Patrick Stewart (Yorkshire).
The stereotypical pirate accent is an extremely exaggerated southwestern accent, found in such places as Somerset, Dorset, and Devon.
To my untrained ears, both Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen sound almost exactly the same. Are they from the same area?