–Does England have distinct middle/upper class regional accents? I often see people associating regional English accents with thick working class accents (such as using the guys from Oasis to show a typical Manchester accent). What are good examples of upper/middle class accents from the north of England and how do they differ from the upper/middle class of the London area?
–I often hear Lily Allen and Kate Nash derided as “Mockneys”–people who affect working class accents when they actually came from privileged backrounds. What are the giveaways they don’t have legit Cockney accents? Is there an actual accent they do sound like?
–One of my favorite TV characters as a kid was Mr. Bentley an Englishman on the Jeffersons. I was stunned to find out the actor was an American. Does his accent sound like a legit English accent, and if it does from where?
I’m equally stunned that you thought he wasn’t American. He doesn’t sound as though he’s even attempting an English accent. If I had to guess where he was from based on his accent, I’d have a stab at maybe Boston or thereabouts.
I am not English and have never been to the UK.
However, it is my understanding that in the UK, the upper class generally send their children to “public schools” and that there is a “public school accent” which is common to the gentry in all parts of the country.
Accents are easy to modify, so a faked public school accent is probably pretty common, and these days a lot of people who would naturally speak with a public school accent fake a working class accent to “pass” as regular people. That’d cover regional accents as well as “mockney”.
lol, im actually from london myself but we all dont speak the way other people in other countries think we would, the younger kids speak ‘‘slang’’ (a whole loada’ nonsence) and its not mockney lol, its cockney, which is kinda like slang but makes more sence, like, instead of saying “good morning” i would say, "good mornin’ " or "alrigh’ " (without pronouncing the t’ ) so yh, and then you have the posh people, who pronounce EVVVEEERyTHING correctly (which is just too long) so there you go 
Lily Allen’s dad Keith is also a celebrity, and he talks like that, although he’s probably more “Cockney”. So in her case I don’t think there’s anything “mock” about it.
For the class thing, there is essentially one “posh” accent (listen to Prince William, say), and then there are a load of regional accents. The posh accent is sometimes called Received Pronunciation or RP, but that term does cover a range of accents, some of them less “upper class” than that of the royals…
Mr Bentley sounds half English, half American to me. The way he pronounces “Oh Lord” (rhotically) and “my apology was sincere”, for example, sounds quite American to my ears.
There’s old RP, like the Queen, though even she’s changed a bit in the past few years.
There’s new RP, like, say, Moira Stewart, the woman coming out of the closet (heh). The other two have new RP accents with touches of estuary English - the ‘godda’ and ‘av’ instead of ‘got to’ and ‘have.’
Is a reasonable reperesentation of a real Cockney accent..
Most ‘mockney’ accents aren’t really mockney. Jamie Oliver and Russell Brand are just talking how they were brought up to talk, in the areas of Essex where the accent changed rapidly after the East End of London was bombed out and everyone moved a bit further east - their parents were working class.
Kate Nash and Lily Allen (especially the former) are ‘posher’ examples of Estuary accents. They grew up in London with wealthy parents but were not necessarily surrounded by minor aristos all their lives. For example, they’d say ‘I dunno’ quite naturally, but pronounce most of their h’s.
I can’t see your clip, sorry.
–Does England have distinct middle/upper class regional accents?
Yes it does. Regions and background are in evidence in the accents therein.
OK, I just watched a couple of different Mr Bentley scenes on Youtube and it would never have occurred to me he was meant to be English. He doesn’t sound even the slightest bit English. Was he meant to, really?
Mr. Bentley sounds like an American doing a second rate English accent, veering back to American in places. From 0:58 to 1:06 sounds like a passable attempt at a public school accent, but then goes straight back over the Atlantic when he says “Won’t happen again I assure you”. Couldn’t say what region, but to me it sounds far more American than English, or possibly trans-Atlantic, that one always catches me out.
Here’s a good example of English accents from Fry and Laurie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ , though Fry does a less than great cockney copper, Hugh Laurie’s is your standard English middle class.
Kate Nash, Lily Allen and the like sound quite ridiculous when you’ve seen a few episodes of Only Fools And Horses, where David Jason and Lennard Pearce in particular give you the full flavoured cockney that you’ll find from yer working class Landanar. - YouTube
There are certainly ‘levels’ within regional accents. I myself have a ‘posh’ Manchester accent, essentially a middle class version of the Manc accent. Generally I’d characterise a middle/upper class version of a regional accent as a softer and slightly less extreme version of the working class edition, but of course that’s a wild generalisation.
Shakester, you’re overstating massively - the upper-class doesn’t exactly equate to the gentry, it’s not only the upper classes that send their children to public schools, and although it’s true that there is a subset of accents you could pretty much class as ‘public school’ I wouldn’t say that there is no regional variation there. I’m struggling to think of an example off hand, is the problem!
…which is why I started out saying I’ve never been to the UK, and why I said “it is my understanding” rather than “it is a fact”.
I’m Australian, and entirely proletarian. My knowledge of the class system in the UK is based on reading PG Wodehouse and watching a lot of UK television programs and movies, and having personally known a few poms. Which makes me an expert compared to most Americans, but not an actual expert, hence the large disclaimers in my post.
The accents of Sir Ian McKellen and Michael Parkinson are good examples of “middle class” regional accents (respectively Wigan and Yorkshire accents). You can hear one interviewing the other, here. For comparison, this is the “proper” Wigan accent and dialect. Compare with how McKellen talks.
It seems to me that these middle-class regional accents are not really distinct accents. Instead, the regional accent is modified towards the “neutral” or “prestige” accent, in this case RP. The same phenomenon is found everywhere - people in rural parts of the US don’t all talk like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel from The Simpsons, for example. They’re likely to be somewhere between that and standard “newsreader” pronunciation.
England has a huge range of accents, and it has different variants of ‘posh’ and upper middle class ones depending on the area. The classic posh accent is called received pronunciation, which is how the Queen speaks (although she’s moderated it a little bit nowadays) and how BBC newsreaders used to speak decades ago: The Queen speaking.
Nowadays BBC newsreaders don’t quite speak in full RP, but they’re a good example of the archetypal ‘posh’ accent nowadays: this is Tim Wilcox for instance.
Like I said though, there’s a lot of regional variants. One is the “sloaney” accent which is common in public schools and in posher parts of London; there’s a new programme called Made In Chelsea which is a perfect example: Made in Chelsea youtube trailer. But there’s posher versions of most regional accents as well: lancashire, Scottish, parts of Wales, etc.
As far as “mockneys” goes, it’s not really that there’s a giveaway in their accents: Lily Allen and Kate Nash don’t actually speak with cockney accents, they just adopt elements of it, but people don’t believe they’d have picked up those elements growing up middle class. I’m not sure about those two, but Tony Blair definitely used to pick up elements of cockney (like adding glottal stops) when he was talking to working class audiences, despite usually having a very middle class accent.
Finally I’m sorry to tell you this Mr Bentley character’s accent doesn’t sound anything like a real English one. 
I wouldn’t even have guessed he was trying to sound English, I would’ve thought he was going for some sort of mid-Atlantic/east coast/New England accent.
In my defense, I was six when the show came on:) The funny thing is that when they cast the role, they turned down several actual English actors. I guess they though his accent would be enough to fool most viewers (like myself) without having the problems many Americans have understanding a true English accent.
If you english and lived there you would be able to tell with relative ease if the person was from the MIdlands, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool etc. The words the person uses is a dead give away if they say ‘pet’ they come from near Newcastele just as an example.
One of the strangest examples of “mockney” is that of the violinist Nigel Kennedy. I have seen a clip of him from a children’s talent programme when he was about ten years old, and he is speaking with a posh accent. Then when he grows up, he morphs into a pretend cockney.
The Midlands can even be divided up further. For example Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester all have different and distinct accents. This over a distance of about forty miles.
BBC announcer Wilfred Pickles was heavily criticised (or more accurately the BBC were, for hiring him) in the 1940s for having a regional accent. Yet if we listen to a recording of him now - YouTube there seems little to complain about - a slight hint of Yorkshire, but no more.
Sir Robert Peel was mocked at the time for having a regional accent, but without recordings it is hard to tell just how slight it was.
Yes and no. Here’s an example: Leeds has a very strong and identifiable accent and differs a lot from the Southern accent. Where I work near London their are 3 people born and bred in Leeds. The first of them comes from a very working-class background and the accent is immediately recognizable, anyone reasoanbly au fait with British accents would instantly recognize the town they come from and even someone who wasn’t would easily recognize the marked difference between the local accent. The second comes from a lower middle class background, you might not notice immediately the difference between their accent and the local accent, but after if you thought about it you could probably recogniser that they were from Yorkshire. The third comes from an upper-middle class background and attended public school and you would not recognize where they were from by speaking to them, the only way you’d be able to pick it up perhaps is in the odd little hint.
On the other hand accents can be extremely regionalised. Even in Reading, where I live, people talk of a ‘Tilehurst accent’ (Tilehurst is basically West Reading).
Myself I caqn tell if someone has a genuine London accent or if they are speaking ‘Estuary English’ or as a ‘mockney’ affectation. The reason for this is that my mother and her family are from South-East London, I can tell if someone has learnt their accent directly from working-class Londoners like my grandparents or if it’s come from somewhere else (that said after the war a lot of working class people from East Londonmoved to Kent and Essex, hence estuary English).
That is a terrible atrempt at an English accent, I think I’d guess they were trying to do a Canadian accent.