In all my 42 years of watching TV, it has always been a common courtesy for the host to at least take some active interest in what the guest is doing or plugging. To not do so is beyond rude.
Never mind the fact that she just outright said “I don’t know who Russell Brand is.”
Mika is an intellectual snob bitch who regularly walks of the show before it’s even over as if she can’t be bothered with her own fucking career. Joe wasn’t present, but his narcissism is of epic proportions and the fact that these two are paired together is freaking comical. They deserve each other.
Seeing these guys be put in there place was nothing short of awesome.
I’ll confess that I sometimes turn on the closed-captioning when I’m watching a British movie or TV show. But I don’t have to do it for the whole show/movie, I just need to let my ears acclimate to the actors’ speech. For example, when I watched The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie in the theater, I could hardly understand a thing Martin Freeman said for the first 20 minutes, but I gradually got used to his accent and after that I had no trouble understanding him. More recently I saw Freeman as Dr. Watson in the BBC Sherlock Holmes show with Benedict Cumberbatch, and Freeman was immediately understandable — I was already used to his voice — but it took a bit to start clearly understanding Cumberbatch.
This is a great topic to derail a thread so I hope someone will use the idea to start one. I can’t because I have too much trouble parsing speech already. The summer I was at school in Devon, I traveled around on weekends as well as for several weeks after and I quite literally needed a translator at times.
I remember hitchhiking on one of the main highways somewhere near London at around 4 in the morning and being picked up by 2 guys on their way to work/deliveries/something. I finally stopped asking them to repeat anything since it was completely hopeless. But as I said and to be fair, I’m pretty hopeless even with mild accents until I can acclimate.
Even with my ex, she always tried to talk to keep up with her stream of consciousness and that just didn’t fly. It was an endless struggle to make her slow down and enunciate.
It’s not just you. I live in central Scotland and within a hundred miles or so of me there are dialects that are quite hard to follow - Aberdeen and Newcastle, and environs. It doesn’t take too long to adjust, but it does take an effort. You would have a hard time understanding me when talking to my friends in a pub
quite, I have a good ear for accents and can make sense of most. (though I’m pretty crap at foreign languages) but that is probably because I was exposed to many varied strong accents through family and early work years.
It is like listening to Shakespeare plays, you need some time to re-calibrate and adjust. As much to know what you can safely ignore as to what is important. As with all things natural ability varies.
If nobody could understand you, it’s not their fault…it’s yours. Do you talk too fast. I don’t think I’m alone in having a hard time understanding Ricky Gervais. His accent, I think is normal, but I think he talks really fast, and maybe doesn’t enunciate well.
Having said that, Russell Brand’s accent is hardly a ‘fairly standard British accent’. I don’t know much about the area of the UK where he comes from, but I think it’s safe to say he talks differently then most people from the UK. At the very least, maybe he just enunciates differently. For all I know he’s just hamming up the accent and the people from his own hometown have a hard time understanding him too. Maybe he’s the Bobcat Goldthwait or Emo Phillips of the UK.
My husband and I will never forget watching TV in our hotel near Winchester, and seeing a Scot being interviewed on the news - with subtitles translating what he was saying in English, into English.
I do wonder, to the extent that Americans ask Brits to slow down more than vice versa, it might simply be that Brits are more likely to watch a lot of American TV than the other way around, so they have that “gear” all ready to engage, in the way Mister Rik describes.
Anyway, knowing now that these hosts are used to more substantial news topics, it makes sense to me that they were perhaps clumsily trying to engage Brand on a humorous footing. The problem is they’re uncomfortable with it, they are bad at it, and I think if you’re interviewing a comedian, the best thing you can do is be the straight man, ask open-ended questions, and let them be the funny one.
Or it’s possible it’s all a giant cultural woosh. Though I doubt British chat show hosts are as awkward and terrified-looking as the Morning Joe crew were.
I’d like conservative-with-a-mind-and-an-attitude Clarkson to interview Brand. Sparks would fly out of the interesting conversation between the two, as opposed to the deer-in-the-headlights drivel on the part of Morning Joe’s dullards.
That was a pretty bad apology. It was more of an excuse and they should have just let it go instead of dragging it back out into the light. Kind of like the Paula Deen thing (she needs to stop talking too). Did someone say “Wasn’t he married to Kitty Perry?”
Do you talk too fast. I don’t think I’m alone in having a hard time understanding Ricky Gervais. His accent, I think is normal, but I think he talks really fast, and maybe doesn’t enunciate well.
It’s probably a very good thing Craig doesn’t drink or drug any longer - he and Russell could have cut a wide swath through the world together, I suspect.