It’s worth noting that “standard” accents like the BBC one are not fixed. Compare continuity announcers and newsreaders of thirty years ago to those of today (not including the ones with regional accents, who of course simply wouldn’t have been newsreaders in the '70s). They sounded much posher back then. Nowadays very few people speak with that kind of cut-glass RP accent. In fact “RP” has become such a broad term as to be of questionable utility. Prince Charles speaks RP, and so do I, approximately, but I sound nothing like him (I hope).
Ricky Gervais - Reading (twinges of West Country alongside a dose of London’s influence)
Michael Caine - Sarrrf Landon (although ‘Cockney’ pretty much suffices)
McCartney - diluted Liverpudlian
This is where Estuary English has spread widely. ‘Fack off’, ‘ain’t it’, and other south-eastern idioysncracies have spread a long way. (I disagree totally with the ‘Essex girl’ parallel, this being a social stereotype rather than a manner of speech.)
Ricky Gervais has something close to an Estuary accent (a generic south-eastern accent), although he’s from Reading and you can hear the slight West Country/Oxfordshire elements in that town’s accent.
Michael Caine’s is a mild working class London accent. Pretty similar to Estuary, really, except that that is a recent term more asscoiated with younger speakers.
Paul McCartney never had a really strong Liverpool accent, and these days it’s even fainter, so I would say Liverpool/RP for him.
On preview, pretty much as above.
(Further though, I don’t know McCartney’s biography, but would ‘middle-class Liverpool’ fit?)
So, for that matter, is Valley Girl.
I think you just got whooshed.
In the UK, wealth has very little to do with prestige. Job and education to some extent - but it’s all about class. Define that in a non-circular fashion and you’ll be a trailblazer - but to some extent you have prestige if you have prestige.
For example, I’ve noticed that doctors are regarded as prestigious in the US (osmosis from TV) “oh you’re a doctor? wow”, whereas that effect is certainly less pronounced here. Medics are respected, yes, and they earn a lot more, but I wouldn’t say they have hugely more prestige than other public servants, like teachers.
To most British ears, the Queen’s voice is heavily accented. Her speech is reportedly a lot like the RP of the 1950s.
If you seriously believe that anyone speaks “without any accent”, you need to open a book. Your accent is just the way you speak - by definition everyone has one. When you say the BBC people had to speak “without any accent”, what you are saying is that they spoke with an Oxford/BBC accent, which many British people are culturally conditioned to regard not as an accent like any other, but as “correct” English. The BBC has recently opened up to a wider range of accents, that’s true.
Doctors - perhaps because so many of them are South Asian - in my experience speak with a wide variety of accents.
And with airline pilots - yes they speak clear English, and yes they have quite pronounced accents in many cases. Consider the All Nippon Airways pilot touching down at heathrow - he will doubtlessly have a katakana accent to a greater or lesser degree. But there needn’t be an contradiction between an accent and clarity.
As for which British accents are the most prestigious? Probably an Oxford accent like mine (eg Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister) or a soft Edinburgh Scottish accent (eg Ducky in NCIS). Virtually anyone in the upper echelons of the British economy and society - city lawyers, senior civil servants, senior bankers - will either be foreign or have developed one of these accents.
zhongguorenmin
Am I bothered ? I ain’t bothered! 
That’s a cool sight! Thanks.
If you seriously believe your experience means anything in this context, you need to open a dictionary (it’s a book where words are defined) and learn the difference between ‘anecdote’ and data’. 
Glee, are you really saying that doctors don’t have a wide variety of accents, which is at least as great as that of the population they treat?
Yeah but no but yeah but
There was fascinating programme on BBC4 recently about a set of newly discovered sound recordings dating from WW1.They were of British prisoners of war, and were collected by a German professor of linguistics who asked his subjects to speak in their own accents and dialects.
What did emerge was that some accents have changed over the years and are now not as “broad” as they used to be. One example was of a man from Wiltshire. His accent was more like the one from present day Somerset. The modern-day Wiltshire accent is not nearly as broad. Others, especially those from Scotland, had hardly changed at all.
This is true. Go into any workings mens club in Wigan and they’re talking a different language.
Forgive the hijack, but I’m interested in this. What is ‘hin’? Is it the same as ‘him’? Or is it an accusative ‘him’? If you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we could take this offline. Send me a private message if you wish.
hin = hinney, which is a term of endearment (honey, I presume). It’s a Geordie (North East) dialect word
Don’t listen to them!
Everyone knows that these English people just talk that way to confuse Americans. When they’re among themselves they talk just like us. All this “accent” stuff is just a put on.
You think that’s something, you should see San Francisco from the bay at night.
dough!
Hin is Geordie (Newcastle) speak, North East England and does not mean “Honey”
Au contraire, it means “Hen” which for some obscure reason is a term of endearment in that particular neck of the woods.
Its usage is mostly confined to addressing members of the fair sex e.g
“Dis tha fancy a newkie wi’ mi’ hin?” Newkie being Newcastle brown ale
Just has here in the East Midlands you will hear “duck” as a term of endearment.