the company of friends

[kindkit]

I finally managed to download The Company of Friends from Big Finish and listen to the Fitz section (the audio includes four 25-minute stories with the Eighth Doctor and different companions).

Comments

<-- new paid account!; i should get a fitz icon

[lullabee_lj]

It's sort of EDA canon anyway that Fitz's accent is easily distinguishable from cockney - he feels a bit ignored at one point in Revolution Man, while they're in London, and he starts doing this local guide schtick with a fake cockney accent. I've heard David Tennant and Hugh Laurie do fake versions of their real accents, but never have I ever heard somebody switch from their real accent to a fake version of it, and I'm sure that would have been worthy of mention if he had just switched from a regular cockney accent to the accent of some kind of cockney turf accountant from Oliver!.

But I seriously had a good laugh at the idea of Fitz sounding like a heavy from any program whatsoever. Rather than get into a fight, he hides and does intimidating thug voices! And when he does get in fights, he fights dirty in the manner of somebody who's not strong enough to throw a solid punch. He's not supposed to be any kind of intimidating individual. I've always imagined his voice being just a smidge higher than Eight's... of course, as I'm kinda tone-deaf, I couldn't tell you if that's the case in the audio.

But somehow I dislike the idea of him having a posher accent than he should have. But he can probably do a subtly posher version of his usual accent if he wants to impress somebody and hardly even has to think about it. Also, there are all these words that middle-class people tend to use, especially more around Fitz's era than nowadays, in the belief they're posh, but they're not. Middle-class people say (said) "serviette" but the upper classes would say "napkin". I've always imagined Fitz would get the fake-posh thing right and say "napkin", although he never seems to have occasion to use any of the words for which there's a divide.

Re: <-- new paid account!; i should get a fitz icon

[kindkit]

I dislike the idea of him having a posher accent than he should have.

*nods* I don't think he necessarily would--I just think he's more likely to do that than to make his accent more working-class. There was something about Di Angelo's accent on the audio that felt very deliberate, like Fitz was one of those guys who fell in love with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and went all mockney.

Re: <-- new paid account!; i should get a fitz icon

[lullabee_lj]

Mockney seems to be the province of people more middle-class than Fitz. You know, people who'd have had a TV by 1963 and wouldn't buy ex-jukebox records. You have to be more upper-class than he is to think it's a lark to act more lower-class than you are. And anyway he likes James Bond too much to go in for mockney. If he were to constantly affect a different accent, it would be posh. But it just seems wrong to try too hard to have a lower-middle class character be superficially upper-middle class, even more than on general principles it seems naive to think it makes any sense at all for such a character (James Bond wannabe or not) to do mockney.