sixth-light:

this great post about changes in acting styles and accents over the 20th/21st century made me think about Nightingale’s accent, and how Peter – who’s English – thinks he sounds like ‘a Hollywood villain’ on first meeting him, and how p much everybody in fandom who listens to the audio books goes “whoa Mr Holdbrook-Smith that accent is a bit much’ before they get used to it. And how that’s because Nightingale has the old-fashioned upper-class accent mentioned in one of the posts in that reblog chain, which DOES sound like a parody to modern ears but absolutely isn’t (think, e.g., recordings of the Queen from just after she ascended to the throne.) 

Two three many stray thoughts leading on from this:

1) in the modern era I bet his accent is actually a genuine barrier to him doing police work – Peter talks about coppers deliberately practicing a certain style of speech which is Not How Nightingale Talks, and Nightingale doesn’t even talk like an average posh guy, he talks like a parody of one

2) if they ever do a TV series, they’re going to have to make a choice about whether to have the actor go full on Old-School Posh RP or just modern posh newscaster-ish RP, because having the audio effect of the full thing will have an effect on how audiences react to Nightingale, and I don’t think there’s a wrong choice here but I would be curious to see which one they made

2a) if they DO go Full-On Hollywood Villain, a TV fandom will put a LOT of time into theories that Nightingale is Secretly The Villain/Faceless Man, like way more than the book fandom ever has, and probably not quite realise why 

3) Nightingale’s unchanging accent – vs., again e.g. the Queen’s – is a marker of how little fucking regular human contact he has had over the past seventy years, if he was talking to other people lots every day it would have started to shift (if you’re a migrant or know migrants, you’ll know how radically adult accents can shift in the right circumstances) 

3a) probably starting in 2012 and going into the future of the books, he’ll come down to a more modern-style posh accent, only neither he nor anybody who interacts with him a lot will notice unless they listen to old recordings of him or something after a few years, because brains are weird that way 

3b) I would love to see Peter notice this in the books but he won’t, because it hasn’t been quite long enough and also brains