A health librarian at the cinema: The Dig

This is a film about the excavations at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, of what turned out to be Anglo Saxon burial mounds.   The excavations were initially done by Basil Brown, a local " amateur " " excavator " .I was attracted to this one as it ' s set near where I grew up, and also because we had seen aBBC video about the dialect coach who helped Ralph Fiennes with his Suffolk accent.   The dialect coach is from Sudbury, and has the sort of accent I heard growing up.  I was impressed that Ralph Fiennes wanted to learn the accent and dialect, and that the coach had an input into the script to make it more authentic.   I was also in complete agreement with the dialect coach ' s comments about how inauthentic East Anglian accents in television drama and films usually are!  (1)  One good recent Suffolk accent in a film was, I thought, that of Paul Whitehouse inthe 2019 Armando Ianucci adaption of David Copperfield.   And another is Mr Fiennes (although my mother knew he was actually born in Suffolk, and although he moved away at a very young age, that might have influenced his desire to get it right), and the actors playing his wife and some of the housekeeping staff in the Big House whose grounds contain the Sutton Hoo burial mounds.Other things that struck me were, first, that Basil Brown is entirely self educated.   He was not a " trained " archaeologist.  But he had a house full of books, and ...
Source: Browsing - Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: East Anglia language Source Type: blogs