Denise Van Outen ordered to get Joss Stoned
PrintLose the Brit accent, say US TV bosses
Posted in Entertainment, 20th March 2007 11:02 GMT
Free whitepaper – The Dell Management Console and ITIL
US TV bosses have instructed Denise Van Outen to do a Joss Stone and lose her Brit accent - because audiences over the pond have not warmed to her chirpy Essex twang.
Van Outen, 32, was signed to present Grease, "a reality show which is aiming to find a new cast to play the characters from the hit Seventies movie", the Evening Standard notes. Sadly, the Basildon girl has suffered a slight speech impediment in that Yanks don't understand her accent.
A source told the Standard: "The producers thought Denise would be immensely popular with the American public, but unfortunately, it hasn't worked out. She is a very attractive girl and has years and years of television experience. That, along with her English accent, meant that she should have been a hit in the States... but they aren't keen on her voice.
"She has made her career over here on the fact she is a down-to-earth Essex girl, but they just don't get it in America. They are not keen on her demeanour either."
Accordingly, she's been downgraded from main presenter to "roving reporter" and sent off for some Eliza Doolittle-style therapy. Poor old Denise described Los Angeles as "really unforgiving place", adding: "I will not lie - it has been hard. I went out there on my own. I felt really, really out of place. I didn't know anyone. I didn't understand the city."
Bless. The old timers among you may remember the kerfuffle over UK gangster classic The Long Good Friday, which the American distributors apparently wanted to dub because nobody over there understood a bleedin' word of what was going on. Mercifully, good sense prevailed, preventing what Harold Shand would doubtless have called a "diabolical liberty". ®
Enabling The Agile Data Center
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter