Letter from America
I'm in New York in a cold but sunny Sunday morning watching the , probably the most prestigious and serious news show on commercial TV in America. Its entertainment section featured a long interview with of ITV's Britain's Got Talent fame. The interview was remarkable -- not because of anything she said -- but because it carried subtitles in English so Americans could understand her!
Yes, CBS told us that her Scottish accent was "a little difficult" to understand, hence the subtitles. They also used subtitles when they carried a clip from Ant and Dec.
Some British accents are hard to understand, even in other parts of the UK, and they are impenetrable to many foreign ears -- the most guttural of Glaswegian, for example, or broad Geordie. But I wouldn't have thought Ms Boyle's accent that hard to decipher among her fellow Brits (let me know what you think) and Ant and Dec are obviously clear enough to be understood on our network TV.
But CBS clearly thought otherwise and I suspect this is the start of a trend. Some British movies now carry subtitles in America when there are strong regional accents (eg Damned United). I've even heard some English southerners demand subtitles when certain Scottish trade unionists are on TV, though I suspect there would be an outcry if any British broadcaster used them.
Britain probably has more regional and national accents than most countries and I wonder if some have become more impenetrable over the years: even I struggled to understand some folk when I was back in the Glasgow region recently, though that might simply be because I haven't lived in the West of Scotland for almost 40 years. 
Even so I do sense that some regional accents have become harder to understand and, though the diversity of British voices is one of our glories, if you can't be understood even by other English-speaking countries then clearly there is a problem (unless, of course, you never leave your own backyard). I should add that some Americans also find up very upper-class British accents hard to understand eg Princess Anne had a tough time being understood when she visited some teenagers in New York a while back.
Lest any readers of this blog should be concerned, I'd like them to know that, though I have appeared regularly on US TV for almost three decades, no US broadcaster has yet found it necessary to use subtitles.
Just to be sure, however, I think I'll take an interpreter to today's Valentine lunch: in matters of the heart it's dangerous to be misunderstood.
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