Derry's princess of pop, Nadine Coyle says she's going to take elocution lessons.
It could be a real life version of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion that morphed into the smash hit musical My Fair Lady. But would our Girls Aloud star have proved an even tougher challenge for the phonetics professor than the Cockney flower gi
rl?
Possibly. The Derry idiom could have proved too, "confusin" (sic] for the professor!
Nadine Coyle is a class act and her accent is part of her appeal. So what if 'Wossy' couldn't understand her? Most of us don't want to understand him. But if she wants to soften her Derry tones to help people make sense of her American TV interviews, that's fair enough. She's based in Los Angeles these days.
In Shaw's classic play Professor Henry Higgins takes on a bet that he can turn Eliza Doolittle into a refined society lady. One of Eliza's first tests is at an "At Home" with genteel Mrs Eynsfort-Hill, her daughter Clara and her son Freddy. Eliza is under strict orders to stick to just two topics of conversation, the weather and everybody's health.
After a couple of weeks with a Derry pupil it would have been Professor Higgins whose accent would have changed. He would probably have opened with, "Yis Mrs Hill? How'ar ye doin? Isn't that a wile coul oul day, hi?"
