Rough Cuts has used a fair few epithets to describe Emmerdale over the years, but "exotic" has never been one of them.  

But apparently Anne Hathaway thinks ITV's rural soap is the best thing since powdered egg, and who would Rough Cuts be to argue with the wife of William Shakespeare? 

Last night Ms Hathaway was out on the town (specifically,  Westfield shopping centre in the heart of London's glittering Shepherd's Bush) at the premiere of Lone Scherfig's romantic drama One Day, and inevitably a question arose about how she came by the new-found Leeds twang in her voice. 

To the surprise of many, Hathaway cited watching Emmerdale as one of the key primers for her Yorkshire vocal training, going on to heap praise on the programme: "Emmerdale's great. We don't have programmes like that in America so it was actually quite exotic for me."   

Well indeed. After all, the Dingle family doesn't really have an American counterpart, does it? 

However, the jury’s still out over whether she might have been better off with Linguaphone rather than the popular ITV soap opera to teach her the subtleties of northern dialect, as critics have generally been less than kind about the Brooklyn-born actress's attempts to mimic a local of the Yorkshire Dales.  

Indeed, even the film's Danish director, Lone Scherfig, has in the past raised the issue.  Speaking of Hathaway's accent she said: "Yes it is a concern... but they're actors and actors they always play things that they are not, that's part of their job." 

Still, Anne’s revelations about the source of her spiffy new accent poses an interesting question: could beleaguered British broadcasters battle their way out of recession by exporting tapes of Byker Grove, Brookside or Pobol y Cwm to drama colleges in the States…? To paraphrase Pink Floyd, we don’t need no elocution; we’ve got Jimmy Corkhill.