Liverpool the other one

Call the voice coach! One of Line of Duty's characters hit a bum note for some viewers in northwest England

Many aspects of Line of Duty stretched the viewer's patience. For me the series 6 conclusion was not one of them. Like the devastatingly downbeat sign-off of The Wire, it illustrated how tackling the symptoms of crime is at best a containment job and at worst — and most of the time — futile. Rank humanity will always prevail.

However, the Stephen Lawrence Christopher murder and the Photoshopping of Jimmy Savile into a picture with the retired chief super Patrick Fairbank did not so much make a hole in Line of Duty's fourth wall as smash it to bits with a sledgehammer.

The mention of Daniel Morgan, the private investigator murdered in 1987 with an axe while investigating police corruption, was a little irritating, but perhaps allowable, given that it is one of the most horrifying unsolved crimes involving was Ted Hastings would call "bent coppers" and, I suspect, hugely influential on the writing of Line of Duty. An independent inquiry set up by Theresa May in 2013 is due to publish its report next week. It's unlikely to send Terrible Dick to jail, because no link exists to the killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes, and indeed the draft report caused minimal waves when released earlier this year. But it's worth noting that there are links to the Stephen Lawrence case, as revealed in the report by Mark Ellison QC. So maybe we can allow Jed Mercurio this little indulgence.

Anyway, worse even than the unwelcome intrusion of Savile was, I'm sorry to say, Amy De Bhrún's attempt at a Scouse accent. She plays Steph Corbett, wife of Stephen Graham's late undercover officer John Corbett. She claimed a couple of weeks ago that even Graham, a Scouser, was "fooled by her twang". I sincerely doubt it. For one thing Liverpudlians don't speak with a twang. For another thing the accent was the worst on-screen accent we've endured for some time. Her scenes with Martin Compston, a Scot who has maintained a flawless Estuary English over six series as Steve Arnott, were particularly execrable because of the comparison. A merciless piece in the Liverpool Echo came much closer to the truth.

The reason I mention this now is that I've belatedly started watching Unforgotten, in which the actor doing the voice of Jimmy Sullivan — possibly Harley Sylvester — makes a much better fist of the accent. Is it especially difficult? If so, why not hire someone from the area to do it? Half a million people live in Liverpool. Some of the 330,000 who live over the water on the Wirral could probably pull it off too. I seem to remember that some of the characters in Brookside were played by people with a real or at any rate passable Scouse accent. Why is this allowed to happen? I wouldn't be surprised if the population of Liverpool were quite cross about it. It may have even burnt their cap out.

To celebrate Amy De Bhrún's efforts, we're throwing it out to you: tell us your favourite dire on-screen accents. The actors who can't tell their argot from their elbow. The brogues that went rogue.

Here are a couple to kick things off:

Ali G's mesmerisingly weird attempt at Abbie Hoffman's Massachusetts-by-way-of-California in The Trial of the Chicago Seven. He was "terrified", apparently. So was I.

Peter Mullan's barely comprehensible hillbilly drawl in Ozark. Was it brilliant? Or absolute diabolical? I still don't know.

Come on — give us your most vile vernaculars in the Comments box.