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With news that David Tennant is to make his U.S. network debut as an anxiety-prone Chicago attorney in Rex Is Not Your Lawyer , you have to wonder: Are there any British actors left in Blighty to eat the bacon sarnies backstage at the National Theatre?

It would seem they've all flown to American TV, where they play American cops, doctors and vampires – most with drinking problems. U.S. producers like British actors because they're well-trained, inexpensive (‘we're cheap,” says Dominic West, a.k.a. The Wire 's Jimmy McNulty) and they're unspeakably grateful to be working in a place that has more than two days of sunshine a year.

More important, most of them have a head start, having already learned to lose their regional accents for a generic, genteel English inflection, often called “received pronunciation.” (West is from Sheffield in Yorkshire; Tennant is Scottish.) According to the Hollywood Reporter, the director of the Rex pilot will be David Semel, who has already scrubbed the posh right out of fellow Old Etonians Damian Lewis (in Life ) and Hugh Laurie (in House ). Good luck, innit.

The following is a random sample of current British TV stars and their ongoing, sometimes wildly fluctuating, attempts at Murrcan accents.

Hugh Laurie

• Character: Gregory House
• Show: House
• Rating: 4.5 out of 5
• Hugh Laurie has long been famous in England for a silly accent – the ridiculously “pip pip” voice of Bertie Wooster, who is as dim as a shuttered room, but well-bred. Famously, the executive producer of House , seeing Laurie's audition tape (self-filmed in a hotel bathroom), thought the actor was American. Indeed, Laurie's accent rarely slips, even if he shares a tendency toward slanginess (“whaddaya know?”) with Joseph Fiennes, below. In a masterstroke, House is supposed to have had a peripatetic childhood, and thus his accent can't be pinned to one particular place.

Joseph Fiennes

• Character: Mark Benford
• Show: FlashForward
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• What a gorgeous voice Joseph Fiennes has, but it just doesn't quite work on FlashForward . It's not that there's anything wrong with his accent, more that he suffers from Homer Simpson syndrome – in trying to capture the informality of American speech, Fiennes goes overboard with the “gonnas” and “gottas” and never remembers that “and” has a final consonant. (Fellow Brit Sonya Walger fares better as his wife.) He makes up for it with Shakespearean intensity, which is perhaps what happens when you have played Shakespeare. His neck veins deserve a special Emmy.

Stephen Moyer

• Character: Bill Compton
• Show: True Blood
• Rating 3.5 out of 5
• Vampire Bill's as dishy as they come, but when he opens his mouth it's sometimes Thames Estuary not the Louisiana bayou that you hear. Offscreen, Stephen Moyer is still an Essex boy (“summink” is a dead giveaway) and Bill's accent is a bit of a wandering old hound dog. Occasionally one or two syllables too many slip into a single word (does the sun really go “day-own”?)

Dominic West

• Character: Jimmy McNulty
• Show: The Wire
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• West has said it took him three years to feel comfortable with his Baltimore accent – and then The Wire only had two more years to run. Sometimes there's a bit too much New Jersey in McNulty's voice – turning “that” into “dat” – but on the whole you'd never know West is from Yorkshire, though like Lewis and Laurie, he was educated at Eton. His task was made more difficult considering that McNulty was rarely sober, and acting drunk is hard enough in your own thick tongue, let alone someone else's.

Natascha McElhone

• Character: Karen Moody
• Show: Californication
• Rating: 5 out of 5
• Now that's how it's done. There's a tendency to overplay the Jeff Spicoli when portraying a Californian, but McElhone – born in the tweedy, highbrow London neighbourhood of Hampstead – has got just the right subtle, groovy inflection as a conflicted L.A. woman who is an architect, mother and sometimes wife. She never says “dude” but if she did you'd believe her. Altogether quite gnarly.