Dick Van Dyke has offered another explanation as to why his Mary Poppins cockney accent was so terrible.
The American actor played played chimney sweep Bert in the 1964 musical movie and joked that receiving the Excellence in Television award from BAFTA Los Angeles at the Britannia Awards this weekend meant he'd been forgiven for his bad accent.
"I appreciate this on several levels actually," he said in his acceptance speech. "For one thing, I'm assuming that after 60 years of bad jokes, I'm off the hook for excoriating the Cockney dialect."
Van Dyke continued to say that there were "a million" reasons for why his accent was so ubiquitously bad – and that Mary Poppins co-star Julie Andrews is one of them.
"I've got a million excuses," he continued. "But the most important one... I was working with a cast [of] all Brits. Not one person said, 'You know you ought to work on that accent.'
"So I blame Julie Andrews as much as anybody."
Dick Van Dyke will be making an appearance in the Mary Poppins reboot Mary Poppins Returns upon its release in December 2018, and he continued to joke that, this time around, his accent is much better – mainly because he had a dialectician "figuratively handcuffed" to him.
"You're going to be real proud of me," he added. "My accent was good – every syllable was right there."
The actor also got the support from professional Queen Elizabeth II actor Claire Foy as well, who accepted her own award during the ceremony by saying: "Dick Van Dyke, as a British person and as the Queen of England, can I just say your accent's perfect so don't listen to [ceremony presenter] Jack Whitehall."
Mary Poppins Returns, starring Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Whishaw, will be released in December 2018.
