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Here's the script from Inside No. 9 Nana's Party

You can get them quite cheap now, can't you?

It's all Marks's, actually. Apart from the ham, which I got from the local batchers.

From the what?

From the batchers.

The "batchers"? What's the "batchers"?

Leave her alone. I like her talking posh.

It's not posh, Mother, it's proper

Oh, heh! We're not "proper", Mum!

I wanted BOTH my girls to talk nice! That's why I sent you for electrocution lessons. You should say "batcher", Carol.

That's how you get on! Oh, right.

So what are we having for afters, "sammer padding"?

Well, I did make a trifle, but it's got quite a bit of sherry in it, so Kettle's boiled.

There's some talk of the joke:

I thought that the overdone 'batcher' joke was taking the piss out of northerners who try and sound 'posh' by changing how they pronounce the letter 'u' to match how they assume southerners pronounce it in words like 'butcher' - unfortunately they get it completely wrong because southerners pronounce the word 'butcher' as 'butcher' never 'batcher' lol

  • what's the deal about the batchers vs. butchers joke?
Mou某
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    Can you elaborate on what you'd like to know about the joke? "What's the deal" is a bit fuzzy, especially as you quoted a broad explanation of it right above that question. (I'll admit I laughed at the electrocution bit.) – Dan Bron Apr 26 '15 at 15:13
  • Wonder if they mean this slang word: batcher noun someone who lives alone Australia, 1943 From earlier 'bach; batch' (to live alone); ultimately from 'bachelor' – Marius Hancu Apr 26 '15 at 16:04
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    The joke is that one of the daughters is trying to sound proper by pronouncing "butcher's" as "batchers", but to the audience she just sounds foolish. I think that's all there is to it. – augurar Apr 26 '15 at 18:25
  • The general idea is that much of the difference in pronunciation between British classes is in vowels. Mother knows this, but she doesn't know which words it applies to, so she just assumed that "batcher" is the upper-class way to say "butcher", perhaps by extrapolation from some other words. – Barmar Apr 27 '15 at 20:09
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    It would help if we knew *how* she was pronouncing batcher. My guess is that it's with a broad 'a', like in father. – Peter Shor May 20 '15 at 17:56
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    I just watched this. She pronounces it as in the word "batch", but with "er" on the end. I came here after googling because I didn't understand why she was saying it that way or why it was supposed to be funny. Still none the wiser :) – Phil Gyford May 30 '15 at 19:23
  • Certainly, the pronunciation of 'butcher' is not uniform in the UK. However, without using the IPA, which might render the written joke rather weak, the relevant pronunciations cannot be accurately given. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 17 '16 at 17:13
  • I'm not at all convinced that the joke lies in Northern versus southern vowels, and if it did, where does your 'north' end? I got corrected by school teachers for using a (working class) north of England pronunciation of 'butcher' in central Scotland ('butt-cher' instead of 'boot-cher'). To my ear this is joke about class and pretension rather than north/southernn-ess. And I've absolutely heard a braying type of 'upper' accent which would render 'butcher' more like 'batcher' and 'summer' as 'sammer' to my ear, though 'pudding' would be more like 'poodding'.. Can't help with IPA though. – Spagirl Oct 11 '17 at 16:03
  • @Spagirl: certainly Northern English accents are not uniform ... I hope I didn't imply they were. – Peter Shor Oct 14 '17 at 15:02

5 Answers5

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My guess is that the entire joke is that its being pronounced incorrectly, the other person saying "sammer padding" (instead of "summer pudding") is teasing the person who says batchers (instead of butchers).

pau
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In many words the letter 'u' is pronounced 'oo' in Northern England, but 'uh' or even 'ah' by southern/RP speakers. The joke is that butcher is not one of these words.

Kate Bunting
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Here's why I find it funny:

The speakers are unconscious that they're betraying themselves as hopelessly out of touch when it comes to proper pronunciation of words. Being "well-spoken" is what they're after, but they're achieving precisely the opposite by saying "batchers," "electrocution," and "sammer padding."

The audience, who knows that the characters are missing the mark, gets to privately make fun of them and laugh internally for being so ridiculous. Part of the humor is that the characters are mispronouncing the words, but I think the bigger part is that they are taking themselves seriously and patting themselves on the back for attaining such a cultured, proper, posh standing in their own eyes.

user215019
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My reading of it was that she accidentally mispronounced the word initially - simply a slip up (there’s a glimmer of realisation as she says it) but she styles it out to save face, explaining that it is ‘proper’. The sister and mother assume that she’s being ‘posh’ when in fact the pronunciation was not posh, just an error. It sets up that the sister is resentful of the main character’s aspirational lifestyle (which becomes clearer later).

Flower Tea
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The description the OP found online is completely correct:

I thought that the overdone 'batcher' joke was taking the piss out of northerners who try and sound 'posh' by changing how they pronounce the letter 'u' to match how they assume southerners pronounce it in words like 'butcher' – unfortunately they get it completely wrong because southerners pronounce the word 'butcher' as 'butcher' never 'batcher' lol

More specifically, in Northern England, or at least in many dialects of English there, the "u" in butcher's and the "u" in summer are pronounced the same (both like the "u" in butcher's).

One of her daughters is trying to use Southern pronunciation with the proper vowel (her rendition of it uses sammer rather than summer), but doesn't realize that butcher actually is pronounced the same in both Northern and Southern England, so she says batcher's, which is completely wrong.

Peter Shor
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