"I have a very standard accent" said a new colleague, as I and also new Australian and New England colleagues looked on in disbelief at these overly extrudely nasal West Coast tones. "At least Keanu Reeves sounds cool" I thought to myself.

There is no pan-English accent. There are plenty of projects to document this. Perhaps try something like Forvo: Type your word, and hear the different pronunciation via via speakers from different places in the world: http://forvo.com/languages/en/ for example the word 'English' http://forvo.com/word/english/#en