This study used ProPer (PROsodic analysis with PERiodic energy), a tool for automatic prosodic analysis, to investigate prosodic variation in four British English varieties. The central question was how to efficiently describe systematic prosodic variation without extensive manual annotations. We analysed ProPer parameters, the magnitude of F0 change between two successive syllables, synchrony (i.e. the general trend of the F0 movement within a syllable), and periodic energy mass. We then carried out audiovisual analysis of the F0 movement. Our overall assessment is that ProPer allows holistic prosodic analysis, significantly reducing researchers' workload in prosodic annotations. The ProPer analysis is optimised for syllable-sized intervals. It requires the examination of a vast amount of acoustic information and possibly the careful design of experimental materials for collecting laboratory speech data.