September 11
Fry's Planet Word: Babel
In this first episode, Stephen seeks to uncover the origins of human language and how and why we are the only species on the planet to have this gift. From attempts to teach chimps to speak to the so-called singing mice who have been given the human 'language gene', Stephen uncovers to what extent our brain is uniquely hard-wired for language. Watching how a child acquires language, Stephen hears from psycholinguist Steven Pinker how grammar is an innate quality, yet still has to be nurtured. Case studies of feral children, like Victor of Aveyron, illustrate how difficult it is to be certain which is more important. And at the National Theatre of the Deaf in Connecticut, Stephen learns why sign language is a true language.
September 18
Fry's Planet Word: Identity
What is it that defines us? Stephen Fry argues that above all, it is the way we speak. Be it a national language, a regional dialect or even class variation - we interpret and define ourselves through our language. From markets in Kenya to call centres in Newcastle, Stephen charts the shifting patterns of lingua franca and the inexorable spread of Globish (Global English). As many of the world's more than 6000 languages are threatened with linguicide, Stephen seeks out examples of this rise and fall. In Ireland he learns how TV soaps are keeping Irish alive, whilst in Southern France, Provencal and other Oc languages are struggling to survive after 200 years of suppression by Parisian orthodoxy and the heavy hand of the Academie Francaise. But even amidst the imminent death of some, other languages like Basque survive, whilst Hebrew in Israel is reborn. Variety is the spice and in Bradford poet Ian McMillan teaches Stephen the subtle variations of dialect, whilst in Norwich Stephen finds his ultimate sense of identity in the chants of his beloved Canaries, Norwich City F.C.
September 25
Fry's Planet Word: Spreading the Word
In this programme, Stephen Fry explores 'the written word'. Writing is a great invention - making it possible to communicate across space and time. Without writing we would have no history and very little technology. Stephen discovers the earliest writing - cuneiform - at the British Museum, and learns how our alphabet came from the Phoenicians. As part of his exploration of the diversity of scripts, Stephen visits 106-year-old Mr Zhou, the inventor of the Chinese phonetic writing system called Pinyin, who relates how literacy increased four-fold after its introduction under Mao. After the written word came the printed word, and Stephen looks at how this has shaped our relationship with writing, giving us libraries, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. From the Bodleian to Diderot's favourite café to the cutting-edge research at MIT, Stephen explores how the written word evolved into printing, then libraries, encyclopaedias and computer code. Blogging and twittering is just the tip of a brave new future which no one dares predict.
October 2
Fry's Planet Word: The Power and the Glory
In this programme, Stephen Fry celebrates storytelling. It has been with us as long as language itself and as a species, we love to tell our stories. This desire to both entertain and explain has resulted in the flowering of language to describe every aspect of the human condition. Stephen asks just what makes a good story and why some writers just do it better. He reveals what stories make him shiver with joy or, conversely, shudder with horror. From Homer's epic to Joyce's modern-day reinvention with Ulysses, from taking in Shakespeare, PG Wodehouse, Tolkien, Orwell, Auden, Bob Dylan and the even the mangled web of words that became known as Birtspeak, Stephen uncovers why certain words can make us laugh, cry or tear our hair out. Talking to storytelling gurus like screenwriter William Goldman and modern-day interpreters of classics like Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, he looks at how character and plot are interwoven and how any schema to create the perfect story are doomed. Shakespearean actors Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Brian Blessed and Mark Rylance give their take on Hamlet and laud the bard as the blue planet's supreme writer. Sir Christopher Ricks argues that Bob Dylan should be considered as great a poet as anyone, whilst Richard Curtis explains why Auden can move us to tears but why in the modern world, Coldplay are just as important.
October 9
The Adventure of English: Birth of a Language
The modern Frisian language is the closest sounding language to the English used approximately 2000 years ago, when the people from what is now the north of the Netherlands travelled to what would become England, and pushed the Celtic language - ancestor of modern Welsh - (Celts) to the western side of the island. Words like "blue" can be recognised in the Frisian language. Bragg then discusses how English dialects in certain areas of the United Kingdom were heavily influenced by historical events such as the invasion of the Vikings in the east, contributing words such as "sky" to the English language.
October 16
In Search of Beowulf
Historian Michael Wood returns to his first great love, the Anglo-Saxon world, to reveal the origins of our literary heritage. Focusing on Beowulf and drawing on other Anglo-Saxon classics, he traces the birth of English poetry back to the Dark Ages.
Travelling across the British Isles from East Anglia to Scotland and with the help of Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, actor Julian Glover, local historians and enthusiasts, he brings the story and language of this iconic poem to life.
October 23
The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England
Melvyn Bragg explores the dramatic story of William Tyndale and his mission to translate the Bible into English. Melvyn reveals the story of a man whose life and legacy have been hidden from history, but whose impact on Christianity in Britain and on the English language endures today. His radical translation of the Bible into English made him a profound threat to the authority of the church and state, and set him on a fateful collision course with Henry VIII's heretic hunters and those of the Pope.
October 30
Shakespeare
"The decade on either side of the year 1600 saw thousands of Latin words come into the English vocabulary of educated people, words like 'excavate,' 'horrid,' 'radius,' 'cautionary,' 'pathetic,' 'pungent,' 'frugal' [...]," states Bragg in this episode. The Inkhorn Controversy, a debate about the English language and where its new words should come from, soon followed. A few scholars, including John Cheke, wished that the language should not use Latin or Greek words to expand the English vocabulary, but rather Anglo-Saxon ones.
English eventually obtained its own dictionary. Eight years before Italian and 35 years before French. However, this is a huge difference from the Arabic dictionary, which was made 800 years before and the Sanskrit, which was created nearly 1000 years before the English.
Scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones informs on poet, courtier and soldier Philip Sidney, who also had a large impact on the English language, introducing phrases like "my better half," "far-fetched" and words such as "conversation," which had previously had another meaning.
William Shakespeare's contribution to the English vocabulary is one of the most famous. Over 2000 words used in modern English were first recorded in his writing, words such as "leapfrog," "assassination," "courtship" and "indistinguishable." Shakespeare's vocabulary included over 21,000 words, his plays translated into 50 different languages, and Bragg states, "The Oxford English dictionary lists a stunning 33,000 Shakespeare quotations."
November 6
Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary Man
Drama-documentary telling the story of Samuel Johnson's creation of the first English dictionary, in an attic room just off Fleet Street in Georgian London. The depressive writer-for-hire with Tourette's syndrome did for the English language what Newton had done for the stars, classifying words, fixing their meaning and bringing order to the chaos of language. It took him nine years, but in the process an anonymous writer became a literary superstar.
November 13
Do You Speak American? Episode One
MacNeil stops at the Priscilla Beach Theatre, where he made his first foray into acting in the United States. To become an actor, he admits, he had to learn to suppress his native Nova Scotian accent. In New York City, viewers meet two people, both very much engaged in language, who have diametrically opposing views: Dr. John Simon, New York theatre critic, believes that English is “going to the dogs,” whereas Dr. Jesse Sheidlower, Oxford English Dictionary editor, sees changes in English as a healthy, expected phenomenon for any language. In a New York City record store, MacNeil interviews Dr. CeCe Cutler, a researcher who studies urban speech and its adoption by suburban teenagers. He visits an internet café where teenagers describe the language they use to write instant messages and the influence of spoken language of on this medium. The final stop in New York City is Spanish Harlem, where MacNeil orders a shaved ice from a woman who says she has spoken nothing but Spanish for the entire 19 years she has lived in the United States.
November 27
Do You Speak American? Episode Two
This episode begins on a riverboat on the Ohio River, the political border between North and South. MacNeil is joined on the riverboat by Dr. Walt Wolfram, a linguist at North Carolina State University. Together they visit Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, where a fiddler shares both his music and his stories about the local language. From there, MacNeil joins a trucker named Spanky on a drive through the South to Nashville, Tennessee. There they watch a country music performance by Cody James. Although the Southern dialect is not native to either of them, Spanky and James both say they speak it because it seems to suit their lifestyles. Linguist Dr. John Fought asserts that Southern is the fastest-growing variety of English in the United States. In an Oxford, Mississippi, bookstore, MacNeil comments on the Southern writers Eudora Welty and William Faulkner and plays a recording of Welty reading from one of her books. MacNeil then speaks with Jeff Foxworthy, a comedian whose act makes light of Southern speech. Foxworthy points out that people often make judgments about how intelligent a person is based on the way he or she speaks.
December 4
Do You Speak American? Episode Three
In Los Angeles, MacNeil meets Patricia Lopez, video jockey (VJ) for the LATV show Mex 2 the Max. She talks to MacNeil about being bilingual in Spanish and English and about the importance of being able to speak Spanish. Linguist Dr. Carmen Fought describes Chicano English, a speech variety spoken in Los Angeles and some other places with Hispanic populations. Together, Fought and MacNeil visit a Los Angeles park where they listen to two boys speaking Chicano English. While in Los Angeles, MacNeil joins DJ Steve Harvey at his radio show. Harvey, a speaker of African American English, discusses how speakers adapt to different audiences and how important African American English is to him in his work. At Public School (P.S.) 100 in the Watts district of Los Angeles, elementary school children who speak non-mainstream varieties of English at home are taught how to translate their home language into mainstream English. From there, MacNeil moves on to Hollywood, whose entertainment industry is responsible for portraying American English in films that people will watch around the world. Writer and director Amy Heckerling helped popularize Valley Girl speech with her film Clueless. MacNeil talks with Heckerling about how she represents that speech variety in her films. He also interviews Winnie Holzman, producer and writer of the television series My So-Called Life. To see whether California teenagers actually talk the way they are depicted in film and on television, MacNeil meets with a group of high school students from Irvine. From Fought, he learns about another speech variety that originated among young people in California, “Surfer Dude,” so he heads up the coast to surfing territory. There he meets with George, a surfer who drives him to favorite surfing spots, describing the scenes in Surfer Dude speech.
December 11
Speeches That Shook The World
Speech-making is the art of persuasion. Well-honed rhetoric appeals not just to the mind, but to the heart and, deeper down, in the guts. Examining the speeches that provoked radical change, surprised pundits or shocked listeners, poet Simon Armitage dissects what makes a perfect speech.
Simon gets the inside story behind some of the famous speeches of the modern age, talking to Tony Blair's speechwriter, to Earl Spencer on his controversial address at his sister's funeral and the woman who challenged the rioters in Hackney. We hear how Peter Tatchell confronted the BNP, Paul Boateng on how Enoch Powell's divisive speech personally affected him as a child, and Colonel Tim Collins, whose charge was to motivate his troops on the eve of the Iraq war. Simon discusses the nuts and bolts of speech writing with Vincent Franklin, aka the blue-sky thinking guru Stuart Pearson from The Thick of It, and gets tips on powerful delivery from actor Charles Dance.
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