Fry's Planet Word

Fry's Planet Word
Genre	Documentary
Written by	Stephen Fry
Directed by	John-Paul Davidson Helen Williamson
Presented by	Stephen Fry
Composers	Debbie Wiseman Andy Hopkins
No. of episodes	5
Production
Executive producers	Mark Bell Gina Carter
Producer	Helen Williamson
Running time	60 minutes
Original release
Network	BBC Two, BBC HD
Release	25 September (2011-09-25) – 23 October 2011 (2011-10-23)

Fry's Planet Word is a documentary series about language. Written and presented by Stephen Fry, five hour-long episodes were first broadcast in September and October 2011 on BBC Two and BBC HD. The series was produced and directed by John-Paul Davidson who worked with Fry on two other documentaries: Stephen Fry In America (2008) and Last Chance to See (2009). There is a book to accompany the series published by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Group.

Episodes

"Babel"

Focusing on the origins of language with topics covered including:

• The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and communication between primates
• The Turkana language
• The FOXP2 gene and its effect on language
• Brain patterns from an MRI scan while talking
• Victor of Aveyron, feral children, and language acquisition (discussion with psycholinguist Steven Pinker)
• The wug test by Jean Berko Gleason
• The Klingon language and how d'Armond Speers taught it as the first language to his son
• Sign language
• The Tower of Babel
• Philology, the Proto-Indo-European language, and Grimm's law
• Working languages and official languages of the United Nations

"Identity"

Focusing on how one identifies through language

• Regional accents of English through Yorkshire and Newcastle upon Tyne (discussion with poet Ian McMillan)
• Multilingualism
• Jewish humour and the Yiddish language (Discussion with comedians Ari Teman and Stewie Stone at The Friar's Club)
• Language death and globalisation
• Irish language and the Connacht Irish dialect on Ros na Rún
• Basque language and cuisine
• The loss of the Occitan language and its Provençal dialect
• The Académie française and inventing new French words
• The Maghreb French dialect's effect on standard French
• Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language as a modern language (discussion with linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann)
• Kenya's Turkana people and the use of English, Swahili, and Turkana

"Uses and Abuses"

The evolution of slang and profanity

• Common sources of obscenities in the Turkana and English languages
• "Fuck", Tourette syndrome, and coprolalia
• Swearing and the basal ganglia
• Brian Blessed, the Stroop effect, and the hypoalgesic effect of swearing
• The Thick of It and Armando Iannucci
• The ban of Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Stephen K. Amos and racial and sexual epithets
• Euphemisms and weasel words
• Omid Djalili and the Persian politeness of taarof
• Euphemism and dysphemism in the hospital
• Polari in Round the Horne
• Teenagers and slang at Berkeley High School
• Hip hop and popular media on the growth of language
• El Général and the Tunisian revolution

"Spreading the Word"

The history of written language, from the earliest writing to blogging and tweeting

• The Akha people of Thailand who have no written language
• Cuneiform, the history of bureaucracy, and the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone
• Classical Greece, Homer, the Phoenicians, and the alphabet
• Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the resilience of Judaism by means of the Hebrew alphabet
• The Dome of the Rock and the spread of the Arabic script with Islam
• The Dead Sea Scrolls and the oldest record of the Ten Commandments
• Printing and its roots in China
• The complexities of Written Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• The development of pinyin during the Cultural Revolution
• Typography, the development of the book, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the standardisation of the English language
• The democratisation of reading, the Age of Enlightenment, and Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie
• The Bodleian Library and the digitisation of information
• Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia project
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Belle de Jour and the lure of blogging
• Hanif Kureishi and the evolution of the book, Robert Coover and electronic literature, and the researchers at the MIT Media Lab

"The Power and the Glory"

The influence of storytelling and literature on language

• The Turkana people and their rivalry with the Toposa people
• Plot with William Goldman and his Marathon Man
• Homer's Odyssey and Iliad
• James Joyce's Ulysses with David Norris
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the works of Stephen King with Peter Jackson
• William Shakespeare and the emphasis on character
• Hamlet with Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Brian Blessed, and Mark Rylance
• Shakespeare in French with Guillaume Gallienne of the Comédie-Française and in Mandarin Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• P. G. Wodehouse with Robert McCrum
• George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, its Newspeak, and business speak with Ian Hislop
• W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues", Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Coldplay's "Fix You" with Richard Curtis
• Bob Dylan's music with Christopher Ricks

International broadcast

In Australia, this programme was shown on ABC1 at 9:30pm on Sundays from 11 March 2012.

External links

• Fry's Planet Word at BBC Online
• Fry's Planet Word at IMDb
• Stephen Fry's Planet Word, BBC Two, review at The Telegraph
• The Weekend's TV: Fry's Planet Word, Sun, BBC2 at The Independent