15 January, 2006

Balderdash and Piffle: TV review

Balderdash and Piffle is a new BBC TV series exploring the origin and use of English words. It has a magazine format, with the main presenter Victoria Coren and various guest presenters each doing a piece on the origin of a particular word, interspersed with numerous short spots in which celebrities choose their favourite word and explain why they like it in about one sentence.

So far, the series has been consistently excellent. Victoria Coren is an intelligent and interested presenter. The guest presenters vary from charming to ebullient to erudite to irritatingly bumptious. Some of the stunts have real style; the first episode featured a Tiger Moth doing aerobatics to illustrate an appealing (but, sadly, unproven) derivation of the phrase 'pear-shaped'. Here are some of the other highlights from the first two episodes.

Ian Hislop, of Private Eye fame, demonstrating the principles of 'management-speak', complete with multicoloured Powerpoint presentation. I am normally sceptical about the concept of immutable 'rules' in writing, but management-speak suits rules. Here they are:
1. Take a noun (incentive)
2. Verbify it (incentivise)
3. Add some extraneous words - adverbs are good (proactively incentivise)
4. Convert to the passive voice (the team will be proactively incentivised)
5. Get the word 'stakeholders' in somehow (for the benefit of all our stakeholders, the team will be proactively incentivised)
Anyone who's worked in or for a corporation in the last 20 years will recognise this language; for anyone who hasn't, regular reading of Dilbert should help.

'Ploughman's Lunch' is not a traditional meal going back to the dawn of time, but was invented by a marketing executive in 1961 to increase sales of cheese (this has long been rumoured, but Victoria Coren unearthed documentary evidence and proved it).

In Old English, the word 'man' meant 'human' and did not become gender-specific until much later. Moreover, it goes back thousands of years to Sanskrit, and (rather wonderfully) is cognate with the same root as the word 'mind'.

A thought-provoking, informative and entertaining programme. A delight. I hope there's a second series.

For those of you who live beyond the shores of this sceptred isle and are shaking your heads at me for an insular Brit ('Fog in Channel. Continent cut off,' as the [apocryphal?] newspaper headline has it), there is a point to this post. If you think Balderdash and Piffle sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth, which also explores the origin and use of English words in all their infinite variety. When there's a series being broadcast, the most recent episode is available over the Internet for a week after the broadcast (look under 'W' on the Listen Again page). You don't get the stunts, but you do get twice the content in half the time. Radio is like that. Whether by accident or design, the current edition (Sunday 15 January) also had an item on management-speak, called by their contributor 'Office English' or 'Offlish', and featuring that most diverting of corporate entertainments, Buzzword Bingo.


wil said...

"Fog in Channel. Continent cut off," is just too funny. :-)

I'm already a big fan of BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time." Now I'll have to give "Word of Mouth" a try.

Carla said...

Thanks for stopping by, Wil. It's a great line, isn't it? An entire outlook summed up in 6 words. Alas, I can't claim credit for it. I don't know where I found it but I know I didn't make it up.

'In Our Time' is terrific, isn't it? Aladdin's Cave for the mind.

Wordfan said...

The Balderdash & Piffle team are Wordhunting again - have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/balderdash
Happy hunting...