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Fry's English Delight

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Stephen Fry explores the highways and byways of the English language

Fry's English Delight: Series 9

Fry's English Delight: Series 9: Let's Get Physical

Grayson Perry: En Garde

05/02/2017

Let's Get Physical

Series 9

BBC Radio 4 - Fry's English Delight, Series 9, Let's Get Physical

Stephen Fry delights in language made by hand.

Are we loosening our connection with language as more of our communication goes digital? Stephen gets his hands dirty looking at what we might lose - the physicality of text.

Roman carvings, graffiti, inky handwriting and printing - handmade physical text always offers extra clues about who created it and why. So, is digital text robbing English of a personality which enhances the experience of writing and reading? 

Stephen Fry's inquiry starts and ends with an exchange of handwritten letters between himself and Grayson Perry, who uses lots of text in his work. What will Grayson make of Stephen's handwriting and vice versa? Especially as Stephen's letter quotes WH Auden, claiming we like our own handwriting in the same way we "like the smell of our own farts."

Although graphology - the divining of personality through handwriting - is a pseudo-science, handwriting inevitably feels more personal than electronic text. With the help of Sherlock Holmes and a modern forensic document examiner, Stephen delves deeper into what our handwriting says about us. Philip Hensher, author of The Missing Ink, helps uncover the mysteries of our writing, and Professor Mary Beard weighs in with a forensic examination of some Roman physical text - not, as you might assume, from a grand memorial, but from the walls of a Pompeian brothel.

We also visit the first industrial scale printing press in Europe, now housed in the Museum Plantin Moretus in Antwerp. Stephen learns how, in the late 16th century, industrial scale multiplication of human effort in a still intensely physical environment changed the nature of language and who is in charge of it. All the while, he concentrates on physical ingredients - why ink caused a stink and why much of what was written at the time was literally (yes, literally) not worth the paper it was printed on. Paper was expensive, and much of it was recycled, rather than kept for posterity.


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Series 9

Let's Get Physical

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