Fry's Planet Word Explained
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:
"Identity"
Focusing on how one identifies through language
"Uses and Abuses"
The evolution of slang and profanity
"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
International broadcast
In Australia, this programme was shown on ABC1 at 9:30pm on Sundays from 11 March 2012.[1]
External links
Notes and References
- Web site: ABC1 Programming Airdate: Fry's Planet Word (episode one) . ABC Television Publicity . 18 June 2012 .