# Fry's Planet Word

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.