Genre | Documentary |
---|---|
Running time | 30 minutes |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Language(s) | English |
Home station | BBC Radio 4 |
Starring | Stephen Fry |
Created by | Testbed Productions www.testbed.co.uk |
Produced by | Nick Baker, Sarah Cuddon, Merilyn Harris, Ian Gardhouse |
Original release | 25 August 2008 – present |
No. of series | 10 (plus one winter special) |
No. of episodes | 37 |
Website | Fry's English Delight |
Fry's English Delight is a BBC Radio 4 documentary series in which language enthusiast Stephen Fry explores various aspects of the English language. [1]
The title is an allusion to the British confectionery Fry's Turkish Delight.
Series | Episode | Title | First broadcast |
---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Metaphor | 25 Aug 2008 |
2 | Quotation | 1 Sep 2008 | |
3 | Cliché | 8 Sep 2008 | |
2 | 1 | So Wrong It's Right | 11 Aug 2009 |
2 | Speaking Proper | 18 Aug 2009 | |
3 | Hallo! | 25 Aug 2009 | |
3 | 1 | The Trial of Qwerty | 11 Aug 2010 |
2 | He Said, She Said | 18 Aug 2010 | |
3 | Accentuate the Negative | 25 Aug 2010 | |
4 | Future Conditional | 1 Sep 2010 | |
Winter Special | Word Games | 28 Dec 2010 | |
4 | 1 | The Mouth | 11 Jul 2011 |
2 | Brevity | 18 Jul 2011 | |
3 | Persuasion | 25 Jul 2011 | |
4 | Class | 1 Aug 2011 | |
5 | 1 | Colourful Language [2] | 16 Aug 2012 |
2 | Intonation | 23 Aug 2012 | |
3 | Conversation | 30 Aug 2012 | |
4 | The Story of X | 6 Sep 2012 | |
6 [3] | 1 | Rhetoric Rehabilitated | 26 Aug 2013 |
2 | Spelling | 2 Sep 2013 | |
3 | Words without End | 9 Sep 2013 | |
4 | WTF | 16 Sep 2013 | |
7 | 1 | Magic | 4 Aug 2014 |
2 | Capital Punishment | 11 Aug 2014 | |
3 | Reading Aloud | 18 Aug 2014 | |
4 | Plain English | 25 Aug 2014 | |
8 | 1 | Words Fail Me | 12 Aug 2015 |
2 | Talking about the Weather | 18 Aug 2015 | |
3 | Do You Promise Not to Tell? | 25 Aug 2015 | |
4 | English Plus One | 1 Sep 2015 | |
9 | 1 | Let's Get Physical | 5 Feb 2017 |
2 | The Story of Oh! | 12 Feb 2017 | |
3 | English Upside Down | 19 Feb 2017 | |
4 | That Way Madness Lies | 26 Feb 2017 | |
10 | 1 | Order! | 6 Aug 2019 |
2 | You Must Remember This | 13 Aug 2019 | |
3 | The Doolittle Factor | 20 Aug 2019 | |
4 | Signs of the Times | 27 Aug 2019 | |
Up to series 7, every episode of Fry's English Delight has been released on CD and is also currently available in the form of audio downloads. [4] The first series also contains the 2007 documentary Current Puns presented by Fry on Radio 4 on 26 December 2007. The second series contains the 2006 documentary The Joy of Gibberish, presented by Fry on Radio 4 on 3 January 2006.
Series | CD release date |
---|---|
Series 1 | 4 June 2009 |
Series 2 | 29 March 2010 |
Series 3 | 11 October 2010 |
Word Games | 7 July 2011 |
Series 4 | 8 September 2011 |
Series 5 | 20 September 2012 |
Series 6 | 12 September 2013 |
Series 7 | 12 September 2014 |
Blackadder is a series of four BBC One pseudohistorical British sitcoms, plus several one-off instalments, which originally aired from 1983 to 1989. All television episodes starred Rowan Atkinson as the antihero Edmund Blackadder and Tony Robinson as Blackadder's dogsbody, Baldrick. Each series was set in a different historical period, with the two protagonists accompanied by different characters, though several reappear in one series or another, e.g., Melchett and Lord Flashheart.
The BBC World Service is an international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC. It is the world's largest of any kind. It broadcasts radio news, speech and discussions in more than 40 languages to many parts of the world on analogue and digital shortwave platforms, internet streaming, podcasting, satellite, DAB, FM and MW relays. In 2015, The World Service reached an average of 210 million people a week. In November 2016, the BBC announced that it would start broadcasting in additional languages including Amharic and Igbo, in its biggest expansion since the 1940s.
Stephen John Fry is an English actor, comedian and writer. He and Hugh Laurie are the comic double act Fry and Laurie, who starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster.
Gordon Angus Deayton is an English actor, writer, musician, comedian, and broadcaster. He was the original presenter of the satirical panel game Have I Got News for You, a job from which he was dismissed in October 2002 after a second round of tabloid allegations about his personal life. He was also the host of British panel show Would I Lie to You? from 2007 to 2008.
Jonathan Ross is an English television and radio presenter, film critic, actor and comedian best known for presenting the BBC One chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross during the 2000s. Ross also hosted his own radio show on BBC Radio 2, and acted as a film critic and presenter of the Film programme. After leaving the BBC, Ross then began hosting a new chat show on ITV, The Jonathan Ross Show. Other regular roles have included being a regular panellist on the comedy sports quiz They Think It's All Over and being a regular presenter of the British Comedy Awards.
Dr Matthew Keith Hall, known professionally as Harry Hill, is an English comedian, writer, and television presenter. A medical doctor, Hill won the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the 1992 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and began his career in radio and television comedy with the radio series Harry Hill's Fruit Corner (1993–1997). He has hosted his own television comedy show Harry Hill's TV Burp (2001–2012), and has narrated You've Been Framed! since 2004. His other projects include The Harry Hill Movie, released in 2013.
BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The service provides national radio stations covering the majority of musical genres, as well as local radio stations covering local news, affairs and interests. It also oversees online audio content.
Desert Island Discs is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942.
QI is a British comedy panel game television quiz show created and co-produced by John Lloyd, and features permanent panellist Alan Davies. Stephen Fry was host of the show from its initial pilot, before departing after the final episode of the M series in 2016, exactly halfway through the alphabet, with frequent QI panellist Sandi Toksvig replacing him at the beginning of the N series in 2016.
Mark Gatiss is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, producer and novelist. His work includes writing for and acting in the TV series Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Dracula. Together with Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson, he is a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen. He played Tycho Nestoris in the HBO series Game of Thrones.
Mitchell John Benn is an English comedian, author and musician known for his comedy rock songs performed on BBC radio. He was, until 2016, a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's satirical programme The Now Show, and has hosted other radio shows.
Who Do You Think You Are? is a British genealogy documentary series that has aired on the BBC since 2004. In each episode, a celebrity traces their family tree. It is made by the production company Wall to Wall. The programme has regularly attracted an audience of more than 6 million viewers. More than ten international adaptations of the programme have been produced.
Susan Francesca Dent, is an English lexicographer, etymologist and media personality. She has appeared in "Dictionary Corner" on the Channel 4 game show Countdown every year since 1992. She also appears on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, a post-watershed comedy version of the show presented by comedian Jimmy Carr. She has been Honorary Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) since 2016.
Doctor Who Confidential is a documentary series created by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to complement the revival of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Each episode was broadcast on BBC Three on Saturdays, immediately after the broadcast of the weekly television episode on BBC One. The first and second series episodes ran 30 minutes each; third series instalments ran 45 minutes. BBC Three also broadcast a cut-down edition of the programme, lasting 15 minutes, shown after the repeats on Sundays and Fridays and after the weekday evening repeats of earlier seasons. Confidential received its own version of the Doctor Who theme tune, at least three different versions of the theme appeared in the series.
Reginald Yates is a British actor, television presenter and radio DJ. He was the voice actor for Rastamouse and played Leo Jones in Doctor Who. Yates has worked at the BBC in radio and television–presenting various shows for BBC Radio 1 with Fearne Cotton–as well as hosting the ITV2 reality show Release the Hounds from 2013 until 2017.
New Tricks is a British television procedural crime drama, created by Nigel McCrery and Roy Mitchell, produced primarily by Wall to Wall, and broadcast on BBC One. The programme originally began with a pilot episode on 27 March 2003, before a full series with commissioned for 1 April 2004, with it concluding after twelve series on 6 October 2015. The show utilises an ensemble cast, of which Dennis Waterman was the only constant over all twelve series; this cast variously included Alun Armstrong, James Bolam, Amanda Redman, Denis Lawson, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Tamzin Outhwaite, and Larry Lamb.
Russell Joseph Howard is an English comedian, television presenter, radio presenter and actor, best known for his TV shows Russell Howard's Good News and The Russell Howard Hour and his appearances on the topical panel TV show Mock the Week. He won "Best Compère" at the 2006 Chortle Awards and was nominated for an if.comedy award for his 2006 Aberdeen Festival Fringe show. Howard cited comedians Lee Evans, Richard Pryor and Frank Skinner as influences.
Kingdom is a British television series produced by Parallel Film and Television Productions for the ITV network. It was created by Simon Wheeler and stars Stephen Fry as Peter Kingdom, a Norfolk solicitor who is coping with family, colleagues, and the strange locals who come to him for legal assistance. The series also starred Hermione Norris, Celia Imrie, Karl Davies, Phyllida Law and Tony Slattery.
BBC Alba is a Scottish Gaelic-language free-to-air television channel jointly owned by the BBC and MG Alba. The channel was launched on 19 September 2008 and is on-air for up to seven hours a day with BBC Radio nan Gàidheal simulcasts. The name Alba is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland. The station is unique in that it is the first channel to be delivered under a BBC licence by a partnership and is also the first multi-genre channel to come entirely from Scotland with almost all of its programmes made in Scotland.
Stephen Fry is an English actor, comedian, author and television presenter. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and the duo also played the title roles in Jeeves and Wooster. Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the Blackadder television series and was the host of celebrity comedy trivia show, QI. He has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, and has written four novels and three autobiographies, Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me: A Memoir.