Review by Steve Bennett

Gyles Brandreth has been researching this beautifully enunciated love letter to the English language for nigh-on half a century. His first book on the curiosities of lexicography came out in 1980, nearly a decade after he founded the National Scrabble Championships, and his latest came out three weeks ago. You can’t deny he has a genuine and deep passion for the subject.

Lying somewhere between popular lecture and after-dinner speech, Word Power! gets through quite a lot of territory: beautiful examples of the use of language; the the dangers of auto-correct, the erosion of diction on TV and the art of euphonics, which is the pleasing sounds certain words make. He imparts plenty of nuggets of interesting information, illustrating it all with anecdotes galore, and even the dreaded audience participation.

He drops more names than a dyspraxic delivering telephone directories, from first-hand stories involving the likes of Denis Thatcher and Sir Kingsley Amis – about whom he made the most awful faux pas when a young newspaper reporter –  to theatrical yarns about Ralph Richardson and melodramatic Shakespearean Donald Woolfitt.

The hour is awash with those who use language exquisitely, such as Samuel Johnson, or those who clumsily shatter it, like John Prescott. And, yes, that includes a smattering of George W. Bush-isms, the linguistic atrocities that have been so overdone in comedy they seem more dated here than Hilaire Belloc or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brandreth is as much a collector of comedy than originator, which does mean that a risk of ‘heard it’ accompanies some of his witticisms.

Stand-up is all about knowing exactly who the comedian is, and you definitely know where Brandreth is coming from, the puckish, erudite, clubbable raconteur who’s willing to tease his own privilege or past life as a Tory MP. For someone who says he’s been approached to be the new face of Stannah Stairlifts, he’s light on his feet too, dancing around the stage with the same sort of playful precision with which he attacks his beloved English language. He’s even got his own theme tune, sung to the melody of Move Over Darling.

His combination of self-effacement and jauntily persuasive upper-middle-class accent convinces the audience to take part, en masse, in a cheesy march that you might expect to find at Butlin’s. But we’re all releasing our inner public schoolboy…

Brandreth gets a bit more meandering around the two-thirds mark as he reminisces about his days at Oxford, where he met his wife. But although indulgent, it sets up a beautifully poignant moment later, courtesy of… well, the English language. Go team GB!

Review date: 25 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard