Gyles Brandreth: Word Power! (Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh)
A gentleman, says Gyles Brandreth, is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, and doesn't. How does he get away with it? Moreover, he ends his show – part lecture, part after-dinner-speech, part stand-up – with a rousing chorus of "Nipples leading," the audience on their feet, chests proud.
Speed, wit, phrasing and timing override any niggles and irritation when it comes to coping with this torrent of verbiage from the former Conservative MP, Countdown veteran, Just a Minute stalwart, novelist and founder of the national Scrabble championship.
He's simply irrepressible and he's got a big bee in his bonnet about language, use of words, the erosion of meaning and sloppiness of diction; he can't understand what anyone says on television any more and only realises half-way through Foyle's War that he's seen that episode before.
Part of the show is about words that don't mean what they once did – cool (done deal, red hot), wicked (really good), iconic (has appeared on TV) – and a plea for literacy, with back-up statistics to prove that if you learn a poem a day you live longer, just as an apple a day kept the doctor away.
And he believes we should relish our language more: Shakespeare only had 26,000 words, created lots of new ones ("excitement" in Hamlet), now we have half a million. The French, who have a measly 100,000, don't even have their own words for entrepreneur, or baguette.
There's an unexpected, more personal streak, in his memorialising of his parents prompted by reading Dr Johnson's letter to his (Johnson's) mother, and an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet – "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…" – dedicated to his (Brandreth's) wife.
And how nice to be reminded, in the one show, of Hilaire Belloc, Donald Wolfit, Bram Stoker, Denis Thatcher (who falls face down in his blancmange at a lunch where Brandreth's giving the main speech) and Fanny Cradock, an alcoholic TV chef who was infinitely more Jeremy Clarkson than Mary Berry.
Gyles Brandreth: Word Power! runs at the Pleasance Courtyard until 30 August.
