Away With Words — Season 1, Episode 5: Episode 5
30 min • 1 season, 13 episodes
Episode synopsis
Neil Innes gets to grips with more of the English language in a programme which ranges from real tennis to Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's big poser 'What's in a name?" provides the perfect excuse for Neil to climb into costume and discover the enormous debt our everyday speech still owes to William Shakespeare. While a visit to a real tennis court serves to uncover the origins of some of the sport's idiosyncrasies (like the scoring). And where better than Cambridge, to find out why students "graduate", who makes a "chum", and how to stay out of someone's "bad books'. A trip to the tailor's reveals, among other things, where the term "the full Monty" originated. And, punting down the river, there's time to contemplate how Cambridge itself came by its name.
About Away With Words
Presenter Neil Innes has fun exploring the origins of well-known words; and phrases in AWAY WITH WORDS. The 13-part series follows him on his travels from Yarmouth to Ely, Southend, Newmarket, Luton, Southwold, Duxford, Ipswich, Norwich, Corby, Bletchley, Cambridge and Colchester. But it won't be a map so much as a dictionary that he will have as a guide as he looks for the unlikely sources of all sorts of everyday names and sayings, and talks to some of the people who can throw light on them.