Ways with Words - 1x01 - Episode 1- Followmy.tv

Programme one sees him joining the circus at Great Yarmouth's Hippodrome, where he makes the acquaintance of a friendly pachyderm (elephant), and finds out why we refer to chaotic situations as a "three-ring circus". A ride in a traditional gypsy caravan with a Romany family throws up some surprising language links with India, and offers an explanation for why prison is sometimes referred to as "stir". Also in the opening programme he lets the cat out of the bag down on the farm, enjoys a fairground ride, and grapples with some curiously-named tools when he takes to the waterways with a Norfolk marsh-man. He even starts talking "double Dutch" with the mayor of King's Lynn, who helps to explain how East Anglia's historic trade links with Holland left a legacy in the language. As a writer, humorist and musician, Neil Innes has always been fascinated by words. A founder member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, he worked with the Monty Python team and joined Eric Idle on Rutland Weekend Television, creating The Ruttles, a parody of The Beatles. He has also made three series of The Innes Book of Records and is the writer behind the children's ITV series The Raggy Dolls. "I started off as a painter, as an art student, that's when I met all the other Bonzos. That's when I became interested in writing songs and interested in words I suppose," he says. "The only danger of this programme probably is that I'll turn into the pub bore and that when anyone says anything I'll say ‘…oh, did you know it came from this ... ?’ But I love the stories connected with different phrases. These things intrigue me." "In general what we discovered doing this series is that the English language doesn't really belong to the English at all," he says. "It's come from all over the place - Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, French, German, Danish, Old Norse" "It is a fact that the English language is growing all the time. There are more people in China learning to speak English than there are people in Ame