“I love books” Gyles Brandreth — author, quiz show panellist, former Tory MP of “One Nation”, and boon companion to Elizabeth II and Prince Philip — moves across the stage in an unsteady tiptoe. “Books are the only friends you can rely on”. He comes to a stop. “You can even go to bed with a book.”

To modern Britain, Gyles Brandreth is an Adamic figure. For close to forty years he has been doing the rounds on quiz programmes like Just a Minute, Countdown, and I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue, dispensing palindromes, anagrams, and amiable bits of literary aperçus. He is the godfather of the modern British panel show, which makes him, by extension, the godfather of the modern British public intellectual. The status of figures like Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig, Richard Osman and David Mitchell is impossible to imagine without him. 

Brandreth’s life has been spent revelling in the glories of the English language. This infatuation began at an early age. As a child in Barnes and Kensington, Brandreth grew up among the last enchantments of England’s prewar literary world. He had a brief but memorable encounter with T.S. Eliot as a choirboy, and “shook the hand of someone who shook the hand” of Oscar Wilde. “So if you shake my hand later on you can say that you’ve shaken the hand of someone who’s shaken the hand of someone who shook hands with Oscar Wilde.” 

As a boy, he also saw the grand old Sybil Thorndike give a one of her last performances on the London stage. She entered one scene hunched over, moving her arm back and forth as if using a vacuum cleaner. After doing this for a few minutes, it eventually had to be explained to her that she’d misread “hover” in the stage directions as “hoover”. For Brandreth, this was a moment of awakening. Borges once said that the English language, being neither Germanic nor Latinate but a haphazard mix of the two, had all kinds of subtleties, gradations, exceptions, nooks, and crannies that others lacked. It is in these nooks and crannies that Gyles Brandreth has thrived.

He has a strong grounding in the literary canon and is an author in his own right, but this is what really gets him going: the anagrams, the word games, the tidbits. 

Brandreth’s career has been that of an antiquarian, someone who catalogues and indexes a fixed body of knowledge. He is incorrigible list-compiler: his 1980 book The Joy of Lex: How to Have Fun with 860,341,500 Words was followed two years later by 871 Famous Last Words, and Put-downs, Insults, Squelches, Compliments, Rejoinders, Epigrams, and Epitaphs of Famous People, and then, over the next three decades, The Book of Mistaikes, The 7 Secrets of Happiness, Interesting Stories about Curious Words, and, most recently, Prose and Cons: The English Language in Just a Minute. 

We are in South Kensington for what’s been billed as: “A Magical Tour of Our Mother Tongue”. This turned out to be not so much a trot through the canon, but rather a wallowing in the language’s delectable complexity. “Did you know that you can rearrange ‘Monday’ as ‘dynamo’?” he ventures. Then, more boldly, “‘Margaret Thatcher’ can become ‘That great charmer’ or ‘Meg the Arch Tartar’”.

Soon his enthusiasm bubbles over. “I love words!” he cries. “I love punctuation!” When an audience member asks him about the virtues of the Oxford comma he explodes. “I love the Oxford comma!”

Brandreth’s tastes in language tend towards a mild conservatism. “Rules matter. You’ve got to learn the rules first before you break them”. But he has long since given up his campaign to maintain standards in English and is now “relaxed” about the neologisms that each year brings. “I told my wife recently that I was having a Hot Girl Summer.”

He keeps things studiously light. We, mercifully, never stray towards something like “Words in an Age of Populism”. What do you do if you can’t find a word to express something, a member of the audience asks. “Don’t be afraid of silence.” Mhm. What does he think of modern comedians? “Using bad language in place of wit is an example, I think, of linguistic laziness.” Sure. How about AI? “There are upsides and downsides.” Just so. 

And why shouldn’t he be mellow? Gyles Brandreth can look back on a long career lived in the world of books, pictures, and ideas. He acts like a collector because all the metaphors, images, and allusions are actually inside his head — he’s read things like the Book of Common Prayer, and assumes that everyone else has as well. To Gyles these trivial pursuits are simply a fun way to cap off a life of reading — not so important in and of themselves. After another literary factoid he arches an eyebrow, “The great thing about learning things like this is that one day you’ll die and forget all of it.”

It’s a distinction that’s been lost on his successors. Having pioneered it decades ago, the Brandreth style has since metastasized out of his control. For Brandreth’s imitators, these factoids, word games, and dinner party maxims are the actual stuff of intellectual life. 

The result is that, over the past thirty years, this kind of antiquarianism has come to completely dominate English society. Quiz shows and general quizzing are now ubiquitous in the culture, and there has been a decades-long vogue for historical fiction (Where is the American Philippa Gregory, or Hilary Mantel?).

Information is treated as a series of unconnected curios and fancies with no application

Programmes like Quite Interesting have an approach to knowledge and learning that’s downright medieval. Information is treated as a series of unconnected curios and fancies with no application. You’re not out to make sense of the world, but to be let in on a series of hermetic secrets — hence the furtive and conspiratorial tone that people like Stephen Fry take when they talk about learning: “The people who’ve got the power don’t want you to read books.”  

Still worse has also been the ritualisation of this style: bogus shows of learning. People like Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig are deliberately obscure in content and form; what’s actually happening on Britain’s quiz shows is a conscious lolling in the marginalia. The more arcane and ill-assorted the facts, the better. “Who can tell me what the reproductive faculties of the Lesser Horned Madagascan Lemur have in common with the rather grisly fate of Oliver Cromwell’s head?” Eccentricity and donnishness are occurring; the substance of what’s being said is of no moment. 

As far as I’m aware no one ever thought to consult Alex Trebek from Jeopardy! on the Electoral College

This scholastic sense is now so dominant in Britain that quizmasters like Fry and Toksvig are treated as the country’s leading intellectuals — invited to weigh in on issues like House of Lords reform. As far as I’m aware no one ever thought to consult Alex Trebek from Jeopardy! on the Electoral College. 

Wider forces are at work here, too. Closed and fretful societies tend to see a recession of intellectual life, into the quietism of trivia, facts and antiques. Germans living in the age of Metternich mostly compiled lists of bugs and fussed about the Middle Ages; after Hegel died intellectual life virtually ground to a halt. In this sense 2020s Britain is no exception. 

Gyles Brandreth was the progenitor of the antiquarian style, but he cannot really be blamed for unleashing it. All of his puzzles, anagrams, and bonne bouches were meant to celebrate the glories of English letters. How was he to know that people would take it for the real thing?