Friday, June 29, 2012

Criminal Word

Click here for an amusing and diverting clip of Springwatch's Chris Packham shoehorning the titles of 51 Bowie tracks into the latest series of the show. He's previously done the same for The Manic Street Preachers and The Smiths, apparently, and clearly gets away with it in large part because he's clearly a total pro in all other respects.
What's always striking, though, about many of the Bowie nuts I come across is how few of them can actually pronounce his surname correctly. The chap who runs my local pub quiz- and he's perfectly wonderful in all other regards- is the same. The biggest fans are usually those that (mis)pronounce it Bowie (as in Bow Wow Wow), as Chris Packham does at 5' 19". Packham is clearly enough of an aficionado to know songs titles such as Moss Garden and Width of a Circle, so it's baffling that he doesn't actually know the name of his hero. More bizarre still was George Clinton, who pronounced it as Boo-ey on the song P-funk(Wants to get Funked Up). For the record, it's actually Bowie (as in bow and arrow). Apparently, there is an official BBC pronunciation guide that gives the correct way to pronounce, for example, the names of foreign ministers. It also tells presenters how to pronounce Bowie, though few at BBC 6Music appear to have read said guide, given the number of times its DJs say it incorrectly. And it appears Chris Packham has never read it either, possibly because he was too busy shtupping Kate Humb(snip- libel ed).

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