I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

I do love the rhythm in language and I think it's an important part of it even in prose.

Any kind that's there to try and persuade, use beguile charm or delight or reader, there

is a sound element to it and most readers vaguely hear it tinkly in the back of their head.

It's not that my favorite writers are always in, have a kind of music to them. It can be a very stark

and bleak music in some cases of writers who are not ornamental but it's nonetheless a kind of music.

Stephen Fry loves words but he does more than love them. He puts them together in ways that

so delight readers that a blog or a tweet by him can get hundreds of thousands of people hanging

on his every keystroke. As an actor he's brought to life every kind of theatrical writing from sketch

comedy to classics. He's performed in everything from game shows to the British audio book version

of Harry Potter and always with a rich intelligence and searching eye. His latest books tell the stories

of ancient Greek myths in ways that seem as fresh as your morning coffee.

Stephen I'm so glad that you're going to be doing this show with me because as you probably know

what we talk a lot about communication on this show and this hardly anybody I know in the world

who communicates more than you do and better than you do.

That's very good and now of course is the time that I will lose all possible

I'll take it to see an ability to put one word after another in the service of a sentence.

That's someone who uses the word articulacy.

It is too as you I'm sure no but those of us who do speak for living because it's not something

that's ever exactly taught. There are times when you're about to go on a stage or stand up

after a dinner or something when a little demon inside you says you don't know what you're going

to say. You're going to stand there with your mouth opening and closing like a guppy fish and

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