Fry’s English Delight: The Trial of Qwerty (BBC Radio 4) was an entertaining romp through the keyboard’s history. But it didn’t need the naff mock-trial aspect – played in the many trails for the programme – and irksome lines such as “How do you plead? Not gluity.”
But these were just a framing device for a fascinating programme. It is, we learned, easier to learn to fly a plane than to master touch-typing. We also heard about some of the keyboard’s myriad quirks. The letter “i” sits under the number 8 so that you can easily type I8 hundred and something as a date; an issue for something invented in the 1870s. “So convenient,” Stephen Fry quipped.
Read the rest of the review here.
You can also listen to the programme here.