Last of the series of this award-winning sketch show.
The latest episode of John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme (Episode 6, Series 7) has an excellent linguisticky bit starting at 16:42, featuring a character who’s a professor of linguistics and quite possibly the first time “phatic” has been used in a comedy sketch. You can listen on the BBC’s website for the next six weeks. The whole episode is also great, and also features a minor linguistic issue of word boundary phonetics in the denouement, which I won’t spoil here.
I think I might have called it a discourse marker rather than a phatic expression, but I’m not going to look a gift linguistic comedy sketch too much in the mouth. (Hey BBC, if you ever want future advice on linguistics for comedy sketch shows, feel free to email me.)
There’s also a great sketch from Episode 2, Series 7 (still online for 9 days), about Shakespeare Original Pronunciation.
Previous Finneguistics: kirates, awesome, ambiguity, and Cabin Pressure.