Filed by: Officer Taylor
The BBC's natural history series Walking with Beasts (known in the USA as Walking with Prehistoric Beasts) has lots to recommend it, but the narration is frequently excruciating. For example, consider this snippet from the last episode's trailer:
One of the most awesome of all the mammals: the mammoths!
Kenneth Brannagh - or rather, the writer responsible for his speech - is plainly guilty of one of the most heinous crimes in the English language: singular/plural mismatch. One (singular) of the most awesome mammals is the mammoths (plural). I ask you.
Clearly what Brannagh meant to say was either
One of the most awesome of all the mammals: the mammoth!or
Some of the most awesome of all the mammals: the mammoths!
Could it be any worse? Well, maybe not. But the similar American series When Dinosaurs Roamed America showed time and again that it was capable of exactly the same error - ``The hadrosaurs were one of the most successful dinosaurs.'' This should, of course, be ``one of the most successful groups of dinosaurs.
We have no hesitation whatsoever in sentencing Kenneth Brannagh to be burned at the stake. Our personal opinion is that his performance in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) merited that punishment anyway, so it's well overdue.