Christmas

Tue Dec 22, 10.35-11.40pm, BBC1 Feature continues

Alfred Butts, the American architect who invented Scrabble, was clearly an obsessive type. He calculated alphabetical letter frequency by going through a copy of The New York Times and counting the incidence of each individual letter. Alfred was the shape of things to come, and he’d probably recognise a few kindred spirits in this playful series closer. Tonight, Alan Yentob enters the peculiar world of competitive Scrabble, where words are mere abstractions and speaking English as a second language might even be an advantage. Yentob’s clearly sceptical at first, mistrusting Scrabble’s tendency to divest language of its beauty and poetry. But the Scrabblers he meets are a likeable, quirky bunch and eventually he’s won over by their sheer dexterity. For the less rarefied word warriors among us, there’s also an investigation into Facebook phenomenon Scrabulous which, at its peak, was the only real reason most of us bothered turning our computers on in the morning. Certainly not one of ‘Imagine’s’ loftiest outings, but good fun all the same.