24 July 2021 • 5:00am "He can introduce us to his 'thousand acres of fields, brooks and wild flower meadows' just for the hell of it." Credit: Amazon Prime Video Like Jeremy Clarkson, my TV career has involved a lot of bollocks.
In my case, I am thinking specifically of an episode of Balderdash and Piffle (a BBC Two series about etymology that I presented a few years ago) in which I investigated the origins of the word “codswallop”. There were various theories, taking in the Wallops who are earls of Portsmouth and “walloped” the French at Agincourt; WG Grace and a cricket bat he made in Middle Wallop, Hampshire; a 19th-century drinks maker called Hiram Codd and “wallop” as a slang term for beer; and an alternative theory in which “wallop” is still beer but the “cods” part derives from an old slang word for testicles.