Giles Brandreth ‘plummier than ever’

Scientists monitoring the condition of British television personality Giles Brandreth have discovered that the erudite writer, broadcaster and former Monopoly champion has reached hitherto ‘unthinkable’ levels of plumminess.

Dr. Tim Caswell, who has led the government team tasked with measuring the former Conservative Member of Parliament’s gravitas since 1993, revealed that Mr. Brandreth is now ‘incredibly plummy.’ ‘Brandreth’s voice has had a significant rise in plumminess since he was previously checked,’ he warned. ‘During his last after-dinner speech he came up a massive 9.5 on the Derek Nimo scale – the man’s plummier than a 1950’s fruit orchard.’

Experts fear that if the president of the Association of British Scrabble Players’ plumminess level continues to rise, the ripple effect will begin to cause anyone listening to become equally plump of articulation. ‘If this carries on the plumminess will spread like Women’s Institute plum chutney on toast’ said Dr. Caswell: ‘slow and pleasant at first but with increasingly devastating effects.’

‘Soon the entire country will be exposed to a level of plumminess not heard of since the days of pre-war BBC continuity announcers. Back then, sound recording was at such a primitive and scratchy level that the public was protected by a veneer of clipped and flattened vowels. But with today’s HD stereo surround sound, by 2014 we will only be able to communicate via flawless enunciations of ‘how now brown cow’.’

Family and friends are said to be extremely concerned about the ‘Just a Minute’ regular, with one associate revealing that during their last conversation, Brandreth’s diction was ‘more ovular than an owl with a beak full of gobstoppers, and had vowels so rounded that ‘you could use them as a space hopper.’ While a former parliamentary colleague described him as being ‘plummier than a plumber who has been tied up with a plumb line and had his plums smeared with plumb tomatoes – and believe me, that’s damn plummy.’