The Word, Series 3, Episode 16, 26/03/93

The Word – Series 3, Episode 16 (26 Feb 1993) — the one where Friday night TV tried to do everything, everywhere, all at once, with an accordion.

Tonight’s carnival opens with Canadian snowman Snow rapping “Informer,” proving that patois sounds even stranger when delivered in a ski jacket. Superclub vamp Diane Brill lands on the sofa to teach Britain the holy trinity of glamour—boobs, boys, and high heels—while conducting a supermarket masterclass in melon selection and cucumber diplomacy. Opposite her: teen dream Stephen Dorff, drafted in to provide smoulder, vowels, and someone for the camera to cut to when the innuendo detonates.

Because whiplash is the house style, we then pivot to an earnest report on US campus hazing—a cheery montage of secrecy oaths, thumb-sucking circles, and brick–to–appendage physics—punctured by the statistic that people actually die from this. The voiceover says “tradition”; the footage says “lawsuit.”

Spike Lee pops up to defend his new film and his hat choices, and somehow still ends up the most sensible adult in the room.

Elsewhere, The Word attempts its own University Challenge, hunting for “Britain’s brain” among a line-up of bronzed undergrads whose chief qualifications are hat size, chest measurement, and the ability to spell “Oxford” while flexing. Jo Brand judges, deadpan enough to register on the Richter scale. The prize appears to be humiliation and maybe a phone number.

Music keeps gate-crashing: Bang Bang Machine roar in, The Reese Project wafts dancefloor uplift, and Snow returns to rhyme “informa” with “we’re still on air somehow.” Teasers promise Jean-Claude Van Damme “as you’ve never seen him before,” which is hopefully not another accordion.

By the end, you’ll have learned that glamour takes six hours, hazing takes lives, and TV can take anything and throw it in one hour. It’s chaotic, tasteless, and weirdly gripping—The Word at its most What did I just watch?