It's painful to admit, but Alex Horne's second book (after the quite charming Birdwatchingwatching) is irritating. Written well before he became famous for Taskmaster and the panel show circuit, Wordwatching is about a young comedian (we were all young once) trying to get words in the English dictionary. And maybe succeeding with one, sort of. But not really.

There's very little that's personal about this story, and the anecdotes don't really go anywhere. If Birdwatchingwatching was a meditation on what it meant to be a son and to prepare to be a father, coupled with interesting bird facts, Wordwatching is a comedian who would go on to bigger things talking at you about a pet subject that you may well share but in a way that's near impossible to engage with.

Wordwatching is only interesting if you want to see how far Alex Horne has come; it's hard to imagine how it was perceived at the time, other than the man trying to horn in on Susie Dent's racket.