Here’s a new episode — #McG-002, “”The Tay Bridge Disaster” with Dr. Elena Bodnar — of the Improbable Research TV series. It’s the 2nd of many episodes featuring the bad poetry of William Topaz McGonagall.
William Topaz McGonagall, who died in 1902, is widely regarded as the worst poet ever to write in the English language. The poem “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is his most famous work. Dr. Elena Bodnar won the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks. She later performed the first known translation of “The Tay Bridge” into Ukrainian. In this video, Dr Bodnar recites a portion of that translation, assisted by Terry Jones, an original Monty Python.
BONUS: Terry Jones recites McGonagall’s long-overlooked poem “Stirling Castle”