Professor Johnbull wows TV viewers with bombastic English

As Professor Johnbull, the new drama series sponsored by grandmasters of data, Globacom, debuted on national television last Tuesday, fans of the lead character played by Kanayo O. Kanayo have expressed amusement at his penchant for grandiloquent vocabulary.

The professor in the opening montage describes the various characters in words ranging from "unswerving, philanderer, gregarious, acquiescent, prevaricator, sedulous, gullible, adjudicator and confusionist," while he describes himself professorially as "erudite."

While upbraiding his house help, Caro, played by Mercy Johnson-Okojie for turning herself into the ‘’Witch of Endor," Professor Johnbull opines that her rather queer way of differentiating between two alphabets was an "exhibition of primitively atavistic tendencies’" and "unabashed educational jingoism."

Consequently, he accuses his daughter, Elizabeth (Queen Nwokoye) of failure to subject the housemaid to "anthropological larynphalothrophy" before she was employed. The university egghead, also accused his son Churchill of "filial insubordination."

When he encounters the fake D’banj at Olaniyi (Yomi Fash-Lanso’s) restaurant, he views his sobriquet, Kokomaster as an anomaly.  "The Cocoa?", he quipped. "You mean somebody's name is cocoa. Cocoa belongs to the genus theobroma family, subfamily sterculioidea of the mallow family. The botanical name is theobroma cacao. How can somebody's name be cocoa? That is taxonimical anomaly. 

Just as the argument was becoming laborious to D’banj, he told the erudite elderly man that he would rather refrain from entering into an argument with him. The scholarly man subsequently described the no-argument stance as "chivalrous, courteous and conciliatory."

At his home to which he had invited the fake music star, Professor Johnbull offers his guests a plate of garden egg as is customary among the Igbo tribe.  D’banj and his accomplices settled to munch the fruit while Professor Johnbull acknowledges that his guests had sufficiently "massaged their phalanges" and asked the house maid to return the bowel of water used in washing hands.

But as the drama reached its denouement where Churchill, Professor’s son entered to blow the lid off the real identity of the impostor, the professor in obvious disbelief of the extent of deceit, threw brickbats at the fake music icon, noting that he had committed an act of "catastrophic deception’" which could lead to a "conflagration of hostility" as well as a "vilified opprobrium."

In all, the character Professor Johnbull is a stereotype for a normal academic who loves to display his brilliance by employing highfalutin grammar in his bid to oppress, impress or coerce whoever happens to be on the receiving end of his bombastic utterances.

In addition to this, his profile as a respected academic and community leader puts him in good stead to deliver homilies on good conduct, discipline and moral rectitude and to ensure that the full weight of the law falls on whoever contravenes set social standards of morality.

The first episode of the drama which aired on NTA Network, NTA International and Startimes on Tuesday from 8.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. received wide acclaim from viewers. Repeat broadcast holds on the same stations from 8.30pm to 9pm on Fridays. It's a powerful clincher from Globacom, the grandmasters of data.