[Groff] weird ASCII formatting output

[jim]

When I format the groff 1.19.1 man pages, the output is ugly when
viewed on a bog-standard xterm:

% groff -man -Tascii man1/groff.1 | more
GROFF(1)                                                              GROFF(1)



^[[1mNAME^[[0m
       groff - front-end for the groff document formatting system

^[[1mSYNOPSIS^[[0m
       ^[[1mgroff ^[[22m[^[[1m-abcegilpstzCEGNRSUVXZ^[[22m] [^[[1m-d ^[[4m^[[22
mcs^[[24m] [^[[1m-f ^[[4m^[[22mfam^[[24m] [^[[1m-F ^[[4m^[[22mdir^[[24m] [^[[1m
-I ^[[4m^[[22mdir^[[24m]
             [^[[1m-L ^[[4m^[[22marg^[[24m] [^[[1m-m ^[[4m^[[22mname^[[24m] [^[
[1m-M ^[[4m^[[22mdir^[[24m] [^[[1m-n ^[[4m^[[22mnum^[[24m] [^[[1m-o ^[[4m^[[22m
list^[[24m] [^[[1m-P ^[[4m^[[22marg^[[24m] [^[[1m-r ^[[4m^[[22mcn^[[24m]
             [^[[1m-T ^[[4m^[[22mdev^[[24m] [^[[1m-w ^[[4m^[[22mname^[[24m] [^[
[1m-W ^[[4m^[[22mname^[[24m] [^[[4mfile^[[24m ...]
       ^[[1mgroff -h ^[[22m| ^[[1m--help^[[0m
       ^[[1mgroff -v ^[[22m| ^[[1m--version ^[[22m[^[[4moption^[[24m ...]


Any suggestions how to disable this escape-style trickery to do
emboldening? No doubt it's documented in one of these man pages that
are almost unreadable. :-) IIRC this used to be achieved with
backspaces and overstriking: that's how my old formatted man pages
were done.

Oh, and when I tried groffer in the hope it would do the Right Thing,
it blows up:

%  groffer man1/groffer.1 
ash: not found
 should be 'second' here.

It seems to depend on a shell that's only on Linux systems. What gives?