#Tv pilot contest 2016 tv#
With most TV and radio game shows, like Have I Got News For You or QI, they record two to three hours of material and edit it down to 30 minutes.
When you are in the chair, you have to concentrate – and how. If you’re just playing the game, you can lark about. Those recordings were truly the most shattering experiences of my life. For a few episodes when he was 94 and 95, I stood in for him when he was poorly. Nicholas kept going, and brilliantly, until his 96th year. I don’t envy her, because she will find the job is exhausting.
Having known Sue for more than 20 years, I can tell you she will be able to do all that. Jimmy was a heavy drinker and certainly a character (I knew him quite well: when he asked me to lunch he invited me to share his home sauna), but he would never have been able to control the game as Nicholas did, encouraging newcomers, disciplining the obstreperous, and getting his own laughs while never failing to listen (with incredible care and remarkable accuracy) to everything that everybody says on the show. If Edwards had taken on the role, I doubt the programme would have lasted more than a couple of seasons. Parsons got the job and for 52 years made it his own. The rumbustious, trombone-playing ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards was slated as the original chairman and recorded the pilot episode. But when it came to the series, the recordings were on Sundays and Edwards wasn’t available because he liked to play polo and go hunting at weekends. When the programme was launched back in 1967, Nicholas Parsons was booked as a panelist, not as chairman. Evolution has long been the secret of Just a Minute’s success. Now Nish Kumar, Sindhu Vee, Tom Allen and a rich gallimaufry of contemporary word wizards are adding their magic to the mix. Along came Julian Clary and Graham Norton and a raft of younger comics who brought new life to the old format. When Kenneth died, people said he was irreplaceable. The irrepressible Kenneth Williams was probably Just a Minute’s best-known contributor. She knows the game and loves it and has got exactly what it takes to keep Paul Merton in order.
#Tv pilot contest 2016 series#
So believe me, I am not protesting too much when I say that I am pleased and rather relieved and truly very happy that my young friend Sue (she’s 51, I’m 73) is going to be in the chair when we start recording the new series of Just a Minute in the next few weeks. It was time for a change – in tone, in style, in gender. I am a plummy-voiced bloke in my eighth decade and on the occasions when I have hosted the show I have done it exactly in the style of my hero and role model, Nicholas Parsons – a plummy-voiced bloke in his tenth decade by the time he had completed more than half a century at the helm. Just as I knew I was going be defeated at the polls in 1997 (the Blair bandwagon was unstoppable), I knew I wasn’t going to be asked to chair my favourite radio show in 2021. In fact, not since I lost my seat as MP for the City of Chester in 1997 – ignominiously swept away by the Blair landslide – have so many friendly folk been in touch to say: “Bad luck, old chap.” It’s thoughtful and generous of them – and appreciated, of course – but the truth is I don’t mind. Since the news broke that Sue Perkins is to be the new host of Radio 4’s longest-running panel game, Just a Minute, I have been overwhelmed with messages from kind people commiserating with me because I didn’t get the top job.
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