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Just a Minute

Nicholas Parsons
  • Posted at 4:27pm
  • 21 February 2008
  • by SarahDempster-RT

Comedy! It's hilarious. Except when it's not, obviously. Then it's rubbish. Or, in the case of non-hilarious radio comedy, rubbish and incessantly, infuriatingly polite. Unless, of course, it's Just a Minute (Mondays, 6:30pm, BBC Radio 4), which has made a name for itself by being a) conspicuously not rubbish, and b) as rude as it's possible to be within the confines of a station that still, from certain angles, resembles a parson's tea party, on a lawn, with scones, in 1953.

Astonishingly, Just a Minute is now in its 40s. It's been going since 1967, and some wags will suggest that's where it should have remained, puffing its cheeks out in consternation and frantically pressing its buzzer lest anyone be allowed to speak for long enough to say something interesting.

But said wags are wrong. Unlike the majority of its snooty Radio 4 comedy stablemates, Just a Minute actually sounds as if it's enjoying itself. It's rarely anything less than quite funny, and is often almost slightly hilarious, which is quite an achievement, given the station's penchant for arthritic satire and comedies made of buns, cardigans and bits of the 1980s.

For those who have yet to stumble across this Methuselah of vaguely rude panel shows, the format runs thus: posh compere Nicholas Parsons adjudicates over two groups of contestants, each of which consists of two comedians, actors or other high-profile media-type bods. Each contestant is given the chance to speak, amusingly, for 60 seconds on a topic of Parsons's choosing, with the proviso that the subsequent micro-speech must be "without hesitation, repetition or deviation".

Should they so much as pause during said announcement, their fellow contestants can - and indeed, will - press a buzzer, often quite violently, whereupon they will explain why the speaker deserved to be buzzed, before being granted the remaining number of seconds to pick up the thematic baton and continuing the putatively amusing ramble themselves.

This week's pre-eminent show-off was Paul Merton. He interrupted almost continuously. He buzzed in during Jenny Eclair's rant about party tricks, for example, because she'd said "every" and "everything" in one sentence, which almost counted as repetition, didn't it? (It didn't.) His ego could barely sit still. He made a joke about Nicholas Parsons being discovered by the Time Team ("I don't know what it is but it's wearing a striped waistcoat…"), which Parsons didn't like one bit, and made fun of the studio audience, which the audience loved.

But it was all to no avail. Merton lost. And quite right, too. He'd been really annoying. Instead, nice Jenny Eclair and clever Marcus Brigstocke won, even though it really should've been Clement Freud, on the grounds of him being Clement Freud, and thus automatically deserving of every award going.

Freud hardly spoke, although when he did, you relished every painstaking, sardonic syllable. "I think what frightened me most as a child," he said at one point, apropos not much, "was Nicholas Parsons." It was enough to reduce the audience to helpless, guffawing blancmange. (Parsons remained resolutely unamused.)

Just a Minute is a pedant's playground: a nitpicker's paradise. It rewards show-offs, obscurants, bullies and stentorian egotists, and punishes the hesitant and humble. It's a good job it's not played in schools. Kids would develop terrible complexes, growing up to be either a) gulping, trembling wallflowers, terrified of expressing themselves for fear of being interrupted by Paul Merton, or b) William Hague.

Above all, however, it revels in its rudeness. A trait that, given Radio 4's track record for cable-knit puns and nursing-home satire, is as refreshing as it is admirable.

Pedantry! It's the new being funny.*

* Or something.

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