Just a Minute: Deviation of a Listing

When Just a Minute began on 22 December 1967, its very first Radio Times listing described it as "a panel game controlled by Nicholas Parsons".

By the time of its very next billing, on 29 December, the RT had seen fit to add "(!)" after the word "controlled", perhaps indicating sarcasm or disbelief at the choice of words.

This listing was standard until its eleventh series, which began on 5 November 1976, which changed to "a panel game whose unruly members are occasionally kept in disorder by the chairman". That largely stuck for a while, although the 16 May 1978 show had the rather good descriptor of the four panellists "endeavour to prevent each other from talking", and this variation would recur sometimes (occasionally the two would even be combined, as this early-eighties episode shows).

For the sixteenth series in 1982, whoever was responsible for writing these (presumably the show's producer) starts to have a bit of fun, employing some bizarre metaphor not unlike the ones used to introduce Colin Sell on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, even changing the credits to match! Take for example the 7 August 1982 show, which summarises itself as "a bizarre trip through the highways and byways of the English language in which Kenneth Williams, Peter Jones, Sheila Hancock and Gyles Brandreth attempt not to break down, in which case Nicholas Parsons will have to get out and push", with series creator Ian Messiter billed as the 'route-planner' and producer Pete Atkin as 'mechanic'. I won't reproduce all of them here, but highly recommend you go to the Genome to read all of them.

Unfortunately these would only last for one series, and on 14 March 1983 the show returned for its seventeenth series with a new standard description: the four panellists now "submit themselves to the unhesitating, undeviating and unrepetitious discipline of Nicholas Parsons (or not)". Repeat broadcasts would also rather cleverly describe themselves as "repeat repetitions, hesitations and deviations". The show later goes through a period of just being a straightforward listing of chair, guests and production crew, although for the eighteenth series in 1984 onwards it usually claims to be "without hesitation, the least repetitious and most undeviating programme on radio" (with Parsons typically described as being "in the thick, the chair and frequent confusion"). The 1985 Christmas special also has a special listing akin to the 1982 ones.

Later, the 1988 series (the twenty-first) usually describes the four panellists as "[trying] to stop each other talking for just a minute on subjects flung at them by Nicholas Parsons", alternating between this and the boring 'straightforward' listings. The latter has become the norm by the early-to-mid-nineties, causing this article to end abruptly as it's difficult to write too much about those; occasionally in the noughties it was termed "the panel show that challenges even the most loquacious of guests" or something similar. But those creative listings from 1982 really are fun, as are some of the 'standard' listings before they got blandified, and it's a shame they're not done any more.