"Put In A Questionable Way..."

For this week: anomalies and points of interest I have found whilst looking at old Radio Times listings for The News Quiz.

6 September 1977: The show's very first broadcast. Barry Norman is in the chair with Alan Coren, Richard Ingrams, Russell Davies and Clive James on the panel and John Marsh reading the headlines.
2 September 1978: The solitary edition for which Douglas Adams was producer.
16 August 1980 (using the programme information for the 18 August 1980 repeat): For some reason, this edition was hosted by Sheridan Morley.
23 August 1980: A guest chair was also in place for this edition, namely Margaret Howard.
30 August 1980: And this week's host was Nick Ross. Regular host Barry Took was back the following week.
13 June 1981: The very moment that Simon Hoggart becomes the new face of The News Quiz. Actually for a period the chairmanship seems to flip back and forth between Hoggart and Took in a way which is far too confusing for me to try and make sense of.
26 October 1981: A special edition with six people on the panel and titled The News Quiz in the City, from The London International (the six-person panel would also be used for a few 'review of the years' special). The series proper returns at the end of the week, recorded at Pebble Mill as part of '4 on Tour'.
5 October 1985: The first appearance of Ian Hislop on the show. Hislop would go on to appear as a team captain on the curiously similar Have I Got News for You.
2 November 1985: The Radio Times goes through a period of referring to two of the panellists as team captains, despite the fact Alan Coren is the only one who's usually there every week.
2 June 1986: Ian Hislop is referred to as the 'editor-elect', which I find quite interesting for some reason. (There are other interesting descriptions across the years, with Hislop also being branded 'elfin' in 1987 and Barry Took as 'the thinking man's Captain Pugwash'.)
21 May 1988: Daughter of the incumbent Prime Minister Carol Thatcher is a guest panellist.
21 October 1989: This looks to be the first edition produced by Armando Iannucci.
28 October 1989: Bill Tidy chairs the programme for a week or two.
22 September 1990: This edition features a "mystery panellist", which I presume just means they hadn't been booked yet...
13 July 1992: This edition is billed as an 'election special', in spite of the fact the election was over three months ago.
25 March 1995: If this isn't Jeremy Hardy's first appearance, it's certainly one of his very first. Andy Hamilton also makes an early-appearance-if-not-debut the following week.
6 May 1995: To mark VE Day, this week's show looks back at the headlines from 1945.
20 April 1996: Barry Took chairs his last edition.
27 April 1996: Simon Hoggart becomes permanent host. Why Took left midway through the series, I'm not sure.
9 April 1999: John Sergeant is a guest chair, although the listing for the Saturday repeat still lists Hoggart.
1 and 8 October 1999: Rather interestingly, these two shows both come from the host towns of that year's Labour and Tory Party Conferences. They do the same thing in 2000.
12 April 2002: Francis Wheen "makes a takeover bid" as guest chairman.
7 September 2002: A pretty big celebration for the 25th anniversary, with both a special edition of the show itself and The Archive Hour devoting itself to the show's history.
28 May 2004: For some reason, this episode's listing feels the need to quote the Carpenters classic "(They Long to Be) Close to You". There are some other rather strange listings around this time as well - have a look at all the show's 2004 listings if you want to see them all.
31 March 2006: This was Hoggart's last show, although it's not mentioned in the listing.
8 September 2006: Toksvig takes control.
28 September 2007: This is listed as the final show Alan Coren was a guest on; he sadly died of cancer just three weeks later.

The key points of interest after this that aren't on the Genome are an edition guest-hosted by Jeremy Hardy (20 March 2015), another chaired by Susan Calman (3 April 2015), Sandi's final show (26 June 2015) and Miles' first (18 September 2015). Incidentally, here's a related thing I found out that I missed when doing the similar article for Have I Got News for You: for a time in the early noughties, BBC One repeated nineties editions of HIGNFY in the daytime. Presumably pretty heavily censored, and dropped after just two weeks.