Innuendo, tone-deaf singing and dreadful wages: as the cherished BBC panel game celebrates its half century, we look back at its finest moments – and its future
On 11 April 1972 at 12.25pm, between a You and Yours discussion on “What’s new in playground equipment” and a World at One report on Labour party turmoil over the Common Market referendum, BBC Radio 4 launched a comedy game show.
The chairman, jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, was an unusual choice, and he seemed appalled by the format, testily setting the length of one contest at “two minutes, or as long as I can stand it”. Rounds included team members being required to sing Three Blind Mice to the tune of Old Man River; other challenges included improvising rhyming lines. After 30 minutes, the doleful host declared that the first show had come to a “merciful end”.
