Your 60 seconds to talk about bullying, feuding & jealousy starts now!
By Christopher Stevens
Just A Minute has become one of the nation’s most beloved radio shows — but it began as a classroom humiliation, inflicted on daydreamers by a history teacher at sherborne school in the thirties.
A schoolboy called Ian Messiter was hauled before the class and ordered to repeat everything he had learned during the previous minute, without repeating himself or hesitating. It was worse, he said, than caning.
Years later, Messiter remembered the punishment and used it as the basis for radio show One Minute Please, which ran from 1951 to 1957 with Desert Island Discs presenter Roy Plomley as the chairman.
the idea was revived in 1967 with the same basic rules: contestants have to speak for one minute on a given topic, without repetition, hesitation or deviation. If a player breaks the rules, the others can buzz to challenge. A correct challenge earns a point, and the challenger must take over the subject.
But if the challenge fails, the speaker gets an extra point and carries on. At the end of the minute, Ian Messiter (who served for years as timekeeper) would blow a whistle, and the player speaking won a point.
Comedian Jimmy Edwards was supposed to host the show but wasn’t available for the recordings, on sundays. One of the panellists, actor Nicholas Parsons, was drafted in instead . . . and is still chairing the show aged 94. since he must adjudicate on all challenges, most of which are hotly contested, he has been the subject of more abuse than anyone in the history of radio.
I can attest to this, having listened to every surviving episode between 1967 and 1988, when I was researching a biography of Kenneth Williams. Nicholas Parsons also invited me to a recording, so I have seen the intensely competitive atmosphere for myself.
Ironically, the first show on December 22, 1967, was something of a disaster. the players, including Derek Nimmo, Beryl Reid and Clement Freud, talked over each other, got confused, and failed to score any laughs. Just A Minute could have been cancelled then if producer David Hatch had not threatened to resign unless the show was given a full series.
JAM, as its millions of fans now call it, really started to work after Carry On star Kenneth Williams joined for the second series in 1968. It stopped being a stilted party game and turned into an outrageous performance.
Celebrity guests asked to join in, from actors and actresses such as sheila Hancock, and presenters like Patrick Moore, to comedy stars including Peter Cook and MPs such as Barbara Castle.
Rock star Rick Wakeman tried his luck, as did DJ Kenny Everett, ex-Python Michael Palin, novelist Will self, and even a Doctor Who, actor David tennant.
But the real maestros of the game are the garrulous wordsmiths. Lyricist tim Rice, raconteur Gyles Brandreth and chatshow host Graham Norton are among the few who have been invited back dozens of times.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF GURNING AND GIGGLES
BEFORE every recording (as Nicholas Parsons told me in an interview), the Crown Prince of Just A Minute, Kenneth Williams, would wind himself up to a state of nervous excitement. He would be the last to burst onto the stage, gurning at fans and ‘sticking his bum out,’ as Parsons put it, to whip up cheap laughs.
Listeners could see none of this, but they could hear the hysterical reaction. Mayhem ruled before the first topic was announced.
Williams loved to put off his fellow players, sometimes by interrupting to shriek and sneer at them, and sometimes by his antics. He would place his feet on the desk and silently strip off his shoes and socks, daring the others to maintain their train of thought. When Clement Freud was talking, Williams would nuzzle his face against Freud’s beard.
He bullied Parsons worst of all. ‘You’re a nitwit!’ he would scream. ‘An ignoramus!’ He also treated female guests savagely, especially comedienne Aimi MacDonald. ‘ We should never have allowed women on this show,’ he would wail.
Balancing this manic stream of provocative nonsense was the calm, selfdeprecating wit of actor Peter Jones. His charming voice, now best remembered for narrating the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was the antidote to Williams’s frenzy. He joined the regular cast in 1971 and continued until his death 29 years later.
Archly camp and terribly urbane, actor Derek Nimmo combined the best of Jones and Williams. He could make the most shocking remarks with a casual shrug. Asked to recite a limerick, he declaimed: ‘there was an old poof of Khartoum/ Who took a lesbian up to his room/ they lay on the bed/ And suddenly said/ ‘ Who does what, and with what, to whom?’
Nimmo was also well-read and widely travelled. He would drop snippets of Old English into his monologues, and half a dozen other languages, bamboozling the other players. His stammer was his undoing — the chairman would sometimes penalise him for the repetition of a letter. But it also made him wealthy, as the voice of the ‘ p-p-p-pick up a penguin’ TV ads in the seventies.
Gyles Brandreth claimed Nimmo would employ a footman in kneebreeches to bring him drinks, in the ‘green room’ after recording, while the others drank warm white wine from paper cups.
BOSS WHO LOVED THE ANARCHY AND AGGRO
THE show’s original producer, David Hatch, was famous for firing off long memos to performers (known as Hatchlets). In October 1973 he summed up the appeal of Just A Minute to its embattled chairman, Nicholas Parsons:
‘Dear Nicholas, I really do believe that the game is about aggro, is about anarchy, as much as it is about the contestants and the simple rules.
‘A lot of the time there is this suppressed aggression against each other, but every now and then they turn like the pack of wolves they are and tear you to bits.
‘they are always snapping at you but if one of them draws blood, then the rest leap on you.
‘One of the great things for an observer is to watch you avoid getting bitten, which nine times out of ten you do superbly. In the larger context, it is like hitting at the establishment, and people enjoy that.’
SURREAL RANTS REINVENT THE SHOW
THE death of Kenneth Williams in 1988 threatened to bring down the curtain on Just A Minute. Many critics predicted it could not continue without its mercurial star. But after 20 years, the series had become a part of the nation’s identity. the game was clever, civilised and gossipy, never taking itself or authority too seriously — a uniquely British combination.
As if to prove the point, Paul Merton — urged on by Nicholas Parsons — joined the panel after Williams died, and reinvented the show. His surreal humour exploited a loophole in the rules: as long as he spoke without deviation, repetition or hesitation, it didn’t matter if he told the truth.
Merton could make up the most fantastical stories without pausing for breath.
One non- stop 60- second rant, on the subject of Flying saucers, began: ‘Well, a flying saucer landed in my back garden about 19 years ago, and I got on it and went to Venus. And it’s true, because I’ve got photographs here of me standing on the surface of that particular planet. And anybody who says this is false can come outside and I’ll give ’em’ a damn good fight!’
Merton’s affection for the show’s history encouraged other young comedians to try their luck — including Julian Clary, sue Perkins, Linda smith, Liza tarbuck and Ross Noble. It has even been played at the Edinburgh Fringe — chaired by the ever-present Nicholas Parsons, who has never missed an episode, chalking up 975 so far.
CHAIRMAN WHO TAMED THE ‘LUNATICS’
PARSONS was already 44 when he signed up for Just A Minute. today he is the voice of slightly bewildered British decency, being teased from all quarters, but in 1967 he had just been named Radio Personality of the Year
for a satirical show called Listen To This Space. He was hired as a talker, but after chairing the first episode, was indispensably in charge. For a few early episodes, Williams, Nimmo and others tried taking the reins. It was as though the lunatics had taken over the asylum. From then on, Parsons’s place was unassailable.
SEX SCANDALS BEHIND THE SCENES
Former restaurateur and Liberal MP Clement Freud made more appearances on Just A minute than any other contestant, easily recognised by his lugubrious voice and poisonous asides. For years, he played the part of an amiable gentleman pretending to be a cynic. By the Nineties, he had abandoned the charade, and was simply nasty. Parsons bore the brunt. Freud was rude to him on stage, and foul off it, if he deigned to speak to his former friend at all.
They had fallen out in the eighties, because Parsons knew the game had to evolve and Freud felt he knew best and nothing should change without his approval.
He was a viciously competitive player, and though contestants were forbidden to wear watches (so they could not time their 60 seconds) Freud perfected the art of challenging with only a couple of moments to spare.
He would take a point for the interruption, and another, two seconds later, for speaking when the whistle went and frequently ruined other people’s jokes.
Seven years after his death in 2009, Freud was exposed as a paedophile who abused a girl in his care, and raped a young woman while he was an MP. It seems likely other Just A minute regulars, while knowing nothing for certain, had their suspicions about his behaviour.
In the first series, on February 23 1968, Derek Nimmo was asked to talk on the topic, ‘Things I warn my children about’. He said: ‘The first thing I warn my children about is Clement Freud. I manage to do this really by teaching them simple nursery rhymes: Little miss muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Then came a big Freud, who sat down beside, and frightened miss muffet away.
‘A little later on, I manage to continue the education of my children, warning them about Clement Freud by telling them about the Teddy Bear’s Picnic. I mean, “Don’t go down to the woods today, because today’s the day Clement Freud has one of his dreadful picnics.” ’
Today, Freud has largely been airbrushed out of the official BBC history of Just A minute — rather embarrassing for the Beeb, as he appeared on 885 episodes.
MY LEFT WELLINGTON AND PEARLY KINGS
IN THE opening show, three days before Christmas 1967, players were challenged to talk on: excuses for being late; knitting a cablestitch jumper; keeping fit; phrenology; the english nanny; things to do in the bath; the many uses of bubble gum, and Chinese restaurants.
In the most recent edition, on September 25 2017, the subjects were: 20-20 vision; Shirley Temple; ballroom dancing; Homer; the solar eclipse; sunflower seeds; apple bobbing; pearly kings and queens, and a mouse.
Among the weirdest topics ever set are: getting bubbles into soda water (1968); things worth writing on a wall (1970); my left Wellington boot (1974); the most lovable points of a rhinoceros (1983); bimbos (1989); spell mississippi (1994); things you should never do in a lift (2002); when you weren’t looking (2007); a road trip with Nicholas Parsons (2015).