On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from some inner reservoir of thoughts and phrases. Maybe that’s the reason why Just a Minute is still such a fixture on the Radio 4 schedule.
The panellists make it sound so easy that we’re always puzzled when a new, unpractised contestant struggles to survive for longer than 20 seconds. We’re puzzled but we also relish their embarrassment. We feel superior. If only we were invited on to the show, we would be able to talk, no problem. Deep down, though, we’re also reliving all those moments when we, too, have been lost for words in an interview, at a party, when trying to explain something we should know about. The temptation to ‘umm’ and ‘aah’ becomes irresistible. To be articulate, fluent and at the same time provoke laughter is not as easy as it sounds, especially when subjects as far-flung as You Can Take a Horse to Water and Waffling are thrust upon the panellists without a moment’s notice.
Incredibly, Just a Minute has been on air now for 45 years, since the first days of Radio 4 in December 1967. The pilot edition was not a success and the programme was only saved by the determination of the then producer, David Hatch (later the Controller of Radio 4), who threatened to leave the BBC if JAM was not allowed a second life. The topics on that first show (given a repeat outing in a recent anniversary programme) are not at all what you might expect from a programme aired in the year of Sergeant Pepper and the Summer of Love. The English Nanny and Knitting a Cable-stitch Jumper were not exactly cutting-edge, nor do they match up to what we now think the Sixties were about: pirate radio, big hair and the Pill. The closest JAM got to risqué in that first edition was when Beryl Reid and Kenneth Williams did battle over Things To Do in the Bath.
The panellists have come and gone over the years but the chairman was and still is Nicholas Parsons, 90 next year and as eager-eared as ever, spotting repetitions that I’m simply too cloth-eared to notice. This week and next he’s taken the programme (devised by the late great Ian Messiter) to India, where it’s recently gone viral, young Indian technocrats doing battle after work in JAM sessions that are less comic fantasy, Paul Merton-style, than fiercely competitive opportunities to show off their knowledge of strange English expressions such as It’s Just Not Cricket or Playing by the Rules.
Two Indian comedians, Cyrus Broacha and Anuvab Pal, bravely stepped forward to take on veterans of the game, Paul Merton and Marcus Brigstocke, for the shows recorded in Mumbai’s Comedy Store. Broacha and Pal did their valiant best to seize control but Merton, Brigstocke and Parsons between them ensured that Empire still holds sway. Next week Parsons and his team venture on to BBC2 for ten nightly episodes. We can only hope the TV version does not take off. JAM on Four is a staple of life, like the shipping forecast and Poetry Please.
The almost nonagenarian Nicholas Parsons (I hope he doesn’t mind me pointing this out) would make a great study for Professor Raymond Tallis and his team of gerontologists, proving that age is immaterial. In Immortal Dreams, the Sunday-night feature on Radio 3, Tallis explored the impact of the statistical average that we are living longer. Suppose, then, that eternal life becomes possible. What would it be like to live and not die?
Tallis, a philosopher, is fuelled by optimism. In Janacek’s opera, The Makropulos Case, the heroine is given a potion that enables her to live on for 300 years, stuck at the age of 42. Her life, though, becomes a living hell, isolated, lonely, boring. In the end, she chooses not to prolong it. Death is preferable. Why worry, then, that every second of our lives something goes wrong inside the body; little molecular screw-ups? Ageing is the gradual, progressive and perhaps necessary accumulation of these little flaws.
Tallis also gave us an extraordinary insight by reminding us that every morning when we wake up we will have gained another five hours of life. We might feel that life is rushing by faster and faster, that time is mysteriously speeding up, leaving us with fewer and fewer opportunities to tick off that tyrannical To Do list, but actually we’re cheating time by five hours each and every day. Not in real terms, perhaps, but because life-expectancy is increasing by between two and three years in every decade. Another five hours, seven days a week. What should we do with them? Now there’s a topic for the JAM team.
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