Just A Minute

On Tuesday, December 23, 2014, dbedford@... [just-a-minute] <just-a-minute@...> wrote:

There's a story in the Times quoting Malcolm Messiter saying that his family was audited by the Tax Department after Ian Messiter's death because they assumed he would have died a wealthy man for having created Just A Minute.

He says at the time Ian was getting just 11 thousand pounds a year for the rights to the show - this at a time when the BBC was already marketing CDs and tapes of the programme as well as having sold it around the world for years.

He said the BBC lifted the payment to 50 thousand pounds only when the family was approached by a commercial company offering to outbid the Beeb.

I can't link to the story as the Times has a paywall. But it's an interesting story. It does make you think how good a journalistic history of JAM could be. Nicholas's recent boom is good fun, but how good it would be to hear all about the show from the perspectives of the Messiiters, the producers, the other cast members, the scorers, the technicians, etc etc etc.