Just A Minute

I'm curious as to what people in general thought about the occasions when JAM was on television? 

 

I've only ever seen one episode, but I've heard the audio recordings of several episodes, some from the mid 90's and others from 1999, and obviously there were varying degrees of success, because some of the people involved had not only never played the game before, but never even played with each other before, and sometimes the people on there really couldn't get a chance to get a flow going because some of them felt the rules were too restrictive to them to allow their humor or even their personality to come through, and sometimes they were just intimidated, or sometimes they just didn't care about the rules, which I think it a good attitude to have considering the randomness of Nicholas' judgements. 

 

but I do like how it provided a nice variety of people to come onto the show, some of whom were pretty good, some were pretty clever, some should never have been on the show at all.  

 

among my favorite guests that were on the show were Tom O'Connor, who also goes into my list of Brief but Memorable, cuz he was not only very good at the game, but was sharp in challenging on little words like 'I' or 'I'm' or 'the', and had a great manner about him with an ear for anecdotes and jokes. 

 

I also include Brian Sewell in that list as well, he was quite smart, clever, and sounded a bit like Kenneth Williams would when he's sounding rather posh.  also he had a great and sharp tongue for putdowns and insults which I thought were great, and he acted as if doing the show was somehow 'beneath him'. 

 

another is Su Pollard, or perhaps the emotionally unstable love child of Kenneth Williams.  because the audiences loved her and she may not have been that good at the game, but she argued and fought to keep subjects, and was great at the inbetween banter, but I wonder how well she'd do on the radio.  

 

any thoughts?