Just A Minute

One of the revelations in Nicholas Parsons' book is about the 1999 TV series. The BBC produced 20 JAMs for an afternoon audience. The shows were recorded over a week in Birmingham and the panels give every indication of being brought together quickly with little thought. JAM regulars at the time such as Paul Merton and Clement Freud, and other experienced players like Graham Norton, Jenny Eclair, Tim Rice, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, Stephen Fry, Julian Clary, Tony Slattery and Fred MacAulay were not involved when surely experienced teams would have been better to achieve success on the programme.

 

Anyway Nicholas claims that one of the people who turned up to play had not even heard of the programme before. I am curious about who this could be.

 

The players who hadn't played the game before were Pam Ayres, Clare Balding, Isla Blair, Ken Bruce, Michael Cashman, Tom O'Connor, Steve Punt, John Sergeant, Brian Sewell and Gary Wilmot. So who do you think was so outside Radio Four and radio comedy listening that they had never heard of Just A Minute?