Making a debut

Ian McMillan on his first go at Just A Minute

The 52-year-old rates Radio 4’s Just A Minute as more difficult to record than Have I Got News For You. “When you get there you think ‘blimey I’m with the big boys’ and for Have I Got News For You they give you a tiny dressing room with all the week’s newspaper in a big stack and you think ‘bloody hell I’ve only read The Guardian’ and you start stupidly looking at the rest when there’s only half-an-hour to the recording. But when you get out there people like Ian Hislop and Paul Merton are very supportive and luckily the series producer is from Barnsley,” says the man who has the accolade of being football’s first poet in residence, at his hometown club, Barnsley.
He recalls arriving to record Just A Minute at Manchester Opera House.
“There was about 2,000 people there who were big Nicholas Parsons fans and he says ‘here’s one of your own, Mr Ian McMillan’ and they all started booing. I said ‘I’d like to point out that this is Lancashire and I’m from Yorkshire’. He replied ‘well it’s all the North’… so they all started booing him.”