promotion for JAM on the telly begins

Interesting comments in the Guardian's radio blog on Just A Minute.

"Radio feeds off the imagination," says the BBC's commissioning editor for comedy and entertainment, Caroline Raphael. "Good radio comedy isn't always going to make good TV."

And what about Just a Minute, the much loved BBC panel show which has been airing for seemingly almost as long as Nicholas Parsons has been alive (45 years. Parsons is actually 88)?

This show was the subject of two TV pilots in the 1990s – the fact that neither was aired suggests how good they were. But still, the BBC has tried another time, filming 10 episodes due to air this month at 6pm on BBC2.

And Raphael thinks they may have cracked it. "They have realised that the best way to do it is to keep it as like the radio version as possible," she says. "It's a show that works so why tamper with it. Even the lighting is set up as it is in the radio theatre to make it as similar as possible. Sometimes you can take it over straight."

I have posted on the page in a no doubt pointless attempt to get them to correct the error about the pilots. Still, interesting remarks from Caroline Raphael.