‘Best Radio Comedy’ returns to Fairfield after 15 years

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, the flagship BBC radio comedy panel present, returns to the Fairfield Halls for the primary time in 15 years later this month.

It has all the time been billed as “the antidote to panel video games”, though the programme has been round for such a very long time, the panel video games to which it was initially an antidote at the moment are lengthy gone.

ISIHAC consists of two teams of comedians being given “silly things to do”, sometimes to music. It was just lately voted “Best Radio Comedy of All Time” by an professional panel for the Radio Occasions.

The present was launched in April 1972 and has been broadcast since on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service ever since.

Devised by Graeme Backyard, the early panels included the likes of Barry Cryer, Willie Rushton and Tim Brooke-Taylor, with Colin Promote on the piano, and had been chaired by jazz musician Humprey Lyttleton. The forged lists over the following 5 many years learn like a Who’s Who of British comedy. And there was additionally Jeremy Hardy “singing”.

Lyttleton was nonetheless orchestrating the mayhem on October 16, 2007, the final time that Clue was recorded in entrance of a (practically) dwell viewers on the Fairfield Halls. It was one of many final exhibits Lyttleton recorded earlier than his dying in 2008.

Jack Dee has been the common Clue chair since 2009.

However this would be the first time that he could have presided at a recording of the present in Croydon, because the Fairfield slowly will get itself again on to its ft after its controversial £67million lick of paint and practically three years of covid.

The producers are recording two exhibits within the Fairfield’s Live performance Corridor on Monday, September 19. Tickets – at a cut price £7.75 (together with the Halls’ reserving payment) – had been being snapped up shortly after they went on sale final evening.

The Croydon recordings would be the first for Clue’s 2022 autumn collection – the present’s fiftieth anniversary, which is due for transmission on Radio 4 from Monday November 14.

Subsequent step in Fairfield’s gradual rehabilitation should certainly be Sue Perkins hosting Just A Minute, the other staple of BBC Radio parlour games, in her home town of Croydon…

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