Nicholas Parsons

The Story of Slapstick began by being mildly diverting (good clips of Chaplin and Buster Keaton) but got more and more infuriating as it proceeded, undone by feeble apercus from its contributors ("Tears and laughter are very close" - Nicholas Parsons) and transparently wrong-headed cultural generalisations in the script ("We can't get enough of silent comedy these days." Eh?) By the end, I wanted to smack it in the face with a giant frying pan.

There were real laughs to be had, and plenty of them, on Just a Minute (Radio 4, Sunday), the last in the current series. The mood was already rather hysterical ("When I look at that beautiful masculine form I can't help but think of King Kong" said Paul Merton of host Nicholas Parsons) when Gyles Brandreth was given the topic of "pretentious vocabulary". Off he went, unstoppably, unleashing a torrent of verbal flourishes. So unstoppable, in fact, that they let him go beyond the full minute. Moments later, Brandreth was emboldened to assert that he has no hair on his body at all. "Show us your chest," suggested Parsons. "Dear Lord," muttered Pauline McLynn. "Off, off, off!" chanted the audience. "What on earth," asked Graham Norton, "has happened to Radio 4?"

Nicholas Parsons pays tribute to Clement Freud

"Clement was in the original pilot of our Radio 4 game show Just A Minute, and was a regular participant right up to a few weeks ago."

Radio Head: David Mitchell

And David Mitchell's periodic clashes with Paul Merton have to stop. They meet on Just a Minute: the incumbent ruler (Paul) sees that he is being challenged by a younger chimp (David).

The challenge is unworthy of his mighty chimp rule; rather than rising to it, he just becomes grumpy. Nicholas Parsons is powerless to leaven the atmosphere. It is ruining everything. I think the short answer is a leave of absence for David Mitchell. Or maybe start him somewhere he can't do so much damage, like The Archers, or From Our Own Correspondent.

Any ad-libbed, improvised show requires a special skill from the players, and in a professional sense they are living dangerously. There was an occasion in Just a Minute when the subject was snapshots. Kenneth Williams was unhappy about one of my decisions, which went against him on this subject, and he began to harass me. Peter Jones and Derek Nimmo joined in, which added to the pressure. In an effort to bring them to order, I said: "I'm sorry Kenneth, you were deviating from snapshots, you were well away from snapshots. It is with Peter, snopshots, er snipshots, er snopshits . . . snop . . . snaps." The audience roared with laughter. I added: "I'm not going to repeat the subject. I think you know it . . . and I think I may have finished my career in radio."

QI, however much it tries to be subtly different, is part of a glorious tradition. When radio first presented panel shows they cast them from those with a proven intellectual background. This mold was broken in the early 1960s, when Jimmy Edwards devised a programme for the Home Service, with himself as chairman, called Does the Team Think?. The panellists were all well-known comedians, Tommy Trinder, Cyril Fletcher and others, who proved that comics were just as intelligent as academics, and usually much funnier.

QI is a direct descendant. And when you have Stephen Fry, and contestants such as Alan Davies, Hugh Laurie and Danny Baker, and a producer of the calibre of John Lloyd, the BBC must be on to a winner.