Nicholas Parsons

Nicholas Parsons to receive special broadcasting award

Nicholas Parsons will be honoured for his decades of TV and radio work at this year's Broadcasting Press Guild (BPG) Awards.

Morecambe & Wise in America review

It's a true Christmas treat, witnessing magical footage of the comedy nonpareils, seen for the first time in the UK. May our hearts bubble over with helpless laughter.

Just A Minute the Swedish way - but still no deviation

Just A Minute is one of the jewels in the BBC crown - and it's been entertaining audiences on radio since 1967. But few people in the UK know its close Scandinavian cousin Pa Minuten. The show, recorded in Stockholm, started just two years after the original and sticks to the same rules - more or less.

Nicholas Parsons reveals the real reason he was absent

"I had flu," the 94-year-old broadcaster told the Today programme. "They wanted to say for some reason - the BBC gave out - that I had taken a couple of days off, which is ridiculous. In our profession you don't take days off. You are terrified someone is going to take the job from you."

Longevity, banging on and on, is the key component of national treasuredom. In his slick Sale of the Century years it was hard to imagine Nicholas Parsons might ever achieve the status, but now, aged 94, and having presented 975 episodes of Radio 4's Just a Minute/c], without deviation but with plenty of repetition, the mantle maybe fits. The BBC celebrated his half century with a tribute, Just a Minute: 50 Years in 28 Minutes, which had living panellists compete with departed wits; a ouija board parlour game. Paul Merton interrupted Peter Cook's 60 seconds on the Loch Ness monster, Jenny Eclair was superseded by Patrick Moore on foolishness. By the time Stephen Fry cut in on Kenneth Williams and Barbara Castle on the subject of Gregorian chants, it was tricky to work out who was in the studio and who wasn't. "I don't think we can have psychic challenges," a youthful Parsons reminded his departed guests; we can now.

50 Years of Just A Minute: Nicholas Parsons in Conversation with Paul Merton (New Year's Day, 6.15pm, Radio 4) has the irrepressibly perky host quizzed by his unfailingly puzzled guest, and can be relied upon to get to the big questions. Did Parsons sport his trademark cravat back when he worked as an engineering apprentice on the Glasgow docks? And how does it feel to have seen his own fame increase while Arthur Haynes, the TV comic he was once the straight man for, has faded away into obscurity?

Nicholas Parsons on half a century of Just a Minute

Nicholas Parsons has left his walking stick at the dry cleaner's: a rare senior moment from someone who is a one-man campaign against ageism.