Patrick Moore (I)

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 Paul Merton interrupted Peter Cook's 60 seconds on the Loch Ness monster, Jenny Eclair was superseded by Patrick Moore on foolishness.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.

Why Just a Minute hides a far more ruthless reality

Just A Minute has become one of the nation's most beloved radio shows -- but it began as a classroom humiliation, inflicted on daydreamers by a history teacher at Sherborne School in the Thirties.

To mark the 40th anniversary of The Goodies' television debut, Ross Noble chats to Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden about giant cats, trandems and rampaging Dougals. Along the way we learn of the trio's superstar status in Australia and how Weymouth was able to double for the North Pole and the Moon, plus reminiscences of doing the funky gibbon on Top of the Pops. All three performers prove to be expansive interviewees, even going so far as to discuss any regrets about blacking up for certain sketches and how they felt about comedy competitors Monty Python's Flying Circus. Guest stars Patrick Moore and Michael Aspel also offer anecdotes, the former recalling his turn as a punk and the latter on being flattened by Kitten Kong.

For years now television experts have been handing out advice on how to cook, decorate, garden, dress, clean, save money and make love. There is no aspect of our lives that a tacky lifestyle programme made on the cheap cannot address, and the more colourful the presenter, the more popular the series. So here is a resumé of television experts down the ages, from Fanny Craddock and Sir Patrick Moore to Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Gordon Ramsay. As a collection of pretty ordinary clips, it is no better or worse than the original programmes. It is made bearable by the fruity wickedness of Brian Sewell, who goes down the list of experts being deliciously rude about everyone with scant disregard for the laws of libel.