Rick Wakeman

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.

Review: Bristol's Slapstick Festival

The avuncular Rick Wakeman, yes he of 70's prog-rock-capes-synths-and-all, then gave a fantastically vaudevillian piano dressing to Stan and Ollie's Big Business from 1929, every note capturing the hilarity of this tit-for-tat classic.

Comedy of the week has to be the spoof documentary series The Life of Rock with Brian Pern. Simon Day plays the eponymous narrator - a self-regarding, pretentious prog rock legend, whose career bears more than a passing resemblance to Peter Gabriel's - eliciting contributions from genuine rock stars including Rick Wakeman, Roger Taylor and Jools Holland.

Rock music's indulgences are an easy target for parody, with the mockumentary format a far from original approach, but The Life of Rock's combination of affectionate derision, pure silliness and a non-stop array of gags is very hard to resist.

Just a Minute, the Methuselah of panel games, has been going since 1967 with plenty of hesitation and repetition, but still no sight of the final whistle. Preserved like an intact fossil in the sedimentary layer of radio history, its formula remains perfect, its host Nicholas Parsons unchanged, despite 60 years on radio, and new talent accretes like barnacles on its venerable frame. The latest guests who are likely to stay the distance are Terry Wogan, who should be fabulous if he can cope with the hesitation rule, and Rick Wakeman, rock star and anarchic thinker who turns out to be an amusing and quick-witted addition to the ranks of Radio 4 comedians.

Expect an arched eyebrow and plenty of sardonic quips as Sandi Toksvig reprises her role as literary quizmaster. Filmed at the Hay festival, this tongue-in-cheek series invites the likes of Rick Wakeman, Jan Ravens, John O'Farrell and Frank Skinner to test their know-how: whereupon Toksvig will separate the truly bookish from the blusterers. Also parading their Eng. Lit. credentials will be returning team captains Sue Perkins and Chris Addison.