The Collector: 2 – The Name's Bond, Brooke Bond

 

During the 1960s and 70s, there was only one brand of tea drunk in our household. Twinings, Tetley or Ty-Phoo didn’t get a look in. We were a PG Tips family. And we had no truck with those new-fangled teabags either. We bought our tea in packets. Our mum made it in a teapot, and each cup was poured through a strainer. Teabags didn’t make significant inroads into our household until the late 1980s.

One reason I can be sure of this – and, also of the sheer volume of tea we drank – is my collection of Brooke Bond picture cards. One card was given away free in every packet of tea: indeed, according to the legend on the rear cover of the 1965 collectors’ album of British Birds, ‘picture cards are given with Brooke Bond Tea, Brooke Bond Pure & French Coffees [and] Crown Cup Instant Coffee’. But tea was, I’m sure, by far the most popular source of supply for these small collectables (as a matter of interest, ‘tea bags’ were not mentioned specifically on the albums until the following year’s Transport Through the Ages).

The cards followed a format that had long since been popularised by cigarette manufacturers, sized roughly 2¾ x 1½inches. The front faces featured colour paintings, usually by noted wildlife artists such as C.F. Tunnicliffe and Sir Peter Scott, although the very first set, issued in 1954, had been photographic. On the reverse, printed in a distinctive blue ink, was an informative description of the subject. Albums, priced sixpence, were available from grocers’ shops, providing spaces to mount each card, alongside additional information and line drawings explaining aspects of the chosen subject in more detail. For the first eleven years, the series focused exclusively on natural history subjects such as birds, flowers and butterflies, and a solitary journey Out into Space, issued in 1956.

The first of these albums to find its way into our house was for the series Tropical Birds, issued in the autumn of 1961, when I was just six months old. I must have spent a lot of time leafing through the accompanying album, for it soon lost its covers and four pages, in which state it has survived, somewhat remarkably, to the present day. I can’t overstate how important this album seems to me now. Its glorious paintings of colourful, exotic birds were some of the first images that ever passed into my consciousness and to look at them today is to take a mind trip back to the age of six months. I would continue to gaze at these paintings – lovingly depicted by the aforementioned Mr. Tunnicliffe – for the forseeable future, and sometime in the 1970s was very happy to be able to buy a reprint of the album and a full set of cards. As a child, I had every expectation of seeing the likes of Bluebirds in our back garden, but global warming notwithstanding, I doubt this is ever likely to happen.

After Tropical Birds, we had a lull in collecting. I remember a lad down the street whose father had diligently compiled the sets of British Butterflies, Wild Flowers and Wild Birds in Britain as they appeared in the early 1960s, but we didn’t begin collecting again in our house until 1966. This year saw a minor sea change in the world of Brooke Bond cards. Transport Through the Ages was the first card issue not to feature a natural history subject, but its collector album, featuring exciting painted images of a space rocket, steam loco and cargo ship certainly appealed to my five-year-old sensibilities. Rather remarkably, we managed to collect the entire set of 50 cards. Given that the series ran for around six months, and the likelihood of duplicates, I have to conclude that we drank a lot of tea (much of it consumed by our Dad).

From here onwards, we followed every new series as it came out, although we never again repeated the full set feat of 1966. Transport Through the Ages was followed by Trees in Britain which, after Tropical Birds, remains my favourite set. Trees held a particular fascination for me, and even now my ‘mind’s eye image’ of most species is still the archetype depicted on the Brooke Bond  cards. Each tree was shown in full leaf and blossom in one card, with the following card depicting leaves, fruit and seed heads in close up. Illustrations and descriptions were provided by Michael Youens, who would go on to provide the pictures for the the British Costume series two years later. I was much less taken with British Costume than I had been with the earlier issues, and the album was never completed. By 1968, Brooke Bond seemed to have abandoned wildlife subjects for good, with the years to 1971 covering subjects as diverse as heraldry (Flags and Emblems of the World, 1967), motoring history (1968), Famous People (1969), nautical history (1970) and the space race (1971). Collectors could send away for any cards they had failed to collect by the end of each series, and I clearly remember doing this to complete our set of Trees in Britain, but receiving back only one of the two or three cards we were missing. I wouldn’t get to see a completed album until I found one at a collector’s fair a couple of decades later.

1971 saw a return to natural history, with a series almost guaranteed to appeal to me – Prehistoric Animals. For the first time, though, I felt there was something lacking. I’d already seen some of the very fine dinosaur art produced by Rudolph Zalinger, the world-leading specialist in the subject, and by comparison, the Brooke Bond artwork wasn’t as characterful or appealing. The cards were well painted, but the album cover was a total let-down, with artwork that looked like a designer’s rough. It was an early sign of things to come.

1972’s set History of Aviation was in part revisiting familiar territory, as aspects of the subject had been covered in Transport Through the Ages. I was bought the album, and collected a fair few of the cards, but my heart was no longer in it. The following year brought Adventurers and Explorers and The Sea – Our Other World, a nicely-painted set focusing on the kind of territory being explored on television by Jaques Cousteau.

If I’d sensed the series were running out of steam, the next set confirmed it for me, with 1975’s Inventors and Inventions reaching an all-time low for Brooke Bond. This time, it was the cards themselves that disappointed, with artwork hastily rendered in a scamp-style line and ink wash technique. You could see bubbles where the ink had dried. It was all a far cry from the thoughful illustrations of artists like C.F. Tunnicliffe, who had a passion for their subject. Inventors was clearly the work of a journeyman ‘commercial artist’ who apparently invested none of the time or interest in his subject that had made the sets of Tunnicliffe, Youens and others so appealing. I hated Inventors... on sight, and on revisiting it ahead of this article, found my opinion unchanged. The only interesting visual came in the form of the album cover, which featured a photograph of some model caricatures of inventors from history, that looks suspiciously like the work of Spitting Image creators Fluck and Law.

Sadly, there was worse to come. Following a temporary return to form with Wonders of Wildlife, 1976 brought Play Better Soccer. Horrors! What on earth were Brooke Bond thinking of? Some of the earlier series may have erred a little on the side of academia, but the subjects were always of universal interest, and could be categorised under the heading ‘general knowledge’. Now, here was a set aimed only at football fans. It was a misjudgement, and the artwork struggled to improve on the low benchmark set by Inventors… 

Declining standards: the artwork on these 1970s sets was well below the quality seen in earlier series.
 L-R: Inventors and Inventions, Play Better Soccer, Police File (which came with an album introduced by Shaw Taylor)

If I’d been losing interest before, I was almost done by this time. Disappointed at the contemporary series, I turned to collecting some of the sets I'd missed back in the 1960s, with reprints including Wild Birds in Britain, African Wildlife and Freshwater Fish. Curiously, not all sets were available this way. Meanwhile, 1977 brought Police File, and another series of cards painted in a slick, modern style: fine for film posters or the covers of cheap novels, but it wasn’t what I wanted to see on Brooke Bond cards. Vanishing Wildlife (1978) was an improvement, but the paintings were still a long way below the high watermark of the early 60s, and the subject had already been covered, definitively, by the respected naturalist Sir Peter Scott back in 1963. 1979 brought Olympic Greats, and a return to photographic images, not seen on Brooke Bond cards since 1954. Woodland Wildlife was similarly photographic, but we’d stopped drinking Brooke Bond tea by this time, and the only examples of these later sets in my collection come from a job lot I acquired somewhere down the line. 

The glory days of Brooke Bond card collecting were well and truly over by the mid 80s, with series now including the likes of Chimp Stickers (1986), Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (1991) and The Secret Diary of Kevin Tipps (1995). The appearance of the famous chimp characters on the collectable cards marked a new nadir for the series which had always steered well clear of making any connection with the PG Tips TV commercials. Clearly, lesser minds were now in charge of marketing at Brooke Bond, and it’s hard to think of a worse example of ‘dumbing down’. The number of cards in each set had gone down from 50 to 40 by the late 70s, and was now reduced even further, with the very last ‘collectable’ set (1998’s International Soccer Stars) comprising a mere twenty cards. What had started out as a laudable exercise ‘offered in the interests of education’, had become a dreary commercial endeavour, dragged down by inane subject matter and repetition.

I still own pretty well all of the collectable era of Brooke Bond albums, many of them complete. In addition, I have many loose cards, and recently decided to sort them into sets. In doing so, I noticed the tendency for certain cards to appear in clusters, whilst others were absent altogether. In a typical set, one might find as many as six examples of one card, and this was from a randomly collected pile of cards going back through the decades. There’s only one explanation for this ‘clustering’. Clearly, someone in the production line was pulling out certain cards so as to restrict their numbers, whilst other cards had their print runs extended. This explains why our missing Trees in Britain cards could not be supplied when we sent off for them in 1967: the print run on those cards had fallen short. It was a win/win situation for Brooke Bond: hold back cards to keep customers buying more tea, then charge them again to complete their sets.

Brooke Bond albums were issued in their thousands and accordingly don’t have huge value today. Even early sets like Bird Portraits (1957) can be had for just 99p if you’re prepared to shop around on ebay. There are, of course, sellers who hope for as much as £50 for the same set, but they’ll be relisting for a long time to come.

Whilst certain sets have dated quite badly – Famous People, History of the Motorcar and The Race Into Space (which envisaged a manned landing on Mars by the mid-80s), the wildlife subjects continue to be as relevant as ever, if not more so, and represent some of the very best of their kind. I’m sure they will continue to be collected long after the aberrations of the 80s and 90s have been long forgotten.

And now, after all that, I think it’s time for a cup of the tea you can really taste…

How to Live Forever (according to ITC)

Going through some very old cassette tapes in my garage, I turned up a minor piece of history reminding me of my long standing friendship with the late Tim Beddows, creator of the Network DVD label. In 1977, our family holiday took us to a rented cottage on the mid Wales coast. The views and the scenery were all very well, but being in Wales for a week had the added advantage of being able to watch an episode of The Saint. It hadn’t been on in our home region (ATV Midlands) for some five years. Forewarned of this possibility, Tim gave me his tiny open-reel tape recorder with a request to record the programme's beginning and end titles, simply so that he could have a copy of the music.

The tape I discovered today was a dupe from Tim’s tiny three inch spool, itself a pretty ropey recording to begin with. But it’s evidence of a kind, a link back to the past and a late, lamented friend. It’s somewhat ironic, in retrospect, to reflect that the episode broadcast that week on HTV was The Man Who Gambled With Life, number 18 in the last series of The Saint, and first broadcast in January 1969. Make a note of that date, as it’s relevant to what follows. The story, written by series script editor Harry W. Junkin, concerned the efforts of wealthy industrialist Keith Longman (Clifford Evans) to keep himself alive when faced with a deteriorating heart condition. Cryogenics was a recently arrived fad over in the USA, and Junkin, a Canadian, would have been well aware of the trend. His script feels rather more like an outing for The Avengers (and even namechecks Emma Peel as if in acknowledgement of the fact), but it still provided a reasonably entertaining fifty minutes, somewhat off the usual Saintly beaten path.

Fast forward now to January 1970 and an episode of Department S: Spencer Bodily is Sixty Years Old. Once again, the theme is longevity, and this time the premise involves participants in a long term experiment who have been using a drug known as BHT (or Butylated Hydroxytoluene) in order to slow down the ageing process. I didn’t get to see this episode until last year, but when I did, I immediately spotted a connection back to the aforementioned episode of The Saint. When Templar is first approached by Longman’s team, he is given a box containing a white mouse. Longman’s daughter explains that the animal’s life span has been significantly extended by injections of... Butylated Hydroxytoluene. The two episodes were the work of the same writer, Harry W. Junkin. So was he merely rehashing an old idea or was there something more to all this? I decided to find out…

First off, I wanted to know about Butylated Hydroxytoluene. It sounded plausible enough, but it could simply have been a scriptwriter’s invention. A quick Google search confirmed that it was real enough. BHT (as it is correctly referred to in Department S) is a known antioxidant, widely used in food preservation, and a key ingredient in various cosmetics. Its effect, is simply, to delay the onset of rancidity. In chemical terms, it inhibits the process of oxidation caused by free radicals. So far, so good. And looking into the matter a little further, there is plenty of literature about the reputed benefits of antioxidants in their natural state – foods including blueberries, dark chocolate, beetroot and broccoli are all natural antioxidants. But wasn’t Mr. Junkin delving into the realms of fantasy with his scripts? Not as far as you might think.

In June 1968, an article entitled ‘Biochemistry: The Elixir of Youth’ appeared in Time magazine. The piece described research into ageing being conducted by Biochemist Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska medical school. The article includes the following statement:

“Now researchers are beginning to wonder if the preservative [BHT] cannot also be used to prolong the life of man [...] With regular feedings of BHT, [Harman] was able to lengthen the life span of a strain of laboratory mice by 50%. “In human terms,” says Harman, "this is equivalent to increasing life expectancy from 70 years to 105 years.”

Here, without a doubt, is Harry W. Junkin’s original source material. In light of the fact that he turned in two scripts with a longevity theme within the space of a few months, can we presume that Mr. Junkin was intrigued by the possibility of extending his own life span? Unfortunately, if he took any steps in this direction, they were unsuccessful, as he was to live for only another ten years, dying in 1978 at the age of only 62. But hang on a minute: if that research was published back in 1968, how come we’re not all now living to 105?

What holds good for laboratory mice does not necessarily hold good for human beings, and no one was about to start adding another chemical to the human food chain without rigorous testing… and we all know, don’t we, that flouridation was nothing more than a communist plot to contaminate our precious bodily essences…

The sobering fact is that the elixir of life dream of Denham Harman, Harry Junkin and many others remains just that: a dream. BHT is still regularly added to many foodstuffs, but has been linked in various studies with forms of cancer (although ongoing research has more or less ruled this out), which may explain why some manufacturers are now voluntarily removing it from their products. Exactly how much you’d have to take to live to 105 isn’t stated in the Time magazine article, but you’d have thought that, if it were possible, some kind of Seven Seas style capsule might have been made available by now. In the absence of any such wonder drug, then, is there anything we can take away from all this?

Antioxidants are the subject of fierce debate in the scientific community. Taken as a whole, there seems to be no persuasive argument in favour of their efficacy, but neither have they been shown to have no beneficial effects at all. The best one can hope for is to ‘suck it and see’ as the saying goes. Over the past few months, I’ve upped my intake of blueberries from, well, zero, to a punnet every couple of weeks. Do I feel any better for it? I don’t think so. On the other hand, if I live to 105, you probably won’t be around to hear about it, and equally if it doesn’t work, I won’t be around to report on that either.

As to cryogenics (or, more accurately, cryonics), there’s still a glimmer of hope, but you’ll need something like $200,000 if you want to join the small, select band of 250 or so frozen individuals following the Saintly path of Harry Junkin’s script. Alan Whicker reported on the state of the industry in the early 1970s, but sadly for those pioneers, eternal life was only as good as the company running the freezer, and all but one of the early cryonics ventures failed: with terminal results for their clients. It’s often stated that Walt Disney has been cryonically preserved, but that’s an urban myth. Although I wouldn’t put it past him to re-emerge in the future as some kind of clone/AI hybrid...

There’s one final aspect of all this that we need to consider. Let’s imagine that Denham Harman really had cracked the secret of longevity back in the mid 60s. Did any government want its citizens living to advanced old age? Even without an elixir of life drug, we can already see the problems of an ageing population as the average lifespan gets longer. If there is some secret wonder drug out there, you’re never going to find it on the shelves at Holland and Barrett: but you can bet that both of this year’s presidential candidates have been shovelling it down on a daily basis. Which might explain a great deal...

Meantime, it's back to the blueberries. The second part of this article will appear in March 2066...

Many a Slip

 

Panel games have always been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these lightweight, humorous shows without really understanding much of what was going on. Just a Minute was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like My Word, My Music or Does the Team Think were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at lunchtime. During the 60s and 70s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 12.25pm slot on Radio Four (formerly The Home Service) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable cheese flans and semolina.

In April 1971, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1964. Many a Slip was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum Petticoat Line and, more famously, Just a Minute. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Roy Plomley would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing deliberate solecisms. The two teams would buzz in every time they spotted a mistake, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. Midway through each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Race, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular thirty or forty years previously.

Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Summerfield and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, David Nixon and Richard Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same week after week, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nine series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on What’s My Line. Many a Slip was itself trialled briefly on television during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived BBC2 channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.

I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of Many a Slip prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had something to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening or closing theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor John Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across bottles and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy Doctor in the House, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard Many a Slip prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.

Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the summer of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school swimming pool, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of H.E. Bates’ Larkins stories (Just Perfick), and the schools programme Singing Together. Indeed, although Many a Slip would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1979, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.

That’s not strictly true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series nineteen years later.

Many a Slip returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC7 in 2003. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Four Extra that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifteen years, averaging two seasons per year, Many a Slip’s archive status is extremely disappointing. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. No complete series survives.

At time of writing, MAS is due for a return next week on Radio Four Extra, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been unearthed since the show’s last outing two years ago, but with so many broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with teachers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.

I couldn’t appreciate Many a Slip at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly old hat and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to thirty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.

One of the rounds in Many a Slip had the teams listening to a short prose essay, which was repeated, with alterations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with some of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot… (there are fifty five ‘intentional’ errors or alterations… bonus points if you spot any I didn’t intend).

Take Two:

Panel games have never been a regular feature of BBC radio. Growing up, I heard many of these heavyweight, humourless shows without really understanding much of what was going on. Just a Minute was easy enough to follow, even without an appreciation of the panellists’ erudition (or lack thereof), but shows like My Word, My Music or Twenty Questions were aimed at a mature, intelligent and well educated audience. Nevertheless, I got to hear all of these and many others through the simple fact of our having the radio turned on at teatime. During the 50s and 60s, and indeed for decades afterwards, the 6.15pm slot on Radio Two (formerly The Third Programme) was a natural home for light comedy and panel games. Even when I was going to school, I got to hear many of these programmes, as for many years I came home for dinner rather than risking the school canteen with its inevitable liver and onions.

In April 1975, I encountered a panel show that was new to me and, I assumed, newly arrived on the airwaves. In fact, it had been running since 1954. Many a Slip was created by Ian Messiter, whose other contributions to broadcasting included women’s forum Petticoat Line and, more famously, What’s My Line. The format was simple: playing the game was anything but. Show host Steve Race would read out short and often humorous pieces of prose containing unintentional solecisms. The three teams would buzz in every time they spotted an error, with points awarded or deducted according to whether the mistake was intentional, unintentional or not a mistake at all. At the end of each episode, a round of ‘musical mistakes’ would be presided over by genial Steve Wright, who would intentionally mix up melodies and lyrics from popular songs – which is to say, songs that had been popular fifty or sixty years previously.

Two teams competed regularly across the series, and when I first heard the show, these comprised the ladies – Eleanor Bron and Isobel Barnet – and the gentlemen, Richard Nixon and Stinker Murdoch. Unlike today’s panel shows, the team members remained the same month after month, with only minor changes between series as various players moved on. This was, in fact, the ‘classic’ line-up, enduring over nineteen series from 1966 to 1974. Murdoch departed in ‘74 and Barnet the following year. The choice of players harked back to the early days of television panel games, with both Nixon and Barnet having been regulars on The Brains Trust. Many a Slip was itself trialled briefly on the small screen during the autumn of 1965, when a run of just ten episodes appeared on the recently arrived ABC channel. But the show, with its emphasis on listening, was more at home on the radio.

I’m not entirely sure why I’d not been aware of Many a Slip prior to 1971, but I suspect that music may have had nothing to do with it. In its early years, the show had no opening theme, and was simply introduced by Plomley (as a sole surviving episode from 1967 makes clear). Somewhere further down the line, the show was outfitted with a quirky little melody from BBC Radiophonic Workshop contributor Richard Baker. Constructed in his customary manner from sounds generated by blowing across jam jars and cut into notational lengths, the tune was instantly recognisable, and certainly caught my ear in the spring of 1971. Baker had provided a very similar linking piece for the radio comedy Doctor at Sea, which debuted in 1968, and his themes were in regular use on both TV and radio going into the new decade. I must have heard Many a Slip prior to 1971, so this makes me wonder whether this was the first year for the music.

Either way, that odd little bit of music became, for me, part of the fabric of the winter of 1971, and is wedded forever in memory with the opening of the school science block, and other radio items from the same era, including a lost adaptation of Philip Larkin stories (Just Perfick), and the schools programme Singing Together. Indeed, although Many a Slip would continue, complete with the same theme music, until 1989, I never heard it again after that summer, which explains its potent associations.

That’s not entirely true, though. A recently discovered diary entry for Monday 2 February 1976 reminded me that I heard that evening’s broadcast at 6.15pm on Radio Four. Our television had temporarily packed in, and in its place, we left the radio on. This, though, would be my last encounter with the programme until a one-off edition, broadcast in a radio retrospective series fifty years later.

Many a Slip returned to BBC Radio in the digital era, with episodes resurfacing on BBC3 in 2007. I couldn’t receive digital radio at the time, and so it wasn’t until 2018, when the show returned to the renamed Radio Five Live that I finally got to hear a run of episodes. For a series that was broadcast regularly over fifty years, averaging two seasons per year, Many a Slip’s archive status is extremely encouraging. Only a handful of episodes survives, with just two hailing from the era of the ‘classic’ team line-up, and the majority dating to 1978. One complete series survives.

At time of writing, MAS is due for a return last week on Radio Four, with a run of episodes that appears to be omitting two orphaned examples from 1967 and 1973. It’s too much to hope that any more survivors will have been dug up since the show’s last outing five years ago, but with so few broadcasts from the past, there’s still the chance that home tapes may come to light: the show was reputedly popular with lawyers, who sometimes wrote in asking for copies of Messiter’s word games, and must surely have recorded the odd episode off air.

I could appreciate Many a Slip at the age of ten, but at 63 it’s a different matter. It may be slightly archaic and exceedingly upper middle class, but hey, if that’s not my demographic, I don’t know what is. If you’ve never heard it, and want to expose yourself to sixty minutes of archival erudition – you’ll get the added bonus of hearing a clearly drunk Eleanor Summerfield in some of the surviving editions – then tune in from next week on Radio Four Extra.

One of the rounds in Many a Slip had the teams listening to a long prose essay, which was repeated, with aberrations, later in the programme, points being earned for every alteration the players picked up. So, for anyone who can’t be bothered, you can play the game right now, because I’m going to repost this entire entry with one of the facts and phrases altered. Award yourself a point for each ‘error’ you spot…