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After raising laughs for 27 years, Radio 4's topical sketch show Week Ending is finally ending for good. The last series begins this Friday and, while the programme lacks the profile it once had, a still sizeable audience will certainly feel bereft. BBC insiders are even less happy. Week Ending, they say, is less an institution than an academy of comedy for which there is as yet no visible successor.
Week Ending has produced several generations of men and women who went on to become fully-fledged stars in the comic constellation. Since 1970, it's featured David Jason and been produced by John Lloyd, Harry Thompson and Lisa Evans. Between 1988 and 1992 alone, it helped launch the careers of Rob Newman and David Baddiel, Steve Punt, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee and Peter Baynham, not to mention a heavyweight squad of gag-writers now anonymously but lucratively turning out shows such as Have I Got News For You.
We're talking comic muscle here, and I should know, because when I worked with those guys back then they showed me that, by comparison, I was a seven-stone weakling.
My four years at what the script-writer Mark Burton calls `the coalface of comedy' began with a successful postal contribution to the `newslines', the one-liners that punningly postulate on the headlines of `next week's news' to play out the show on air (and which originally were read, somewhat incongruously, by Basil Boothroyd).
Clutching my letter of invitation to attend the show's weekly writers' meeting, I tremulously entered the notorious writers' room at 16 Langham Street for the first time. The room was at the end of a very long corridor. In it, non-commissioned hopefuls could sit alongside the show's staffers every Thursday, in a collective effort to get a show together.
I was petrified. That corridor seemed as...
