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Week Ending: The Cabinet Leaks
Sphere, London, 1985
The blurb on the back: Week Ending is Radio 4's topical comedy show with a regular cult audience, not all of whom have tuned in too early for the Shipping Forecast. It has been running for five years longer than Lord Lucan. By the time it was finally axed in the 1990s, Week Ending had few friends left. The strain of churning out a weekly satire show for a couple of decades was showing, and a new format was evidently needed: The Now Show wasn't necessarily what we had in mind, but there you are - that's the joy of Radio 4 schedulers. In its day, however, Week Ending wasn't a bad show. This book comes from a time when the performers were Bill Wallis, David Tate, Sally Grace and Jon Glover, with additional material by Martin Booth, David Cohen, Paul B Davies, Jeremy Hardy, John Langdon, Richard Quick, Stuart Silver, Pete Sinclair, Mike Coleman and John Pye. Its principal value now is as an aide memoire to the Thatcherite glory days (particularly the join-the-dots picture of Leon Brittain's face) and as a corrective to Private Eye's self-image.  Some thought that Richard Ingram's Private Eye was racist, homophobic and reactionary ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 3/5 HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 2/5
Robert Mugabe - as seen in 1985 visit a Week Ending page home |
