Talk:Loose Ends (radio programme)

untitled

What's with the enormous Chris Morris box at the end? Also, it would be worth listing some of the people whose careers have been launched by Loose Ends, such as Arthur Smith, Graham Norton etc..

I agree entirely. Neither this article, nor the Morris article, explains why Morris is so notable in the story of Loose Ends that this massive box is justified. Given the vast number of people who have worked on and for Loose Ends, if each of them needed an info box this size then the article would run to 698 screens. I am removing it. Perhaps someone with a view as to why it should be kept could discuss it here. 82.45.248.177 19:55, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Does a comprehensive list of shows and guests exist anywhere? Drutt (talk) 19:38, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

THE ORIGINS OF LOOSE ENDS -Moved from main article

The contribution below I have moved from the bottom of the main article - as a personal recollection in it's current form is not suited to being part of the article. However there is probably some basis of some additional information that could be added to the main article. Philedmondsuk (talk) 19:47, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

THE ORIGINS OF LOOSE ENDS

Loose Ends began as an administrative convenience. Some said it soon became a pubic one.

In 1985 the Controller of BBC Radio 4, David Hatch, announced that he was going to change the pattern of weekend listening on the Network from the start of the following year. As he explained to staff at the time he wanted to turn Sunday mornings into the classic Radio 4 listen. To that end he wanted to move Pick of the Week there, (from its current Saturday morning slot), to be alongside The Archers omnibus, Desert Island Discs and so on. This necessarily involved re-designing Saturday mornings as well: he was going to bring in the Today programme as a regular fixture, (it had run only intermittently on Saturdays up until then) and he wanted that followed by a magazine programme devoted to Sport, and then another based on Holiday and wider Leisure issues, and then yet another to fill the spot “Pick of the Week” was to vacate.

At that time The Colour Supplement was running for more than an hour and a half on a Sunday morning – in a space that would be occupied by his re-jigged schedule. So he told the Head of the Current Affairs Magazine Programmes responsible, (CAMP. And yes, there really was a BBC Head of Camp, David Harding at the time, don’t laugh) that he would extend the existing schedule until the New Year, to avoid two big changes within three months or so (The Colour Supplement was due to come off air in the autumn), and then continue the programme, but move it into the Saturday morning slot currently being occupied by Pick of the Week when his brave new schedule began in the January of 1986. As departmental budgets had already been set for the first current financial year it made sense to maintain CAMP’s contribution rather than open the slot to departmental competitive offers, which was the alternative.

I was the Senior Producer at the time on The Colour Supplement, and immediately realised that changing the day of broadcast was a non-starter, for various reasons. Many of the items were designed specifically for a Sunday morning: sharing the Sunday Lunch preparations with various celebrities; and many of the regular items were pre-recorded packages such as A Year of My Own, (well-known people recalling a year that was special for them), The Morning After, (a mini-documentary on an event that had taken place the previous evening, edited through the night), Back to Work (famous people taken back to do the jobs they had once done before gaining public notice), but also live items like reviews of the Sunday Papers and so on which would not simply transfer, or would duplicate things that would now already have been covered earlier that (Saturday) morning.

However, it was clear that a new live magazine programme was going to be required, and that the current producers of The Colour Supplement were expected to fill it. So we had to invent it from scratch. Contrary to a commonly-accepted myth, the new programme owed nothing to The Colour Supplement, from which nothing was carried on, deliberately so, except that the same production team created both. That team already had experience working on a wide variety of live magazine programmes individually, and we had already worked together on Rollercoaster a year or so earlier.

The problem was to find a raison d’etre for the new programme. There was already going to be a live magazine programme devoted to News and Current affairs, (Today) followed by a new live magazine programme devoted to Sport, followed by a new live magazine programme devoted to Leisure and Travel (Breakaway). Followed by a new live magazine programme - devoted to…. What, exactly? What was left?

The team, myself Ian Gardhouse, Cathie Mahoney and Simon Shaw, (who came up with the name Loose Ends) decided that we would set out to make an eclectic programme that we would want to listen to ourselves, and what would be distinctive about it would be in the way it approached its subject matter. It would treat topical subjects of the week in an off-beat (and we hoped creative) way. Its tone would be mildly satirical, irreverent even. Above all it would do things that were currently not being done elsewhere. (Such as the Presenter’s opening satirical monologue on the week’s events – which was, at the time, not a device being employed anywhere).

I wanted Ned Sherrin to be its presenter on the basis that he could provide much of the tone which was to be essentially the programme’s identity. Ned was envisaged as a kind of naughty uncle who would indulge the regular reporter-like contributors, as younger members of the family, who would try to interest him in their worlds and could ridicule his old-fashioned preconceptions, he in turn could act as an urbane counter-balance to their sometimes jejune enthusiasms. Both sides of the Radio 4 audience could be represented, enjoyably confronting each other.

There were a few young people who had been working sporadically on The Colour Supplement who were thought could fit into this new programme very well such as Robert Elms, Angela Gordon, John Walters, Victor Lewis-Smith, Stephen Fry, all of whom appeared on the pilot programme, (never transmitted). Posh girls and rough (but engaging) lads, it has been said. They were not part of the stage army appearing on other programmes, and generally approached their commissions with the intention of finding some fun in them. Everyone was to be real, no sketches, (the only exception allowed was for Stephen Fry in the persona of Professor Donald Trefusis), it was to be topical journalism, factual, intelligent, personal - highly individual even - elliptical, amused and amusing. It was never envisaged as being part of a Light Entertainment genre. More like Heavy Entertainment if you like. It had to fit within the CAMP genre. But, most significantly, as far as the team was aware, there was nothing quite like it being broadcast anywhere else at the time.

And so it began 4th January 1986 with that self-imposed rationale.

It was perhaps not perceived as an immediate universal hit. After only two or three weeks radio critic Gillian Reynolds wrote an excoriating review in The Guardian, saying it was “… putrid, a sad disappointment”, [Quoted by Ned in The Autobiography, Little Brown, 2005] and she wrote a private letter telling Ned Sherrin that he should keep away as far as possible from Ian Gardhouse’s malign influence [similarly quoted in the same Chapter].

Loose Ends won the Sony Gold Award for the Best Magazine Programme for its first year, and went on over the next thirty years to launch the careers of several of its contributors (and creators). Producers who worked on it in the early years included Simon Shaw (Antiques Road Show Series Editor), Charlie Bunce (Executive Producer Grand Designs), Kenton Allen (CEO Big Talk Productions, and record comedy award winning producer), Jane Berthoud (Head of Radio Comedy), Alison Vernon-Smith (Executive Producer, BBC Radio Comedy) and Will Saunders (Creative Director, Digital Production), among others.

Ian Gardhouse

Opening of the article is ambiguous

The opening of the article is ambiguous. It says that the programme was originally broadcast on Saturday mornings, and then says that it was then broadcast early Saturday evenings. This is ambiguous, as it might make people think that the early evening is a repeat of Saturday broadcasts. What it should say is that the programme used to be broadcast on Saturday mornings, and is now broadcast early evenings on Saturdays. Vorbee (talk) 17:49, 25 August 2018 (UTC)