Many a Slip

Yes - though wasn't Roy Plomley the compere and devisor or am I becoming confused?

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I also seem to remember (unless I'm confusing this with a similar series) a specific moment of flirtation between Eleanor Summerfield and Roy Plomley when, in his questionmaster he was asking for a date (historic) and she affected to misunderstand him. I can't imagine there was any "followthrough"...

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It's all a question of how you listen. For me the show is an upmarket version of what I have termed Radio 2 comfort food in a thread of that name - ie the point is not whether it has any intrinsic merit but it provides reassurance and a nostalgiac glow as you drift off to Blanket Bay ... though of course that does mean those not old enough to hear it first time around may be excluded. And have to admit I speak as one who has read Roy Plomley's autobiography so my tolerance threshold is probably abnormally high.

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Some further thoughts on Plomley: If an unreliable memory serves on this occasion, I think there was one of those father-and-daughter type interviews in one of the colour supplements in which Plomley's daughter said when an interviewee wasn't responsive, her dad was stumped. I certainly recall his powerlessness (unless it was courteous restraint) in the face of Otto Preminger's merciless teasing on Desert Island Discs (something like: "And now you go very red about the face, especially the head") and another interviewee's anger on the same programme when Plomley suggested that obstetrics was "not really a man's subject". Against that, he wrote with considerable sensitivity and affection about Gilbert Harding, despite a reference to his "unnatural sexuality".

So probably not the most forward-thinking of individuals but I'd still like to hear those programmes again for the sheer comfort of a voice (and it is a remarkably rich voice) from a simpler past. Preferably not week after week. Martin Amis (again I'm trusting to a dodgy memory) once referred to interest in the Royal Family as "a holiday from reason that does us no harm"; perhaps listening to Many a Slip ought to be viewed in the same way.

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Could a sudden dislike of a once-loved programme be to do with this newfangled digital age? Perhaps hearing the first broadcast via the warm, boxy sound of medium wave softened one's awareness of Plomley's priggishness, the aural equivalent of a vaselined lens for a film actress.

Or not.

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Unfair to lump Does the Team Think? in with the rest as that was just an excuse for a load of comics (inc Arthur Askey and Jimmy Edwards) to say vaguely funny things. And wasn't that Radio 2 / Light Programme anyway? Had it been Radio 4 it would probably have been called something like: Is the Team Capable of Sustained Rational Thought?

Have just been listening to Radio 4's Feedback in my lunch hour (yes, I know, I need help) and one listener was complaining about having comedy on R4 at 11pm when people are winding down and don't want to be stimulated. She does have a point. Let's have these museum piece quiz shows on at a similar time on BBC 7 - I can feel my eyes beginning to close already. And if a certain announcer has to be replaced by David Jacobs or someone of a similar vintage, so much the better.

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Incidentally Plomley's autobiography was called Days Seemed Longer - an allusion to the richness of his experiences in his early broadcasting career, as the content would seem to suggest, or an oblique admission of the effect of Many a Slip on the average listener, his guilt and shame forcing itself into the open a bit like those Frost/Nixon interviews?

But having said all that we listen to the radio in a variety of ways, and there is surely a place for Many a Slip and much else on BBC7, possibly with an advance warning for those listeners who still have to pay to use public transport.

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You got an ology ... but the wrong one. Think you mean the title's etymology. (Subtext: have to raise the tone somehow.)

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Yes, there was a shoplifting case - her coat had "poacher's pockets" - and she apparently committed suicide some time afterwards.

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This similar article about the psychological origins of compulsive shoplifting offers more specific detail about Isobel Barnett's case.

www.time.com/time/ma...

Among other things, it states that the shopkeeper who accused her received abusive letters after her death - which could be most kindly viewed as a measure of the affection in which she was still held by the public after her TV fame had ebbed, although I remember from reports at the time that the shopkeeper claimed he had been longsuffering - this was one theft too many.

This makes me think again about Roy Plomley writing about her fellow panellist Gilbert Harding, mentioned earlier in this thread (it can be found in Plomley's book entitled Desert Island Discs). Plomley says that Harding's main problem was squaring his considerable intelligence with the fact he earned a comfortable living doing something that was essentially trivial which didn't exploit his potential - his tragedy was he never found something that would occupy him fully.

I know very little about Isobel Barnett so I won't speculate about her situation but I do wonder how Harding would have coped, had he lived to a similar age, with fame and money receding?