Stop the Week was a long running BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 discussion programme chaired by Robert Robinson which ran from 1974–1992

Origins

The BBC Radio's Current Affairs Department decided that it wanted a programme that would act as a bookend to Monday morning's Start the Week

Start the Week

Start the Week is a discussion programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 which began in April 1970. The current presenter is the former BBC political editor Andrew Marr...

with Richard Baker

Richard Baker (broadcaster)

Richard Baker OBE is a British broadcaster best known as a newsreader for the BBC News from 1954 to 1982. He was a contemporary of Kenneth Kendall and Robert Dougall and was the first person to read the BBC Television News in 1954. At one time he lived in Barnet, North London...

, which had been running for about four years.

Stop the Week ran on a Saturday evening, and its brief was to be a weekly magazine of satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

, topical guests and music. The Hungarian émigré Michael Ember, also the producer of Start the Week, was chosen as the producer.

The programme was presented by Robert Robinson who had just ended a three-year run on the Today programme.

The last show went out at 6:50pm on the evening of Saturday 25 July 1992.

Format

Each week a panel of four or five, drawn from a pool of 'regulars', would discuss a number of topics, usually more or less frivolous, such as "Is Dan Maskell

Dan Maskell

Daniel "Dan" Maskell was an English tennis player, who later became even better known as a radio and television commentator on the game, and was known as the BBC's "voice of tennis"....

 posh?"

Among the regulars were Ann Leslie

Ann Leslie

Dame Ann Elizabeth Mary Leslie DBE is a British journalist who writes for the Daily Mail.-Education:...

, Laurie Taylor

Laurie Taylor (sociologist)

Laurence John "Laurie" Taylor is an English sociologist and radio presenter originally from Liverpool.-Academic career:After attending Roman Catholic schools including the direct grant grammar school St Mary's College in Crosby at the same time as Liverpool poet, Roger McGough, Taylor first...

, Milton Shulman

Milton Shulman

Milton Shulman was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic.-Early life:He was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a successful shopkeeper. His parents were born in Ukraine and were driven out of the Russian Empire by poverty and the pogroms against the Jews...

, Benny Green, Nicholas Tucker

Nicholas Tucker

Nicholas Tucker is a British academic and writer who is an honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.He was educated at Burgess Hill School in Hampstead, London, where his English teacher was briefly Bernice Rubens...

, Dr Anthony Clare

Anthony Clare

Anthony Ward Clare was an Irish psychiatrist well known in the UK and Ireland as a presenter of radio and TV programmes.-Career:...

, Dr Michael O'Donnell

Michael O'Donnell

Michael O'Donnell , is a British physician, journalist, author, and broadcaster.He became a full-time writer after working for 12 years as a doctor. On BBC Radio Four he was chairman of My Word! and wrote and presented Relative Values...

, Edward Blishen

Edward Blishen

Edward Blishen was an English author. He is perhaps best known for three books: A Cack-Handed War , a story set in the backdrop of the Second World War, The God Beneath the Sea , a collaboration with Leon Garfield that won the Carnegie Medal and "Roaring Boys",an honest account of teaching in a...

, Rosalind Miles

Rosalind Miles

Rosalind Miles is an author born and raised in England and now living in Kent, England. She has written 23 works of fiction and non-fiction. As a child, Miles suffered from polio, and had to undergo several months of treatment. At high school Miles acquired a working knowledge of Latin and Greek,...

, Stephen Oliver, Sarah Harrison

Sarah Harrison (novelist)

Sarah Harrison is an English novelist.Born in Exeter, she is the second of three children of an army officer and a former actress, and a cousin of the novelist Celia Dale. She was educated at boarding school and took an English degree at the University of London. She then worked for four years on...

, Jasper Griffin

Jasper Griffin

Jasper Griffin , was Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature in the University of Oxford from 1992 until 2004.Jasper Griffin read Classical Moderations and Greats at Balliol College, Oxford and was Jackson Fellow at Harvard University...

, Christopher Page

Christopher Page

Christopher Page is an expert on medieval music, instruments and performance practice. He has written seven books regarding medieval music...

 and Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris

Matthew Francis Parris is a UK-based journalist and former Conservative politician.-Early life and family:...

.

The musical interlude was provided by regulars such as Instant Sunshine

Instant Sunshine

Instant Sunshine is a comedy musical cabaret trio who sing their own original witty and whimsical songs to acoustic guitar accompaniment. It was formed in 1966 by three doctors at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, Peter Christie, David Barlow and Alan Maryon-Davis. In 1972 they were joined by the...

, Jeremy Nicholas

Jeremy Nicholas (writer)

Jeremy Nicholas is an actor, writer, broadcaster, lyricist and musician. He is President of the Jerome K. Jerome Society.He was born on 20 September 1947 in Wellington, Shropshire, raised in Stafford and educated at Wycliffe College and the Birmingham School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art...

, Fascinating Aïda

Fascinating Aida

Fascinating Aïda is a British comedy singing group and satirical cabaret act, which has retired twice, most recently in 2004. After the death in 2007 of the group's pianist and musical director, Russell Churney, all plans for a new show were shelved. Some of their most famous songs include...

 (or Dillie Keane

Dillie Keane

Louise M. "Dillie" Keane is an Olivier Award-nominated actress, singer and comedienne. She is perhaps best known as one third of the comedy cabaret trio Fascinating Aida since its 1983 inception, but she has also had a prominent solo career.-Theatre and Fascinating Aida:Keane was nominated for a...

 alone), Peter Skellern

Peter Skellern

Peter Skellern is an English singer-songwriter and pianist.-Career:Skellern attended Derby Grammar School and studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He later joined pop groups called 'Harlem' and 'March Hare'...

 and Jungr and Parker

Barb Jungr

Barb Jungr is an English singer-songwriter, composer and writer, of Czech and German parentage. She is perhaps best known as a chansonnière, or singer of chansons—in the sense of classic, lyric-driven French songs; in the broader sense of European songs in the cabaret style; and in the even...

.

Sources

• Robert Robinson, Skip All That, Century, 1997
• Russell Twisk, "Full stop as a major irritant gets scratched", The Observer
  The Observer
  The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
  
  , 26 April 1992
• Dennis Barker, "Stop the week, I want to get off", The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  , 20 July 1992