ISIHAC Mailout

Dear I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue Mailing List Member,

It seems an opportune moment to communicate after the hiatus caused by the death of our beloved Chairman Humph in April this year.

Firstly, on behalf of the team, I'd like to thank the thousands of you who sent us messages of condolence. There were so many I regret I have still not replied to 900 or so - I promise I will in due course. And belatedly, on Humph's behalf, I'd like to thank the thousands who sent Humph "Get Well" messages when he first went into hospital. I spent several hours printing out as many as I could and took a huge pile of them in for Humph to read in his hospital bed. I'm so pleased he was able to able to appreciate the scale of everyone's affection for him at what must have been a very worrying time.

You will probably have heard the various Radio tributes to Humph since his death. I do hope you caught the ISIHAC team's tribute to the great man on 15th June narrated by Stephen Fry. If you didn't, I'm pleased to say that BBC Audiobooks will be releasing it later this year, together with the show Humph In Wonderland which we recorded last Christmas. I will send further details of these in due course.

And you might also have read Radio 4's announcement that we will be continuing with I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue in 2009. We have all been slightly ambivalent about continuing the show without Humph, but have been greatly encouraged by the huge number of emails you've sent encouraging us to keep going. Despite the rumours, we've made no decisions about possible replacements for Humph, and are unlikely to make any decisions this year at least. Certainly I don't envisage us selecting anyone on a permanent basis for several series.

For anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms in the absence of their biannual dose of 'Clue', there are several programmes and publications either currently available or in the pipeline...

* On BBC iPlayer you can currently catch both the BBC4 tribute to Humph, and a half-hour excerpt from the ISIHAC Tour show we filmed at the Lowry Centre in Salford earlier this year. This is the only complete film of ISIHAC in existence and was the last recording Humph made before he went into hospital just ten days later. We will be releasing the entire show as a DVD in due course, hopefully by Christmas. The links to the iPlayer shows are as follows: For the BBC4 Humph Tribute it's http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ddwcy/ and for the half-hour tour show except it's http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dmpd2/

* On 10th October our publisher Trevor Dolby at Preface Books is bringing out the complete collection of Humph's introductions to all the places we visited over seventeen years touring the show, written by Iain Pattinson. The book is entitled Lyttelton's Britain and contains a large amount of previously unbroadcast material. As I say in a foreword to the book, I think the combination of Iain Pattinson and Humphrey Lyttelton has been the single most important writer/performer partnership in British Radio since Galton & Simpson started writing for Tony Hancock. It's a wonderful and hilarious collection and I confidently predict it will be a best-seller. You can pre-order a copy of Lyttelton's Britain now, and Trevor is offering this book at a special discounted rate of 35% off the retail price to members of this mailing list - that's less than Amazon. Just go to http://www.chairmanhumph.co.uk/ and click on 'Pre-Order Now', then enter the promotional code 'Lyttelton' before purchasing, and the price will amend to £9.74 plus £2.75 postage, so £12.49 in total.

* Finally, I must tell you that our good friend and Clue regular Andy Hamilton is touring his one man show 'Hat of Doom' around the country over twenty dates from now until early December. You will of course know Andy from his regular appearances on The News Quiz as well as Radio 4's Old Harry's Game. Andy was co-creator and writer of Channel 4's legendary Drop The Dead Donkey and has recently co-created and written the stunningly good BBC1 sitcom Outnumbered, which returns for a second series this Autumn. For the complete list of Andy's tour dates, go to: http://www.varietylives.com/schedule.html

And that's about it for now. I will of course keep you posted of any future developments.

With best wishes

Jon Naismith
Producer, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue

Monday Evening Musings

After I was invited to be a contributor to this blog, it struck me I'd been letting my Radio Four listening slip a bit in recent weeks. Catching up with the latest ludicrous adventures of Jack Bauer and Gregory House (not together, but I would definitely watch that) and listening to little more than the Today programme on my radio alarm clock, something that resulted in a continuous hazy knowledge of the day's news, which I'd forget altogether until someone mentioned it later in the day and I'd suddenly recall it all.

Anyway, this evening was a chance to catch up a bit. I started with the seminal Clue, which was in Manchester this week- good as always but nothing out of the ordinary. Am I the only one who doesn't think swanee kazoo is funny? Next up was The Archers. I do not listen to The Archers, and as more and more people I know succumb to the Ambridge Curse I'm taking extra care to avoid its dubious charms before doubtless plunging into a grateful numbing addiction at a later stage. Tonight, a man was trying to persuade another man to put a thing in the farm that turns rubbish into electricity. Also, there was a grumpy old man in a wheelchair being slightly less grumpy to someone and talking about coffee. I'm still not sensing the appeal here.

At 7.15 Front Row- Mark Lawson being slightly insufferable. Apparently A N Wilson thought the film of The Golden Compass was very good, and wondered how they trained all the animals until "they began to speak and I started to think they might not be real". The CGI, whilst fooling A N, was below Mark's standard however. The Spice Girls sounded the same as they always had in Vancouver, and there was an interview with Dennis Hopper. The best bit of this programme was a discussion around a new Gibson Robot automatic self tuning guitar. This sounded good to me- it was a bit like Tomorrow's World- but predictably some guitarists might not like it. Except all the ones they interviewed seemed to love it. As far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest types of guitar is the one that has a keyboard where the strings should be, so maybe I'm biased.

Part two shortly...