Loose Ends (radio)

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Loose Ends is a British radio programme originally broadcast on Saturday mornings, and then transmitted early Saturday evenings from 1998 by BBC Radio 4. It was hosted by Ned Sherrin until he became ill in late 2006 with a reported throat infection. It brings together guests, generally from the world of entertainment, in a mix of interviews, sets by comedians and musical sessions.

First broadcast in 1986, it developed out of The Colour Supplement, a programme which had featured early Loose Ends contributors such as Stephen Fry and Victor Lewis-Smith. The latter's contributions to Loose Ends were highly regarded tape packages, marking a genuinely mischievous and disruptive element to the programme which was lost over time.

Original commissioned comedy had, by 2006, been phased out almost entirely, with comic performers tending to deliver existing material from their repertoires although, in June/July 2006, the Scots comedian and writer Janey Godley scripted a weekly series of satiric fictional extracts from Nancy Dell'Olio's Diary to coincide with the FIFA World Cup. Dell' Olio was the girlfriend of controversial England national football team coach Sven-Göran Eriksson. Only four extracts were transmitted due to the England team's failure in the championships.

Typically the programme was topped and tailed by Sherrin reading a comic monologue which, over the years, was written by Alistair Beaton, D. A. Barham, Ian Brown & James Hendrie, Nev Fountain, Tom Jamieson, Terence Dackombe, Andrew Nickolds, Steve Punt and Pete Sinclair.

From the end of 2006, Peter Curran stood in as presenter of Loose Ends (with Patrick Kielty and Clive Anderson as guest presenters) due to Ned Sherrin's prolonged illness. Sherrin died of throat cancer on October 1, 2007.^[1]

Clive Anderson is the current presenter.