Genre literary panel game Country United Kingdom Produced by Sam Michell Home station BBC Radio 4 | Running time 28 mins Hosted by James Walton Language English Number of series 11 (12th in progress) | |
Starring Sebastian Faulks
John Walsh
Beth Chalmers Similar Fry's English Delight, Ladies of Letters, Count Arthur Strong's, The Unbelievable Truth, Dead Ringers | ||
Duo interpretation the write stuff
The Write Stuff, "Radio 4's game of literary correctness", is a lighthearted quiz about literature on BBC Radio 4, taking a humorous look at famous literary figures, which has been running since 1998. It is chaired and written by James Walton. The two teams are captained by novelist Sebastian Faulks and journalist John Walsh, with Beth Chalmers reading literary extracts.
Contents
Format
John Walsh and Sebastian Faulks have been team captains since the programme started. They are each joined by another journalist or novelist; frequent guests in recent years include John O'Farrell, Mark Billingham and Lynn Truss. Truss stepped in as captain to replace Faulks for series 9 (2010).
Each week, the programme has an "Author of the Week"; W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Burns, Philip Roth and J. K. Rowling have all so featured on the programme. The programme has, on occasion, featured a group of writers, rather than a single author, as its key study - for example, poets of the Beat Generation were the featured authors on 26 October 2010. Each programme begins with the panellists reading favourite extracts from the author's writing, and the first round is a series of questions about the author's life and works.
The programme normally ends with panellists having to write a pastiche (or parody; the programme uses the terms interchangeably) based on that week's author of the week. Walton describes these as 'the most popular bit of the programme'. Walton sets a topic that would be so out of style of the author in question that a pastiche would be humorous. For example, when Robert Burns was the author of the week, contestants were asked to write a poem, in the style of Burns, celebrating something typically English; when the very intellectual author Philip Roth was the author of the week, contestants were asked how he might have written a children's story. Faulks has published a collection of his parodies as a book, Pistache.
The intervening rounds do not focus on the author of the week. Rounds commonly included are: connections; odd one out; literary mistakes; the archive round; and a music round.
The programme has normally been broadcast at 18:30 on a weekday, the normal Radio 4 comedy slot.