Heresy winners

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

OK, the competition is now closed! This was a thread where I asked for ideas for Heresy, the Radio 4 show that I host, which battles against kneejerk opinion and received wisdom. The new series will be recorded in May (on the evenings of May 5th, 12th, 18th and 26th) for broadcast in May/June with some great guests including Clive Anderson, Fern Britton, Grayson Perry, David Baddiel and Rufus Hound; it’s a mixture of comedians, journalists, artists, presenters and general cultural idols / creative thinkers. If you fancy coming along to one of the recordings, tickets are available on this website and I don’t think they cost anything.

  Thanks very much to all who posted ideas for modern received wisdoms. We’re going to use two of the submitted entries - which may not sound like many, but we only have eighteen topics in total, and the general thrust of the submissions was very helpful in working out what the general preoccupations of the world are and crafting our own topics accordingly.There were quite a few submissions which were such straightforwardly good ideas that we were either doing them already, or had done them in previous series, and other areas which (if they came up a lot) we thought about and devised our own angles on them. There were others which were very good but a little bit too serious; we want juicy discussions about real “issues”, but it is, in the end, a comedy show, and there are some areas which just don’t work for that.

So: the two we are using from the blog are

“The television shouldn’t be used as a babysitter” from Lusipher Diablo
“You shouldn’t eat animals which are kept as pets (dogs, cats, horses)” from Oliver

  Naturally, that’s two prize-winners. But five seems like a decent number, so prizes will also go to these three suggestions which made me laugh and were on the shortlist:

“Models with small hands should not be allowed to advertise cheeseburgers” from MDW
“Doctor Who has an enviable lifestyle” from John
“All women have, at some point, considered using a tape worm as an aid to weight loss” from Paul B.

The first one didn’t make it to the final cut because, although I love it, I’m not sure there’s quite enough to talk about. The second lost out because I’ve only seen two episodes of Doctor Who in my life, 15 years apart, and I know far too little to lead a discussion about it (but well done John who, I think, won a prize when we ran this competition last year; next time round, maybe we should just hire him). The third was cut because I don’t think a high enough percentage of the audience would actually agree with it, but it’s funny.

  SO, I hope those five posters all used their real email addresses when submitting the topics. If so, they will get an email in the next couple of days with their prize details, asking for postal addresses.

  Thanks again to all for your time, help and ideas.

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