What the Papers Say

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What The Papers Say is one of the longest running programmes on British television. The format, consisting of readings from the previous week's newspapers, linked by a studio presenter, has remained essentially unchanged for half a century. The show has always been made by Granada Television, the longest-running broadcasting company in the UK other than the BBC, and is the only programme surviving from the company's original line-up of programmes in 1956.

For the first 26 years of its run the programme appeared on ITV. The first programme, on 5 November 1956, was presented by Brian Inglis, deputy editor of The Spectator; the following week Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, presented the programme. Kingsley Martin presented the show on a total of 6 occasions, Brian Inglis became the most used presenter with about 170 programmes. In 1969 the programme was briefly relaunched as The Papers, with Stuart Hall, of the Open University, as the first presenter. This version of the programme lasted for only 10 weeks and it then reverted to its original title, and took on the format it still has today, with a different presenter (almost always a journalist) each week.

Originally the programme ran for 25 minutes, later dropping to 20. The show moved from ITV to Channel 4 when the latter launched in 1982, but was dropped in 1989, to be taken up by BBC2 where it is still broadcast on Saturday afternoons, now with a running time of 10 minutes, with the presenters now placed in a virtual studio. The show's distinctive theme music was originally "The Procession of the Sadar", by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. The 10 programmes titled The Papers used the Gershwin Piano Concerto as opening and closing music; when it reverted to the original title it was replaced by "Allegro Non Troppo", the fifth movement from Malcolm Arnold's English Dances which is still used to this day.