Other than that it's good to note that someone at the Beeb also feels that February is the worst month of the year - the fag end of winter but still too far from spring - and that we need some special laughs to get through it. Thus the return of Absolute Power (February 5, 6.30pm). This Stephen Fry/John Bird dissection of the dark arts of PR has made a successful transition to TV, with the result that this, the third series on radio, will be the last, so cherish it.

Any ad-libbed, improvised show requires a special skill from the players, and in a professional sense they are living dangerously. There was an occasion in Just a Minute when the subject was snapshots. Kenneth Williams was unhappy about one of my decisions, which went against him on this subject, and he began to harass me. Peter Jones and Derek Nimmo joined in, which added to the pressure. In an effort to bring them to order, I said: "I'm sorry Kenneth, you were deviating from snapshots, you were well away from snapshots. It is with Peter, snopshots, er snipshots, er snopshits . . . snop . . . snaps." The audience roared with laughter. I added: "I'm not going to repeat the subject. I think you know it . . . and I think I may have finished my career in radio."

QI, however much it tries to be subtly different, is part of a glorious tradition. When radio first presented panel shows they cast them from those with a proven intellectual background. This mold was broken in the early 1960s, when Jimmy Edwards devised a programme for the Home Service, with himself as chairman, called Does the Team Think?. The panellists were all well-known comedians, Tommy Trinder, Cyril Fletcher and others, who proved that comics were just as intelligent as academics, and usually much funnier.

QI is a direct descendant. And when you have Stephen Fry, and contestants such as Alan Davies, Hugh Laurie and Danny Baker, and a producer of the calibre of John Lloyd, the BBC must be on to a winner.

Spin comedy makes screen switch

BBC Radio 4 comedy Absolute Power, which stars Stephen Fry and John Bird as machiavellian spin doctors, is making the switch to BBC2.

Mark Tavener, having killed off his booze-sodden BBC crime correspondent George Cragge, now concentrates on Charles Prentiss and Martin McCabe, minor characters in his comedy-thriller cycle In The Red. They have axed the Beeb's management so successfully that they now find themselves jobless and setting up as spin doctors. Absolute Power (11.30am, Radio 4) gives Stephen Fry and John Bird one or two nice one-liners - but nowhere near enough to sustain 30 minutes.