What the Papers Say

Genre

media journalism

Country

United Kingdom

How it feels

This series was a weekly review of British newspaper coverage. Actors would read aloud quotes from headlines and comment pages from the past week. A presenter, usually a journalist, linked these quotes together with scripted commentary.

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What happens

What The Papers Say was a British radio and television series. It consisted of quotations from headlines and comment pages in the previous week's newspapers, read in a variety of voices and accents by actors. The quotes were linked by a script read by a studio presenter, usually a prominent journalist. The show did not have a regular host, and was intended as a wry look at how British broadsheets and tabloids covered the week's news stories. The programme was most recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. What The Papers Say originally ran for many years on television – its first incarnation (1956–2008) was the second longest-running programme on British television after Panorama. Having begun in 1956 on Granada Television and ITV, the television series moved to newly launched Channel 4 in 1982 and being shown to the network before briefly returning to ITV as part of the new night service in 1988 and then to BBC2 in 1990 before being discontinued in 2008. The programme was revived on Radio 4 in the run-up to the 2010 general election, and continued until 27 March 2016, when it was announced that that was its last Radio 4 episode. The programme's format was the same for both television and radio. On TV, while quotes were being read, they would appear on-screen as newspaper cuttings under the relevant newspaper's masthead, and the presenter would read a script from the auto-prompt operator. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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