The Reunion

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Factual: Life Stories

Series which reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history

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The Reunion: That's Life!

That's Life!

BBC Radio 4 - The Reunion, That's Life!

Kirsty Wark and guests recall the BBC’s ground-breaking consumer rights show That’s Life!

Kirsty Wark is joined by Esther Rantzen and her former co-presenters to recall the consumer show That’s Life! which ran on BBC1 for 21 years.

That’s Life! was essential Sunday night viewing for much of the country in the 1970s and 1980s.  

It ran on BBC1 for 21 years and, at its peak, pulled in audiences of over 22 million. The production team received over 15,000 letters a week which were placed in a giant mail bin in the centre of the office. 

Throughout its 442 episodes, journalist Esther Rantzen was at the helm, surrounded by an ever-changing cast of mostly male co-presenters (or “Esther’s boys” as they were sometimes disparagingly called).

That’s Life was billed as a consumer rights show, but its brief ranged into all areas. There was Prince the talking terrier who said “sausages”, rudely shaped vegetables, and local authority “jobsworths” - but there were also serious campaigns that made us re-evaluate the society we lived in, such as the expose of sexual abuse at Crookham Court School in Newbury.

In 1988, the programme featured a number of people who were rescued as children from Czechoslovakia and brought to England at the start of World War II.  Nicholas Winton, the man who organized their transit, was invited to the studio, and viewers saw the moving moment when Esther Rantzen invited “anyone in the audience who owed their life to the actions of Mr. Winton” to please stand up.   

Alongside Esther Rantzen, Kirsty Wark is joined by original co-presenter George Layton, Chris Serle, Paul Heiney, Bill Buckley and Adrian Mills.  Sir Peter Bazalgette (who went on to create Big Brother) was a researcher on That’s Life, and director Jane Elsdon Dew started on the show in 1979 and stayed through most of the 80s. 

Presenter: Kirsty Wark
Producer: Howard Shannon
Additional Research: Michal Porecki

Series Producer: David Prest
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

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