That Was Then, This Is Now (radio series)

That Was Then, This Is Now (TWTTIN, /twəˈtʌtɪn/) was a BBC Radio 2 history based comedy sketch show co-written and presented by Richard Herring. The series also featured musical interludes from a live band, fronted by Christian Reilly. The show ran for three series between 2004 and 2008.

Herring was assisted each week by TV's Emma Kennedy, Dan Tetsell and Danny Robins. Tetsell and Robins never appeared as themselves (bar a couple of short segments), but rather as characters in sketches or as special guests. Each show would contain sketches based on historical events, the anniversary of which would be around the date of transmission. A running joke in the second series was that Radio 2 had commissioned it so that the final episodes went out at the same time of year as the first episodes of the first series, meaning that exactly the same anniversaries were coming around as for the first. The earlier part of the series featured a running joke as to whether such a show should acknowledge the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and debate as to whether ignoring it would be more offensive than not ignoring it.

As with This Morning With Richard Not Judy and later, As It Occurs To Me, Herring made the show's title in to an unwieldy acronym, which was repeated by the audience every time it was said.

Emma Kennedy's main section in the series looked at births, deaths and marriages from that week in history. These are invariably curtailed by Richard Herring, who would pick holes in Kennedy's jokes before berating her for being mawkish. The section featured the jingle "It's time to find out who got wed, bred or dead, with TV's Emma Kenned... dy". Later in the series, Kennedy tried out various formats, all of which were treated with equal disdain by Herring.

...
Wikipedia