The Unbelievable Truth (radio show)
| Genre | Panel game |
|---|---|
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Language(s) | English |
| Home station | BBC Radio 4 |
| Starring | David Mitchell |
| Created by |
Graeme Garden Jon Naismith |
| Written by | Iain Pattinson (Chairman's script, series 1–2) Dan Gaster (Chairman's script, series 3–6 & 8–9) Colin Swash (Series 7 onwards) John Finnemore (Chairman's Script, series 7–8) |
| Produced by | Jon Naismith |
| Recording studio | Shaw Theatre, London |
| Original release | 19 October 2006 – present |
| No. of series | 18 + pilot and 2 specials |
| No. of episodes | 93 |
| Opening theme | "My Patch" by Jim Noir |
| Website | BBC Homepage |
The Unbelievable Truth is a BBC radio comedy panel game made by Random Entertainment, devised by Graeme Garden and Jon Naismith. It is very similar to the occasional I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue game "Lies, All Lies", which was first played in 1985. The game is chaired by David Mitchell and is described in the programme's introduction as "the panel game built on truth and lies." The object of the game is to lie on a subject, whilst also trying to include the truth without being detected. The series was first broadcast as a pilot on 19 October 2006, with the first actual series broadcast on 23 April 2007. Its latest, eighteenth series was aired from April to May 2017.
The concept is a mirror image of the radio panel game "Many a Slip", devised by Ian Messiter, which ended in 1979, in which contestants do the opposite – spot errors hidden in narrations of true facts.
As David Mitchell says at the start of the programme, "the rules are very simple". The panel is made up of four players. In the game each of the panellists is given a subject on which they give a short lecture. Most of the lecture is composed of lies, but during the course of the speech the lecturer must try to smuggle five true statements past the rest of the panel. The challenging panellists must buzz in when they believe that what the lecturer is saying is true. They must state what they believe the fact was. If it was true, the challenger is awarded one point. If it was a lie, then they are deducted one point. One point is given to the lecturer for each truth they smuggle successfully without it being detected at the end of the lecture. The winner is the panellist with the most points. A perfect score is 20 points (by hiding all five of their truths, and spotting the five truths in all three of the other players' routines without making any wrong challenges), plus additional points for "unintentional" truths revealed during the monologue. However, nobody has reached this score yet, and in fact many contests have been amusingly low scoring, with most panellists having a negative number of points due to high number of guesses. On occasion, panellists have included more than five truths during in their talk, often unintentionally, although Jo Brand included an extra fact about Henry VIII as she thought it was so fantastic.
...
Wikipedia