One of BBC Radio 4’s longest running and popular programmes was called Quote… Unquote. It ran for over 40 years, and its last broadcast was in December 2021. Devised and hosted by the erudite and urbane Nigel Rees, panellists from the arts, politics and entertainment worlds and elsewhere were asked to identify the origin of a particular quotation from a film, book, politics or current affairs. There were lots of digressions, and the people on the show were generally well-read and amusing.
In one programme, a panellist was asked to identify the source of the relatively well-known Shakespearian line: ‘O beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.’ That sparked a conversation about the Ten Commandments, which enabled another panellist to share the ‘unquote’ (or misquote) he’d heard from some schoolchildren who had been asked to name
