+ The Burkiss Way was a BBC Radio 4 sketch comedy series broadcast from August 1976 to November 1980. It was written by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, with additional material in early episodes by John Mason, Colin Bostock-Smith, Douglas Adams, John Lloyd and others. The show starred Denise Coffey (series 1), Jo Kendall (series 2 onward), Chris Emmett, Nigel Rees and Fred Harris. The series had three producers, announced as "Simon Brett of Stepney", "John Lloyd of Europe", and "David 'Hatch of the BBC' Hatch". The series had its roots in two half-hour sketch shows entitled Half-Open University which Marshall and Renwick had written with Mason for Radio 3 as a parody of Open University programmes. The first, broadcast on 25 August 1975, spoofed science, the second, on 1 December 1975, history. In a similar vein, The Burkiss Way was based on fictional correspondence courses by "Professor Emil Burkiss" entitled The Burkiss way to Dynamic Living, and each episode or "lesson" had a number and a title based on one of the course's subjects: "Lesson 1: Peel Bananas the Burkiss Way", "Lesson 2: Pass Examinations the Burkiss Way", and so on. Although the numbers and titles were maintained throughout the run, a rapid change of style early in the second series saw the radio correspondence course become a hook rather than a narrative device, and it was mentioned only in passing. From here on the programme continued in a more obvious sketch format, though it was to use increasingly Pythonesque devices including surreal, stream-of-consciousness linking, back-referencing and aggregation. Like the Pythons before them, the writers lampooned and tinkered with the medium on which the show was broadcast. Radio 4's continuity style was spoofed. Many later episodes had false endings, sometimes disguised as genuine continuity announcements. The opening and closing credits might be anywhere within the show. One show ran backwards from the closing to the opening credits, while another was allegedly dropped, broken and glued together with a tube of BBC coffee, resulting in a disjointed running order with many sketches beginning and ending in mid-sentence. The show's humour was based on surrealism and literary and media parodies, sprinkled with puns.-WikiPedia