On the Record is a BBCpoliticaltelevision series that was aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom from 18 September 1988 to 15 December 2002, usually at a Sunday lunchtime. It was the successor to the earlier BBC political television series This Week, Next Week, which had aired on BBC One from 18 November 1984 until 12 June 1988, and been presented by David Dimbleby. A total of 492 episodes were produced over fifteen series, and apart from two special ones, they were all sixty minutes long. The programme was initially presented by Dimbleby's younger brother, Jonathan Dimbleby, from its first episode on 18 September 1988 until its 178th one on 18 July 1993, but it was later presented by John Humphrys as of its 179th episode on 19 September 1993 until its last one on 15 December 2002. With the exceptions of the two special ones on 12 April 1992 and 18 November 2001, every episode ran for sixty minutes, and most of them started with a filmed piece about a major issue of the day before returning to the studio in which the presenter would "grill" a leading politician on the same issue. A long-running segment of the programme was a political sketch that would be presented by the late John Cole, and for its sixth series in 1993, its theme song was revised in order to incorporate Cole's section within the programme with his own jingles. The programme's mascot was an enormous mutant crocodile, based on a British House of Commonsgargoyle and the Great Westminster Clock, and fashioned from plastic, glue and leather. For the opening titles of the first five series, the crocodile marched across the United Kingdom, but for those of the sixth to fifteenth series, it marched across Europe. Both sequences were shot in stop-motion animation by 3 Peach Animation, and at the end of most of the episodes from the sixth to fifteenth series, the credits "flew" into the crocodile's open mouth as it occasionally blinked, before it closed its mouth and lowered its head as the BBC logo of the time, the copyright notice and the editor's credit, appeared. During 2000, the then-current BBC Director GeneralGreg Dyke ordered a review of political output from the BBC, which was carried out by Fran Unsworth.. This led to a major overhaul of their political output in 2002, resulting in On the Record being axed and replaced by The Politics Show. The fifteenth series only comprised 12 episodes, and the final one was aired on 15 December 2002.
