An Audience with...
television series
An Audience with... is a British entertainment television show produced by London Weekend Television (now part of ITV Studios), in which a host, usually a singer or comedian, performs for an invited audience of celebrity guests, interspersed with questions from the audience, in a lighthearted revue/tribute style.
History
The show's title began as An Audience with Jasper Carrott, for a normal six-part television series for the comedian. His first television show, it was broadcast in 1978 and produced by London Weekend Television (LWT). From 1980 onwards, the show became An Audience with...[name(s) of host(s)], with one-off special guest hosts performing in front of celebrity audiences.
The show was traditionally broadcast on ITV on Saturday nights, while some shows in the 1980s were broadcast on Channel 4. The show has been commissioned at varying intervals, with ten shows broadcast in the 1980s, followed by twenty in each in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s. From 1994 until 2011 there were at least one show, and often several, broadcast per year, with the exception of 2000 and 2003.
Some hosts appeared multiple times. Dame Edna Everage was host three times, while Freddie Starr, Ken Dodd, Joan Rivers, Shirley Bassey, Al Murray, Donny Osmond and Kylie Minogue were all asked to return once.
“An Audience with...” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Audience, television and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“An Audience with...” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Audience, television and series provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4749828. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1980, 1994 and 2011.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “An Audience with...”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow An Audience with... primary sources, An Audience with... archive and Audience research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “An Audience with...”?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “An Audience with...” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.