A total of 492 editions were produced over fifteen series, which apart from two special ones were all sixty minutes long.
A long-running segment of the programme was a political sketch that would be presented by the late John Cole (1927-2013),[8] and for its sixth series in 1993, its theme song (which had been composed by George Fenton, but he was not credited) 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 Commons gargoyle 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 (and from 5 October 1997, the then-new BBC logo, which had replaced the previous underlined one from 1988 only the day before, was faded in at the start of the titles).
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 (along with the programme's website address as of 27 April 1997), appeared.