Daily Inspiration Quote by John Leeson

Nostalgia does a lot of work in John Leeson’s line, and it’s not the misty, neutral kind. “Just at the end” frames his experience as a brush with greatness, a near-miss that still confers status: he was there when the lights were brightest, right before they dimmed. It’s a performer’s way of staking a claim in cultural history without sounding like he’s bragging. The phrase “golden era” isn’t an argument so much as a shared password, assuming the audience already agrees on a canon of BBC comedy that felt bigger than any one show.

The subtext is partly institutional. BBC comedy has long been mythologized as a pipeline where constrained budgets and sharp writers produced work that looked modest but hit hard. By calling it “fantastic,” Leeson isn’t dissecting craft; he’s defending a climate: repertory talent, risk-taking commissioning, writers allowed to be weird, and an audience trained to follow. That “end” implies a shift from public-service mischief toward something more managed - changes in leadership, tastes, and the economics of television that began treating comedy less like a national conversation and more like content.

There’s also a quiet melancholy in how casual he makes it. The understatement suggests someone who watched the peak up close and knows you don’t get to schedule lightning. Comedy scenes don’t just evolve; they get reorganized, corporatized, or outcompeted. Calling that moment “just at the end” is Leeson’s way of saying: you should’ve seen it before the rules changed.