The usually biting BBC programme remembered its sometime presenter and panellist by showing clips of his early and latest appearances.
I call it "Guess how many houses this panellist owns?" The appearances by MPs spike the figures, of course, because they are never knowingly underhoused: the fallen Maria Miller needed us to pay for a home in Wimbledon so that she wouldn't face the horror of a daily commute from Basingstoke (52 minutes from Paddington).
Such a backlash is a real risk - as the Economist pointed out in a special report on migration a few months ago - but as another panellist noted, you don't fail to build a house because you worry about a leak in the roof.
In fact it'll probably feel more like Take Me Out, as Britain considers which panellist it wants to wake up with on 8 May – except with this show we'll be looking for the one least likely to screw us over the next five years.
Former Coronation Street actress and Loose Women panellist Shobna Gulati appears in three of the plays, including Black Gold.
Sir Nigel Rodley, a panellist who is a former rapporteur to the UN on torture, likened the situation to Northern Ireland.
A highlight was a spectacular row (now a hit on YouTube) in which Mr Reich-Ranicki implicitly accused a fellow-panellist, the Austrian Sigrid Löffler, of frigidity after she mocked the clunky sex scenes in a novel by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
Another panellist, Jeremy Grantham, a fund manager who early in his career made and lost a fortune, accused Fitzgerald of "licking the boots" of the rich.
One panellist, Zachary Fasman, a partner at Paul Hastings, a big law firm, announced that he would happily hire eager and talented lawyers with just two years of law school, though colleagues might not.
Those close to Mr Johnson talk of "borrowing" the capital from Labour, on the strength of their man's tousled charm, celebrity as a television panellist and newspaper columnist, and image as a party maverick.
In a televised debate during the 2012 election Ilias Kassidiaris, an MP and spokesperson for the group, attacked a female panellist and threw water in the face of another woman.
