Loophole Abuse in Radio.
- In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio The Contingency Club, the villain the Red Queen has made a bet that she can take over Earth in 1864 without the use of advanced technology, but she has instead used her advanced knowledge to create contemporary versions of advanced technology, such as "inventing" dynamite early or somehow creating clones.
- Exhaustively practiced by Douglas Richardson of Cabin Pressure. For example, regulations require fuel samples to be taken prior to departure to check for water. Regulations do not specify that Douglas cannot put the samples into his car's petrol tank afterward.
- On the BBC Radio 4 quiz show Just a Minute, contestants (usually comedians and other personalities) are asked to speak on a given topic for one minute without hesitation, deviation or repetition. If a contestant slips up while speaking, the other contestants may "challenge", and if the challenge is valid (i.e. the speaker did hesitate, deviate or repeat themselves) then the challenger gets a point for a correct challenge and also gets to speak on the topic for the rest of the minute. When comedian Stephen Fry is on the show, he's been known to challenge himself when he slips up, and since the rules of Just a Minute don't explicitly forbid this, it is still considered a valid challenge, so he not only gets a point for a correct challenge but is also allowed to continue speaking, which always gets a few laughs or a round of applause from the audience!
- This ends up being what saves the day in The Men from the Ministry Missing Episode "Rebel in Regents Park". While yes, the gardener does legally own the island in the lake of Regent's Park and has every right to establish his own country inside its borders, the lake the island is on belongs to England. If the water were to rise enough to cover the island, the latter would become part of the lake.
- In the Radio 4 drama Munchausen, the eponymous Baron tells a police interviewer that, 100 years earlier, he played his first and only round of golf, where he got 18 holes in one at St Andrews, and promised never to play again. When the interviewer protests that this is literally impossible, since there are two par 5 holes that nobody could get a hole in one in, the Baron explains that on the first he was assisted by an obliging seabird (and thereby coined the terms "birdie", "eagle" and "albatross"), and on the second he chipped the ball into a small cannon and fired it the length of the green. The interviewer protests that this is completely against the rules of golf, and Munchausen simply replies "It is now."
- Our Miss Brooks: Department Store Contest: An unusual case of accidental loophole abuse. Miss Brooks wins a prize when a childhood letter to Santa Claus is accidentally entered in a children's contest at Sherry's Department. As she wrote the letter when she was a child, she was able to walk away with the prize and avoid trouble.
- In the non-fiction show Tim Fitzhigham: The Gambler, Tim Fitzhigham seeks out old wagers and attempts to re-create them using only technology available at the time of the original bet. A couple of them involve this:
- One gentleman bet that he could travel across water at 25mph. This was before motorboats and the like... but ain't no rule says the water can't be frozen - as snow on a steep mountainside, say.
- Another episode involved a bet that one person could travel from London to Dover (about 80 miles) and back before another person could draw one million dots. But ain't no rule says the dots have to be made one at a time. You could, for instance, stick 105 pens together...
- X Minus One: In "Martian Sam", a Martian is hired as a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Despite being only eighteen inches tall, the Martian's arm is 32 feet long, so most batters have a lot of trouble hitting the ball. Naturally, the Braves counter this by hiring an intelligent virus from Jupiter, so tiny that no pitch can be of the regulation height against them.
- It is occasionally suggested by The Unbelievable Truth contestants that there ain't no rule against challenging on the basis that the next thing the lecturer is going to say will be true. David Mitchell is happy to go along with this, since nobody attempting this has ever been right.
- In the Sherlock Holmes (BBC Radio) episode "The Remarkable Performance of Mr Frederick Merridew", Watson believes there's something odd about a murder he witnessed, even though the police believe it to be an Open-and-Shut Case. Holmes sympathises, but points out he can't go investigating based on Watson's feelings when he doesn't even have a client. So Watson hires him.
