shewhomust | Just 59 seconds (Reply)

On Just a Minute, Paul Merton was invited to speak about Sudoku. Since I have been puzzled by

durham_rambler's obsession with the thing, I found his explanation most illuminating:

I haven't played the game actually, but I understand it's become a bit of a craze in the last three or four months. You see various people trying to fit the numbers between one and nine into various grids. I don't really understand the appeal of it other than that; crosswords seem to be so much better. But I will talk about Sudoku with a knowledgeable look in my eye, and perhaps I'll be able to bluff Nicholas into thinking that I'm knowing what I'm talking about.

Sudoku was invented in 1927 by a man called Alf Roberts. He used to be the mayor in Coronation Street, but then he got fed up with that, and he ended up inventing this game which is very big in Japan.

The best way to play it [unintelligible] is with two elephants and a huge giant tumbler. You have to throw the dice first of all to get a six, and the first one up the ladder gets a chance to go on the snakes. Once you've done that, you realise of course that the king cannot be in check once the queen's bishop is outside of the croquet hoop, and it's through pushing the ball through that hoop that you can make the bell ring and TILT comes up and you know you've won the big prize.

Sudoku started off first of all as a beach ball carved in the shape of an onion, in Tokyo in 1963. It's been a car, a motorbike, an opera singer and also a plate of beans.

And at that point, 59 seconds in, he was interrupted.