For something that I've been listening to for so much of my life, I've just realized that this journal has had nowhere near enough recognition of Just a Minute. We were listening to it in the car yesterday, and I suddenly realized what a soothing effect it had on me, being something calm and familiar in an environment where so many things that other people consider entertainment seem so loud and overbearing.

I must have first started listening to it about twenty years ago when my parents had it on the radio during Sunday lunch, but it's much older than even that - it's been broadcast since the year Radio 4 started forty-five years ago and is currently halfway through its 67th series. It's an improvisational comedy programme (although I hadn't really considered it one until I needed to come up with that description just now) which stars a panel of complete luvvies, including over the years Kenneth Williams, Clement Freud, Graham Norton, Julian Clary, Gyles Brrrrrandreth and everyone else who has ever been on British television, and is chaired by the undying and eternal Nicholas Parsons. Panellists are tasked with having to speak for a minute on fairly open-ended subjects without hesitation, repetition of any words or deviation from the subject - if anyone else picks up on any of these rules being broken, the subject is passed to them and they try to continue for the remainder of the time. It's as simple as that, and even in 2012 the series has retained a very low-tech approach of just having someone beside the performers on stage with a stopwatch, notepad and whistle to act as timekeeper and scorekeeper - but in a severe case of something being so much better than it sounds, the humour comes from each panellist's unique style of coming up with ways to desperately keep going.

My cousins from Germany absolutely loved it when they discovered it during a visit to us, and we used to send recordings over to them on cassette tapes - and I can now do that on an even more international level, because just like everything else in the entire world, there are a heap of people putting up their favourite moments on Youtube. One such highlight is this clip set to kinetic typography, starring Paul Merton, who I'd consider a staple of the programme even though he's a relative newcomer having only(!) been around since 1989. In this round, he manages the rare achievement of getting through the entire sixty seconds in one run, admitting that he knows absolutely nothing about Sudoku and then just making up an increasingly demented fictional history on the spot.

And I've only just noticed that it ventured on to television this year! I think I'll go and download all of this now - it's not as if it could work any worse than the television conversion of Dead Ringers.