Just a Minute is a BBC radio comedy panel game. The premise of the game came to Ian Messiter as he rode on the top of a number 13 bus, recalling a particularly cruel headmaster from his school days, who punished him with the task of speaking for sixty seconds without hesitating or repeating himself. To this, he added a rule preventing players deviating from the subject presented by the show's chairman, as well as a scoring system based on panelists' correct and incorrect challenges. The first broadcast of Just a Minute occurred in 1968.
The long-suffering but good-natured emcee of Just a Minute was (and still is, as of 2004) Nicholas Parsons. Ian Messiter sat quietly on the stage with a stopwatch and blew a whistle when the speaker's minute was up.
The classic lineup of performers was:
- Clement Freud (politician, food writer and grandson of Sigmund) whose favourite strategies were to slowly rattle off lists, and to wait until the last possible moment to present a challenge;
- Derek Nimmo, who improvised new and contradictory descriptions of his home life nearly every week;
- Peter Jones, who once said that in all his years of playing the game, he never quite got the hang of it; and
- Kenneth Williams, the indisputable star of the show, whose flamboyant tantrums, arch putdowns and mock-sycophancy made him the audience favourite.
The show's theme music is a very fast rendition of Frédéric Chopin's Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, nicknamed the "Minute Waltz".
