Mornington Crescent (game)

Mornington Crescent is an improvisational game featured in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, a series which satirises panel games.

The game consists of each panellist in turn announcing a landmark or street, most often a tube station on the London Underground system. The apparent aim is to be the first to announce "Mornington Crescent", a station on the Northern line. Interspersed with the turns is humorous discussion amongst the panellists and host regarding the rules and legality of each move, as well as the strategy the panellists are using. Despite appearances, however, there are no rules to the game, and both the naming of stations and the specification of "rules" are based on stream-of-consciousness association and improvisation. Thus the game is intentionally incomprehensible.

Mornington Crescent first appeared in the opening episode of the sixth series of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, broadcast on 22 August 1978. Although five episodes transmitted in 1974–1975 are still lost, Mornington Crescent seems to have made no appearance before 1978. It was played in every surviving episode of the sixth series.

The origins of the game are not clear. One claim is that it was invented by Geoffrey Perkins, who stated in an interview that Mornington Crescent was created as a non-game.Barry Cryer, a panellist on the programme since 1972, has said that Geoffrey Perkins did not invent the game, and that it had been around since the sixties. According to Chairman Humphrey Lyttelton, the game was invented to vex a series producer who was unpopular with the panellists. One day, the team members were drinking, when they heard him coming. "Quick," said one, "let's invent a game with rules he'll never understand."

A similar game called "Finchley Central" was described in the Spring 1969 issue of the mathematical magazine Manifold, edited by Ian Stewart and John Jaworski at the University of Warwick. Douglas Hofstadter referred to the article in his book Metamagical Themas. The game is referred to as an "English game" in an article on "non-games" as follows:

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