Mornington Crescent (game)
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Mornington Crescent is a parody game that features in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. The game, whose rules are never explained, satirises complicated strategy games, particularly the abstruse jargon involved in such games as contract bridge or chess.
A game consists of each player in turn announcing the name of a landmark or street, most often a station on the London Underground system; the winner is the first player to announce "Mornington Crescent", a tube station on the Northern Line.
The game's central joke is that while its rules are invoked and argued at length on the radio show, they are never explained.
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[edit] Origins
Mornington Crescent first appeared in the opening episode of the sixth season of ISIHAC, broadcast on the 22nd August 1978. Although five episodes originally transmitted in 1974-75 are still lost, Mornington Crescent makes no appearance before 1978 but is played in every surviving episode of the sixth season.
The originator of the game is not clear. One claim is that the game was invented by Geoffrey Perkins,[1] and he has stated in an interview that Mornington Crescent was created as a non-game.[2] According to chairman Humphrey Lyttelton, the game was invented by the ISIHAC team to vex the series producer, who was unpopular with the panellists at the time. One day the team were drinking in a back room when they heard him coming. "Quick," one of them said, "Let's invent a game with rules he'll never understand."[3].
[edit] Gameplay
The objective of the game is to give the appearance of a game of great skill and strategy, with absurdly complex and long-winded rules and strategies, in parody of games and sports in which similarly circuitous systems have evolved. This is an open secret, and few if any of the radio show's audience are under any illusion otherwise, but it is possible for people to become involved in the game without realising this, and thus to attempt to play the game seriously. Played amongst friends, it bears some resemblance to party games such as Take a plane, Scissors, and Mao, in which certain players know "secret" rules.
In general, when Humphrey Lyttelton (Humph) announced a game of Mornington Crescent during an ISIHAC broadcast, he would usually describe a set of special rules deemed to apply to that session of the game. For example, 'Trumpington's Variations', or 'Tudor Court Rules'. This meant that almost every episode of ISIHAC in which Mornington Crescent was played introduced a new variant.
Over time the set of permitted destinations has expanded well beyond the stations of the London Underground. ISIHAC is recorded in many locations around the United Kingdom, and the game is occasionally modified to fit a local map; such cases have included a version in Slough, as well as one in Scotland played during the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival. In one game, recorded in Luton, moves ranged as far afield as the Place de l'Étoile in Paris, Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. However, a move to Luton High Street was ruled invalid for being too geographically remote.
Lyttelton has sometimes joked that the game predates the London Underground system. For example, the 'Tudor Court Rules' are described as "A version of the game formally adopted by Henry VIII and played by Shakespeare. At this time, the underground was far smaller than at present and so the playing area also was more restricted, primarily due to plague."
Those who write in to the show asking for the rules are usually referred to "NF Stovold’s Mornington Crescent: Rules and Origins" and told it is out of print. They are also advised that "your local bookshop might have a copy of The Little Book of Mornington Crescent by Tim, Graeme, Barry and Humph."
The game is played by fans on Usenet and in web forums, and this has increased the mythology surrounding the rules. A Facebook application has also been produced.[4]
[edit] Publications
In the 1990s, Radio 4 broadcast a Christmas special: Mornington Crescent Explained, a "two-part documentary" on Mornington Crescent, with part one being a history of the game through the ages and part two being the rules. At the end of the broadcast of part one it was announced that part two had been postponed due to "scheduling difficulties".
Part two was eventually written, and broadcast on Christmas Eve 2005. It was named "In Search of Mornington Crescent" and narrated by Andrew Marr.[5]
Two books of rules and history have been published, The Little Book of Mornington Crescent (2001; ISBN 0-7528-1864-3) by Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and Humphrey Lyttelton, and Stovold's Mornington Crescent Almanac (2001; ISBN 0-7528-4815-1) by Graeme Garden.
[edit] Cultural references
- Item #101 of the 2005 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt was for one player on each team to "participate in an email adaptation of the classic game Mornington Crescent", using the CTA rail system. Participants were warned, "We shall follow the standard Thurgood-Hamilton conversion algorithm, but banning semi-lateral shunts."[6]
- After the death of Willie Rushton, one of ISIHAC's long-time participants, in 1996, his life was commemorated by a blue plaque in the ticket office of Mornington Crescent Tube Station in 2002. ("Willie Rushton: Satirist")
- In the alternate reality game Perplex City, card #140 in the blue hex set is entitled "Mornington Crescent". The puzzle is to determine the proper play based on stations in Perplex City. The card does not explain the rules, claiming that it would insult the player's intelligence. In fact, naming any station on the Perplex City tube map was acceptable.
- "The Steep Approach to Garbadale" by Iain Banks mentions the game as a creation of fictional company Wopuld Ltd., described as "a game based on the map of the London underground with a complicated double-level board".
- Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Metamagical Themas, references a game called Finchley Central, as described by Anatole Beck and David Fowler. The game is identical to Mornington Crescent except for the named underground station. It is unclear as to which version was the original, but Hofstadter tellingly phrases his reference "… the game they call Finchley Central", perhaps indicating he already had heard of the Mornington Crescent version.
- In the novel Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend, the protagonist writes to Radio 4 demanding a copy of the rules as he has trouble following the game.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, Pan Publishing. ISBN 0330419574
- ^ Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4, Saturday 22 March 2008
- ^ Hoggart, Simon. "Simon Hoggart's Week", The Guardian, May 3, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-05-18.
- ^ Facebook Mornington Crescent. Retrieved on 2008-01-18.
- ^ BBC – Radio 4 – Comedy and Quizzes – In Search of Mornington Crescent. Retrieved on 2006-11-12.
- ^ University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt 2005 list.
