Just a Minute of the show, all created by Messiter, include a 1952 version on South African radio, and a television version on the DuMont network in the United States. The pilot for the show was recorded in 1967, featuring Clement Freud, Derek Nimmo, Beryl Reid and Wilma Ewart as panellists. The chairman was originally planned to be Jimmy Edwards but he was unavailable on Sundays, the proposed recording dates, and was replaced by Nicholas Parsons who was originally supposed to be a panel member. Parsons did not want the job and only reluctantly took it, just for the pilot episode. After the
Just a Minute show settled in, again he found himself in the role of a straight man for the panellists. Although executives at the BBC disliked the pilot, its producer, David Hatch, threatened to resign if he could not oversee a full series. Not wishing to lose Hatch, the BBC acquiesced. The show's theme music is Frédéric Chopin's piano Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, nicknamed the "Minute Waltz" (which, despite its name, lasts longer than the 60 seconds taken to complete a round of "Just a Minute"; the nickname actually refers to "minute" as in "small" rather than the