Boris Johnson, Britain's leading municipal comedian, was in typically rollicking form at the ceremony to mark the handover of the Olympics from Beijing to London.

Even the normally dour Gordon Brown could not suppress a laugh during Boris's hilariously unconventional performance.

After trumpeting Britain's role in the development of most of the world's top sports, Boris launched into a brief but colourful history of the sport of table tennis, known to its Victorian pioneers by the name of whiff-whaff.

'There I think you have the essential difference between us and the rest of the world,' he continued, warming to his theme.

'The French looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner.

'We looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to play whiff-whaff.'

This is the reason, claimed Boris, that Britain has such a rich sporting heritage.

'Ping pong is coming home,' he concluded (this being the Victorians' other favoured name for their invention).

Boris may have given the funniest performance of the Beijing Games, but there was a large element of truth in his words.

For, like so many competitive sports, table tennis - or whiff-whaff, as Boris preferred to call it - was indeed a British invention.

As with so many other games, its exact origins are obscure, but it seems likely that the first forms of indoor tennis were played in the 1870s and 1880s by Army officers in India and South Africa.

Mimicking the outdoor version of the sport, they used lids of cigar boxes as bats and rounded corks from wine bottles as balls, while a row of books placed in the middle of a table formed a net.

As the officers returned home from the far-flung corners of the Empire this improvised activity soon became a popular after-dinner parlour game.

It acquired the name of ping pong or whiff-whaff from the noise that the primitive bats made in hitting the makeshift ball against the table. NEXT