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The other branch of this sport’s development started as a joke. In their 1976 Christmas special, Morecambe and Wise gave us an insight, into what it must be like for the players being stuck on a pole and spun around. But it is no longer just a sketch, because table football has gone life size, and it is an increasingly popular team building exercise. Now we can all be those players my grandma used to spin and twist.

The pitch is enclosed by a giant inflatable frame, with metal bars like telegraph poles lying fixed across it. Human table football has been modified for health and safety reasons since it first started, soon after the Morecambe and Wise sketch, and so nowadays you are no longer harnessed to the bars. Instead there are two hand straps for each player. It’s far less intimidating for beginners to know that they can slide their hands out if the bar moves too quickly or starts to spin. It’s non-contact so different ages can play together, but don’t let this fool you into thinking that it’s not a physical workout.

I was on a team taking on one of the top table football sides in the country, from Oxford. We wanted to see how they would adapt to this giant version. I was on a bar in midfield, alongside the towering former Southampton player Brian Hague. Being at a bar together was actually nothing new, because he is landlord of the White Hart pub at Stoke in Hampshire, but now Brian and I had a different kind of bar work to do. As we were both attached to the metal bar everything he did, I had to match, and vice versa. He was twice my size, a gentle blond bear of a man, and so getting in sync with someone much smaller required some nifty footwork. If I went left for a ball, he had to watch and come with me, otherwise – as happened twice – one of us would be yanked over in a battle of opposing forces. So teamwork and communication are key, which is why it has become a hit at sports clubs and corporate events.

There are also similarities with the table-sized game. It is like being in a pinball machine, and is hard to keep up with the light inflatable ball as it pings around. In the middle of the pitch, a delicate touch is required, because if you kick it too hard, it lifts up, rebounds off the pole in front, and can smack you in the face. And of course I wasn’t allowed to move my hands up to protect my now red nose.

The captain of the Oxford team was shocked. ‘I thought this would just be a nice little kick around,’ he sighed, ‘but there are a lot of tactics involved. I have seen people playing off the walls to each other.’ The Oxford striker was applying his usual table top strategy. ‘One of the main things is look into the keepers’ eyes, just like in normal table football. They don’t know if it’s coming down the middle, or at them off the side of the one of the walls.’

Our keeper, David Strauss, had indeed been bamboozled. ‘You can’t see it coming, as the ball flies at you so fast.’

It doesn’t really hurt, even if I had been stretched in ways I hadn’t imagined possible. A certain level of fitness might be useful though, because the striker on my team was stretchered off with a strained hamstring. It was almost as bad as when a friend of mine, David Gilmore, broke an arm playing Subbuteo in our secondary school days.

To get involved in human table football, then there are now several websites offering the experience. If it’s the real deal, you’re after and you want to see what got Grandma Olive so worked up then contact the British Table Football Association about joining a league or even working up towards the national team in time for the next World Cup. www.britfoos.com