A meeting between two mighty minds can be savoured next Tuesday when The Oxford Times’s master puzzler Chris Maslanka and polymath Stephen Fry talk wordgames on Radio 4.

Fry’s English Delight is a series in which Stephen probes areas of the language that interest him. Recent ones have been on puns, the Qwerty keyboard and how the word ‘hello’ became a universal greeting. The latest one is on wordplay.

Chris was roped in as the Enigmatist of St Catherine’s College, Oxford — the first puzzlist ever to be accorded that honour— and as the writer of the Guardian’s long-running Wordplay and Pyrgic Puzzles columns.

Stephen asked Chris to explain why puzzles are universal in all cultures and to discuss whether the mathematical brain is different from the wordy brain.

The conversation became so lively that the producer— Nick Baker, pictured with the pair above — just let the tapes run. What cannot be fitted into the half-hour programme is now on the Internet (sp).

“Seeing Stephen Fry on QI, say,” says Chris, “you get the impression of an omniscient and benevolent schoolmaster handing down words of wisdom. But in fact he is also a sensitive and intelligent listener.

“So our conversation went at a cracking pace; we were almost talking in code at some points. It was rather like martial arts with words.

“Fry is such a stimulating interlocutor that I was inspired to compose a clerihew on the spot: Stephen Fry Is the presenter of QI If you had his IQ You could do it too.”

Other Oxford contributors to the programme include Tony Augarde, the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games, who writes the Wordplay column in Oxfordshire Limited Edition.

Fry’s English Delight is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday at 9am and 9.30pm.