Chancellor gets call from contestant on Germany's version of the TV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

From the eurozone crisis to the conflict in Crimea via the NSA scandal: few other mobile phones on the planet will have channelled as many tense conversations over the last 12 months as that of Angela Merkel. But as a cameo on a quiz show on Monday night proved, the German chancellor at the end of the line doesn't always have the answers.

On a celebrity edition of the German version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Wer wird Millionär, the CDU politician Wolfgang Bosbach was asked a €500,000 (£405,000) question about an East Germany-era brand of washing machines, the so-called WM66.

Why was the WM66 so legendary, the question asked. Was it because a) it could generate electricity for heating, b) you could use it to boil food, c) it doubled as a vacuum cleaner, or d) it could receive radio signals from West Germany?

As western-born Bosbach was struggling to find the right answer (b), he got the chance to call a friend. "Who should I call other than the chancellor?" he said, and got his assistant to bring an old Nokia with his party leader's new mobile number.

Merkel texted back. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

But the chancellor failed to pick up his call, and by the time she sent through a text message ("I couldn't pick up. What's the matter?"), Bosbach had already pocketed the money. It remains unclear whether his party leader would have known the right answer, or whether she ever used a WM66 to boil food herself.