What is the origin of the verb "to nurdle"?

Solution 1:

World Wide Words appears to agree with you:

It has been claimed that nurdle was coined by the writers of the US TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, with farkel, bippy and others.

The true origin, as any Brit of mature years can tell you, was in the crazy mind of Michael Bentine, one of the original Goons and the chief perpetrator of a BBC television show between 1960-64 called It’s a Square World. He invented a spoof pub game, drats, supposedly played by Somerset yokels. It was dangerous, with the main risk being that of nurdling, an unspecified but catastrophic error (“Drat me! He’s Nurdled!!”). It was picked up by scriptwriters Barry Took and Marty Feldman for a fake folk song performed by Rambling Syd Rumpo (Kenneth Williams) in the BBC radio comedy show Round The Horne (“Early one morning / Just as my splod was rising / I heard a maiden scream in the valley below / O don't nurdle me / O never nurdle me / How could you use your cordwangle so!”)

The word entered the American lexicon in 1967 when reports appeared in various US media about a mad pub group in Totton, near Southampton, that actually played Bentine’s game, under the title of the Nurdling Championships.