Puzzle for code genii

Somebody asked if there was a way Iraq Blog Count could add recent comments to the sidebar - so that visitors can tell at the click of a mouse which threads are live. Which is an excellent idea really. Except that it doesn't seem to be one of Blogger's standard features. So instead of pestering Blogger about it, I thought maybe we could have a go first. I had a look at the code for "previous posts" and thought that code for "previous comments" would probably be similar.

The closest I could get was this;

{h2 class="sidebar-title"}Previous Comments{/h2}
{ul id="recently"}
{BloggerPreviousItems}
{a href="{$BlogCommentNumber$}" title="comment permalink"}
{$BlogCommentDateTime$}{/a} {$BlogCommentAuthor$}{/a}{/li}
{/BloggerPreviousItems}
{/ul}

But I am not a genius, and it doesn't quite work. Please don't laugh - I trained as an artist not a code writer. If anyone can come up with something else, preferably something that works, that would be wonderful. Wouldn't it be great to think we helped improve blogspot in return for all Blogger has done (free) for bloggers.

Suggestions welcome, the thread is all yours.

(Replacing <> with { and } or [ and ] so that we can see it. If you're logged into blogger, the How do I show a list of previous posts in my sidebar? blogger help item may or may not be useful).

UPDATE! Thanks to Mohammed, BloggerHacks and a mysterious (or not) agent of change, Iraq Blog Count now has "Recent Comments" linked to the sidebar. It takes a wee while to load, so for now it's down the bottom of the page with the "Previous Posts" and "Archives" links (blogroll getting a bit long, working on an alternative solution for that too).