leading britain's conversation this is a podcast from lbc james o'brien three minutes after

a time and uh rarely has the soothing balm of mystery i felt so welcome if you know how it works book

your place now on o three four five six oh six oh nine seven three if you don't know how it works bear

with and i will will explain, it's

not complicated, but it is ordinarily quite a lot of fun. You will have, bubbling away in the

back of your brain, a question in need of an answer. It could be something about origin. You

know, why do we do that? Where does that come from? When we say that, what does it mean? Who, a why, a where, a what, a when, a wherefore,

even the occasional wither, or whence. And you can ring in with it, and someone else listening

will know the answer, and they ring in with that. That's pretty much it. But obviously, I need to

slightly expand upon that simplistic explanation so that you understand the reasons why you

shouldn't ring in. Never be boring. Generally we don't like questions

about roads, like motoring related stuff. Repetition is best avoided, but I can't really hold

you responsible for that because there's 10 times more people listening than there was when we

started. And that's pretty much it. Don't look stuff up. So if you hear someone ask a question,

you think, well, I could Google that.

You're missing the whole point of mystery hour.

The whole point of mystery hour is knowledge, the stuff what you know.

The stuff that you, for reasons that could involve having seen it on telly last night

or having done a PhD on it in the 1950s.

I still think, even though by the time my children are my age, they're probably not going to need to know anything. Do you remember when we used to get aerated? Is that the right word?

I was just say excited. When we used to get excited about taking calculators into maths exams.

When I started here, that was a topic. Oh, should kids be able to take calculators into math

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