Three minutes after 12 is the time. Mystery hour is upon us your weekly opportunity to achieve the sort of satisfaction not ordinarily available anywhere else on your radio dial. I make you two promises this hour. The first is that by one o'clock you will know more than you do now. I promise you that. You will know more than you do now. It may not be knowledge that proves useful to you, and it's quite unlikely it's knowledge that you'll end up feeling particularly

grateful for. But the sum total of your knowledge will increase in the course of the next 55 minutes or so.

The other promise is, and I think we've kept this every week in recent memory, you'll have at least one laugh out loud in the course of what follows.

I like to think I could make you that promise at the beginning of every hour,

maybe even the beginning of every segment, but I can't, so I don't.

Mystery Hour, however, is different.

It's the radio equivalent of all...

I've just seen the first question.

That's why the chuckle just entered into my voice.

It's the radio equivalent of all those newspaper features, notes and queries,

Q&As, where a reader will write in and say, why do we do this? Or, dear sir, what is the origin

of the, where does this come from? When did we start doing that? What happened to? The who's, the

whys, the when's, the wares, the what's, the withers, and even, dare I say, the occasional wherefore. Whatever your inquiry may be, if it's not boring, and the best way in the first instance

to establish whether or not it's boring, is to ask yourself realistically how many people

will be interested in the answer once you've asked the question.

So if your question involves something akin to,

Just near my house, there's a roundabout with with five exits and you're not allowed to go down

the fifth exit. Where does it lead? Don't ring in. If you're going to ask a question which is

going to make every single one of us go, oh yeah, yeah, then do ring in. The only other

circumstance in which you'll be politely invited to move along and take your business elsewhere

is in the event of repetition. And that's quite hard to police at the moment.

I'm the only constant on this program. Even you are not a constant on this program. You're not

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