This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation, mystery hour with James O'Brien.

Five minutes after 12 is the time, and here it is your weekly opportunity to achieve the sort of satisfaction, not ordinarily available anywhere else on your radio dial.

If you haven't listened before, trust me, it's fun. And goodness

knows, we've needed it, haven't we, over the last couple of years? It was always a pleasure to

slip into something a little more lighthearted than the normal news agenda. But given that the

news agenda has been so grisily so recently, it's been doubly valuable, I think. How does it work?

Pretty straightforward. Ring in with a question. Somebody else listening will then ring in with an answer. The only so recently it's been doubly valuable I think how does it work pretty straightforward ring

in with a question somebody else listening will then ring in with an answer the only rule really

is that if you're going to ring in with an answer you have to know it straight up i don't care

how you know it i'll check i'll seek your qualifications which can be anything from i saw it on

telly last night to i'm the professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Brighton. Equally valid qualifications, we just need

to establish that you know it because you're not allowed to look anything up. It's a, it's,

Mr. Jare is designed to hark back to bygone days, which is just a way of saying it's to make us old fogies feel a little bit better about the fact that all the stuff we learned at school doesn't matter anymore because our kids can find it out in the flick of a phone all the sum total of human knowledge several millennia of evolution well more than millennia of evolution isn't it but several millennia of intellectual adventure are all now distilled

into microchips and servers and clouds. So the whole notion of education has changed without us

really noticing. And Mystery Hour is an attempt to sort of hold back the tides of technology and

still revere and respect learned knowledge, memorized knowledge

almost. And I think it is valuable. I think it does have its place. But it's also very funny.

So the only rule is you're not allowed to look anything up, whether online or in encyclopedias.

But if you were reading the encyclopedia last week or last night

and you happen to have that nugget of knowledge to hand, that's allowed. That is perfectly permissible.

Should we just crack on, actually? Try to squeeze in a few more questions even than we usually

manage and spare the rubric, spare the terms and conditions. Remember, the number is always the same.

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