OBC.

Three minutes after 12 is the time and my goodness me are we ready for a mystery hour this week?

It comes usually with two guarantees, although given that everything else that we took to be unassailable in recent months has been torn up like an old newspaper.

Maybe today's of the day my guarantees will broken, too, just like democracy is.

The guarantees are these. You will laugh out loud between now and one o'clock, all right? Promise.

And secondly, you'll know more than you do now. It may not be knowledge for which you end up

being particularly grateful or indeed find in any way useful, and you will probably have forgotten

it by half past one. But between now and one o'clock, something will happen on this radio program that will add to the sum total of your knowledge of the world around you.

It's never gone wrong yet, okay?

The way it works is like a radio equivalent, a real life, a real-time equivalent of those newspaper and magazine collars where somebody writes in with a question and then they hope that several weeks, days, months later, then another reader will write in with the answer. Why do we do that, James? Does that ever happen? What's that all about? What's the origin of this? Where does that come from? Who, why, what, where, when? What happened? What resulted? We do the occasional wither, even the odd wherefore. Very rarely do we do a wence. But there's always room for wences. The point is this. Any question at all we'll do, whether it's silly or serious. If I tell you that, for example, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Brighton is one of the most frequent replies, answerers of questions. You'll get an idea that there can be academic questions. But equally, someone who rings in and when I say, how do you know the answer to that? What are your qualifications? They'll say, I saw it on telly last night. And there you have it. Literally, it could be because it was the thesis, it was the subject of your PhD thesis. That's how you know the answer to this. Or it could be that you saw MythBusters on Dave last week or Dave Attenborough on the BBC last night. That's the way it goes. The number you need to get your question on the board is 03456060973. And I think that's pretty much it, isn't it?

Can't that?

So guarantees.

Oh yes, two other little observations.

Repetition and dullness are our enemies.

Dullness defined as, for these purposes, something like a question that only you would

be interested in the answer to.

The best one ever to illustrate that was some bloke had a roundabout near his house and there was one exit on the roundabout that you're not allowed to go down and he wanted to know where it led. And I sort of thought, this was before we were a national station, we were still London-based, but I did find myself thinking, I'm pretty confident no one else listening, either knows what he's talking about or cares what the answer is so that's when we came up with the dullness rule

if your question is related to motoring it runs a very real risk of falling into the dullness

rule and repetition which isn't really your lookout there is a what's it there is um an archive

on the website at lbc.co.uk. There is a way of checking what we've done in the past.

So you can do that, but obviously it's kind of my job as the longest serving member of the team,

the mystery hour team.

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