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Mystery Hour with James O'Brien.

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Mystery Hour with James O'Brien on LBC.

Five minutes after 12 is the time and mystery hour is upon us your weekly opportunity to achieve a level of satisfaction not ordinarily available anywhere on your radio dial.

The way it works is this.

You almost certainly have a question bubbling away in the back of your brain at the moment,

a question to which you have sought an answer but failed to find one.

It has to be a question that you know has an answer.

Not like what a next week's lottery number is going to be or something like that,

but which, I don't know, just so far, it's eluded you.

Somebody else listening to the program at this point in time will know the answer to your question,

and they will ring in and tell you what it is if you, I'll play the first rule of mystery hour,

and that is to ring in with your question.

So it's like a sort of radio version of those newspaper columns where the readers write in and then other readers respond.

And what I love about it, and I've said this before, but I make no apology for repetition on this occasion,

is that it celebrates education. It actually celebrates knowledge.

You could probably find out the answer to some of the questions you'll hear in the next hour by using Google or another search engine, or referring in the old-fashioned way to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but you're only allowed to ring in with an answer if you knew it already. It's just that's really the only rule. Well, there are three rules, really, but that's the only proper rule of mystery. That's your stone cold rule. You're not allowed to ring in with an answer that you've just looked up anywhere. It has to be something you know already. It doesn't matter how you know it. It could be because you're the professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Brighton, who is already tweeting his excitement about mystery hour,

or it could just be because you saw something on the telly last night, or last week, or last month,

and it's stuck in your memory bank.

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