#oneaday, Day 119: Things I Thought Were True, But Aren’t

When you’re a kid, you pick up what you think is “knowledge” from somewhere. God knows where – probably a combination of things you thought you’d overheard your parents saying (but had inevitably misheard or misunderstood), things you’d seen in the media and things your friends had told you were absolutely, positively 100% true because their big brother said so and their big brother knows everything about the world because he has got a girlfriend and a car and goes to secondary school and you don’t.

Some of these things are myths perpetuated by society to give more meaning to particular events. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Santa. Jesus. (Sorry.) But others are just plain wrong, and sometimes you don’t get corrected on them until much later. And sometimes you don’t ever get corrected on them.

Take these five examples. I know they’re all nonsense, but there are at least three of them I haven’t seen compelling evidence against. So if you’d care to set my mind at rest about any of them, please feel free.

1. Car crashes always cause explosions.

Hollywood can take full responsibility for this one, since almost any movie involving a car crash inevitably ends with one or both of the cars exploding into a ball of flames while our intrepid hero manages to get out just in time. So when I was being driven to a piano lesson by my mother one night, and a car misjudging a peculiar junction bumped into the front of our car at less than 20mph (hardcore, right?) I was terribly surprised to not suddenly be engulfed in flames and smoke and be battling for my life. Pleasantly surprised, I might add – even more so by the fact that we could drive off after the accident, because the second thing I assumed about car accidents at the time was that they caused your car to immediately die. However non-severe the accident was. Scrape a lamp-post? Uh-oh, better start walking!

2. Someone throwing a cigarette out of their car window and it passing underneath your car will cause your car to explode.

I am genuinely quite paranoid about this to this day – not unreasonably I feel, as we’re taught quite early on that cars run on quite flammable materials and as such probably shouldn’t be in close contact with anything that is, you know, on fire. To this day, any litterbug smoker flinging their fag-ends out of their window hasn’t been successful in detonating my car behind them but surely it’s only a matter of time.

3. Using a mobile phone anywhere in the vicinity of a petrol station will cause the petrol station to explode.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that three out of the three irrational fears so far have involved explosions. I don’t have a particular explosion phobia – although like most people, it’s not something I would choose to stand next to – but it occurs to me that no-one gives you a particular education in the things which do and do not cause explosions. This is clearly a failing of the current education system and should be rectified with a new section of the National Curriculum immediately.

Oh, right, mobile phones. Well, there are signs everywhere in petrol stations telling you what you shouldn’t do because petrol is flammable and blah blah blah. And the instruction to switch off one’s mobile phone is always right under the instructions to switch off one’s engine and to not light fires or smoke. Therefore, it’s a natural assumption that the mobile phone thing also has something to do with fire. It probably doesn’t. But to tell you the truth, I don’t actually know why you’re not supposed to use your mobile phone in a petrol station. It’s the sort of thing I think of every time I see that sign and then never bother to ask anyone about.

4. Having been to the place depicted in a TV show makes the TV show approximately one thousand times better.

Okay, sometimes this is true. If you saw Jack Bauer storming a hotel you’d stayed at, that would be pretty cool. But having suffered through many, many episodes of pensioner-based “sitcom” (and I use the term loosely) Last of the Summer Wine when I was little, and then having visited Holmfirth, the Yorkshire village where it is set, I can state with some confidence that this is simply not the case. In fact, I recall being rather disappointed when I discovered that the café in the series was actually a hairdressers in reality. Oh, and the programme still wasn’t funny.

5. Noel Edmonds is watching every house in the country.

Bearded light-entertainment twat Noel Edmonds (now in charge of the utterly pointless Deal or No Deal) used to have a show on Saturday evenings called Noel’s House Party. It was a variety show of the type you don’t really get that much any more, unless there’s some sort of charity gig like Comic Relief or Children in Need going on in which case they draw the format out over the course of approximately fifteen hours. One of the segments on the show was called Gotcha, where Noel would look right at the screen and start talking, then click his fingers and suddenly on everyone’s TV screens, there was a family sitting together on their sofa looking all “OMG!” while Noel was all “LOL!” and the audience was like “ROFL!”

I can’t even remember the point of the segment. I think it involved Noel talking to the family through their TV set and possibly they won a prize or something. The only effect it had on my young self was inducing a state of almost total paranoia while this show was on. As soon as the Gotcha segment started, I started looking around to see if I could spot any hidden cameras. Leave aside the fact that we clearly hadn’t had any visitors from a TV crew to install said hidden cameras at any point. I always wondered why the family was surprised. Maybe Noel’s team broke into the family’s house in order to install the hidden cameras, which just makes them even worse, given the fact that I know I’d be utterly terrified in a break-in situation. But you never saw that in the papers, did you? “Noel’s House Party team in hospital after shotgun break-in incident”.

Fortunately, I no longer think that Noel Edmonds is watching me. Probably for the best.

Super-Important Edit!

[EDIT: “Mike” in the comments below has graciously pointed out that the segment in question was not, in fact, called Gotcha but was actually called NTV. I apologise profusely for this gross failure to check my facts properly before writing. But, to be honest, the prospect of trawling through footage of Noel Edmonds was so repulsive to me that I couldn’t face it. So consider this an official correction and apology. Thank you, Mike, you’ve done the world a service by remembering Noel’s House Party so we don’t have to.]