The week I met Count Binface - and other stories
In which I drop the names of almost all the famous people I have ever met (sorry)!
The last ten days have been a bit of a busy/surreal for me, so I thought I’d write a summary of everything I’ve been up to.
The main thing that’s been going on is that my new book, You don’t Know What You’re Missing, came out last Thursday (04/06). On Wednesday I went down to Old Broadcasting House in London to record an episode of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind (with the excellent Claudia Hammond), about the more psychological aspects of the book. That episode comes out in a couple of weeks, so if you’d like to hear it, then watch this space.
On Thursday morning – publication day – I woke up early, headed over to the ITN studios on Gray’s Inn Road to appear on Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 TV show. Jeremy has always been super kind to me, ever since he read my second book - How to Expect the Unexpected. It was lovely of him to have me on the show to promote this new book.
I also got a little taste for what his regular guests are letting themselves in for, presenting and commenting on a few of the day’s news stories that had been handed to me just a few minutes earlier. I have to say, I don’t envy them the job of having to talk coherently about a topic they’ve had less than five minutes (on average) to prepare for. Stressful.
If you’d like to see some of the more visual examples from the book, then I’ve included the full clip of the segment here.
I spent a quiet hour in the British Library before heading over to New Broadcasting House to appear live on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. Where I also bumped into Michael Berkeley from Radio 3’s Private Passions.
On Jeremy’s show we talked about the different sorts of missingness, from the gaps in our perception to the power of expectation, the ways in which information can be biased before it even reaches us and even the ways in which missingness can be useful.
You can catch up here from 1:06:30 (just so you know what you’re missing!).
The publicity drive seems to have had an impact, as You Don’t Know What You’re Missing made its way up into the low 100s across all books (it’s currently still the number one best seller in popular maths!).
After a quick pit stop at home on the Thursday evening, I headed over to Cheltenham on Friday to host a session in the Town Hall called “How to Win the World Cup”. On the panel were Liverpool’s former head of Data, Dr Ian Graham, and sports psychologist at Liverpool John Moores University, Dr Gillian Cook. On the night, their insights into everything from forming a cohesive squad to how to manage penalty shootouts were absolutely fascinating.
Ian also has an excellent book called How to Win the Premier League, which is well worth a read if you’re interested in football (particularly the evolution of English football over the last 15 years). I had a lovely chat with him over dinner afterwards gleaning lots of insight, but also chatting nonsense about football for an hour, which is always high up my list of priorities for a Friday night.
I took the chance later in the evening to catch up with a few science communication colleagues, including Andrea Sella, Mark Miodownik and, a bit later, (too late really – I need early nights) Adam Rutherford, Kevin Fong and Alice Roberts. This is the really nice thing about Cheltenham Science festival: the opportunity to meet up with old friends and to make new connections.
And then came the most surreal part of the evening. As I was sitting down at one table, someone else was just leaving. I introduced myself as “Kit”, and he replied, “Kit Yates? I know you”. It turns out that this was the comedia John Harvey (aka Count Binface – not in costume, otherwise it might have been quite obvious!). He works with another maths communication friend of mine, the comedian Matt Parker, hence the connection. So let me finish by wishing John (Count John?) the best of luck in next week’s Makerfield by-election: you can read his manifesto here.
So that was it for my surreal week. You can tell how hectic it was because it’s taken me a whole week to recover form it and write this post.
If you think you’d like to join the other people who are reading the book, then you can pick up your own copy:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Know-What-Youre-Missing/dp/1529438039
Bookshop.org (supports independent bookshops): https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/you-don-t-know-what-you-re-missing-the-science-of-what-s-lost-and-how-to-find-it-kit-yates/497ab9dcf971763a