In my last couple of blogs, I asked AI to explain Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics. In both cases, I think the clearest explanation was when I asked the AI to pretend it/they were an 8-year-old child.

This links up to the famous acronym KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

It also reminds me of a chat I had when I was a researcher on programmes at London Weekend Television.

Another researcher and I had a casual chat about the sort of people we might be looking for on various programmes. We agreed, I think, on a couple of vague principles which might seem counter-intuitive.

The first was how to get a person who could explain a complex idea in a way that could be understood by the general viewer. Not dumbing-down in any way. Just being clear and enthusing the viewer.

We agreed that the person you did NOT necessarily want was an expert. 

You did not want someone who had spent the last 30 or 40 years totally immersed in a subject to the exclusion of almost everything else. They knew too much. Their brains were clogged up with details.

What you ideally wanted was not an expert but an enthusiast – a fan. 

The expert would long ago have lost the single original kernel of the enthusiasm which had started them on their long road to expertise.

What you wanted was someone who was still gloriously enthusiastic, who retained that original intellectual vigour, who wanted to make others as enthusiastic in the subject as they were and still are. They knew the key points which simply – KISS KISS – would reveal the bases of the subject.

The other type of person we talked about finding was a true eccentric.

The sort of person you wanted to find was NOT the life-and- soul of the party who made all the lads and lasses laugh down the local pub. Counter-intuitively, you do not want people who seem extrovert. Jack the Lad ‘extroverts’ just want attention; they have no depth of eccentricity.

Rather than an ‘extrovert’, you want to find an ‘introvert’ with rare or unique angles of genuine thought. 

If you can find the right introvert and make them confident enough to follow their creative or mental tendencies, they will let rip and you will get real originality of thought which, really, is what is meant when you talk of someone being ‘eccentric’.

The perfect example of this was when I handled a regular item called ‘Talented Teachers’ on the anarchic children’s show Tiswas (an ATV, then a Central ITV, production).

I was told about Mr Wickers, a teacher who could roller-skate while simultaneously playing the harmonica AND the spoons. I talked to him and he was a lovely, quiet-spoken man who DID NOT have any great ambition to do this on national television. But I persuaded him.

Obviously, I had seen him perform the act to ensure he really could roller-skate while simultaneously playing the harmonica and spoons.

On the day of the live show, he turned up with his roller-skates, harmonica and two spoons.

But he also turned up wearing a Bright Yellow Oilskin fisherman’s coat, a bright yellow oilskin sou’wester hat and a life-sized seagull which he had himself crafted out of papier-mâché. 

The papier-mâché seagull sat on his bright yellow oilskin shoulder by his bright yellow sou’wester hat while Mr Wickers roller-skated round the studio set playing his harmonica and clack-clacking his two spoons together.

Mr Wickers was – and I say this with vast admiration – a true eccentric but quiet and not in any way a so-called extrovert.

The epitome of a certain type of Englishman. (I say that as a born Scot.)