The fart pants had finally arrived
The next archive edition began with a package Scott had been waiting for.
Inside were pairs of underwear designed to filter the smell of flatulence.
They looked like ordinary boxer shorts but contained an activated-carbon panel at the back which was supposed to absorb odour.
Scott immediately saw only one sensible response.
They needed to test them in public.
Chris pointed out a flaw in the product’s wider philosophy: if somebody became used to confidently farting whenever they wore the pants, eventually they would forget they had normal underwear on and make a terrible mistake.
That did not stop the experiment.
A lift was the obvious laboratory
Chris put the pants on and headed to the large glass lifts at the BBC.
Scott liked the location because almost everybody in the building used them and the confined space would make any failure immediately obvious.
If the pants worked, nobody should react.
If they failed, the expressions and rapid exits around Chris would tell them everything.
The difficulty was no longer scientific.
Chris had to produce a fart on command.
“Fart for me” did not help
Scott repeatedly instructed him:
Fart for me.
Chris became increasingly stressed.
Being surrounded by strangers while somebody shouted instructions into his ear gave him what he described as stage fright.
He could feel one “brewing” but could not make it happen at the correct moment.
People entered.
People left.
Scott kept telling him to do it.
Chris asked him to stop saying the word because the pressure was making things worse.
Eventually the experiment happened
Finally, with other people in the lift, Chris managed it.
He waited for a reaction.
Nothing obvious happened.
Nobody complained.
Nobody visibly recoiled.
One woman left the lift, although Chris insisted she appeared to be getting off for an unrelated reason.
He could not smell anything himself.
Scott concluded that the carbon fabric seemed to have worked.
Chris was less enthusiastic about repeating the trial.
Producing a fart on demand in a crowded BBC lift, he decided, was one of the stranger tasks the show had ever given him.
The pants might have passed.
Chris’s dignity had not.
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