The same game was played by Australian cops. It was only revealed when a cement trucking company that has pink trucks complained about how often they'd get pulled over.
@@Zelmel Oh, so they jump on the hood/bonnet of a speeding car ... Of course... convertible. Because you have to be extremely ignorant to believe that it is generally possible to see who is inside a fast-moving, speeding car that passes you a few lanes away.
My first guess based on the question alone - Red and black car owners are more likely to be speeding partially due to the prevalence of those colors on sports cars and partially because they just want to.
White is a popular color on sports cars too. Honda's racing color is white, in fact. Honestly, going purely by the sheer number of vehicles that are white, you will probably see a white vehicle speeding more often than a vehicle that isn't white. And if it isn't white, it's probably gray or black. Between those three colors you hit just over 60% of the vehicles on the road in the US. Obviously, the numbers might be different elsewhere, but I presume the UK is about as boring as the US with regard to vehicle color. 😂
Maybe just a coincidence in my area at the time, but throughout the '90s, before white, black and grey collectively became the colour of 95% of the vehicles on the road, there was a trend with certain types of people leaning to certain types of vehicles. Red cars were popular with pretty girls and black cars were popular with people who liked to show off that they can afford fancy European imports. I could see how pulling over both groups might solve that boredom issue for different reasons.
My guess was going to be that it was an artifact of statistics where a significant number of cars that are white are police cars, and therefore not stopped.
Not just Devon and Cornwall, this was known about in Leicester at the time as my brother driving a red car got pulled over for littering even though none of his windows were open at the time.
Leicester police used to have a very specific reputation over traffic policing (I was “warned” about it by a Staffordshire police officer when I was about to move to Leicester) I was also advised by the same police officer to always buy white cars because the police are less likely to think you’re a hotshot!
SPOILER : It's worth noting that there was no evidence to prove that this was a widespread practice and may have just been one police officer playing it, or maybe joking about playing it. The BBC News report was a tongue-in-cheek article saying that red/black cars were more likely to be stopped if this game was happening but they weren't saying that there was any evidence of red/black cars being stopped more. "Motorway Snooker" is a bit of an urban myth.
This was a plot line in the 1991 TV series ‘Specials’ about special constables. The desk sergeant twigged what was going on when a driver of a road sweeper (typically yellow at the time) came into the station to present his insurance certificate.
Yeah, what the commenter above said. There's an upper and lower limit, because a peninsula isn't an actual physical phenomenon, it's just a categorization tool. Same for continents vs islands, as well as cardinal regions (where Western Europe ends and Eastern begins etc.). There's no physical basis for many of these terms; they're cultural constructs. A good example of this is Lewis and Harris, an island in Scotland that doesn't have a name for the whole, only for two halves which are both referred to as their own islands.
Well sure, but the Iberian peninsula has a proprtionally smaller connection to France than Cornwall and Devon has to the rest of Britain. Maybe that's a factor?
My first thought with red cars was the Warhammer 40K orcs that would paint their vehicles red to make them go faster (and because of their psychic ability, they actually would be faster)
I don't know if Cornwall and Devon are actually on a peninsula, but size is definitely not disqualifying for them. Consider: The Iberian Peninsula containing Spain and Portugal. On back of a quick search, Cornwall and Devon are on the South West Peninsula.
I think it feels different when the land just goes into a long pointy bit vs getting wider after an isthmus like Iberia or having its own weird shapes going on from that pointy bit like Italy. Or for example compared to Jutland, where an otherwise almost straight coastline gets interrupted while Cornwall just looks to be continuous with the shape of the island, widening from the neck down, and the water in between the peninsula and Wales is just a weird, more exaggerated squiggly bit that the west coast of Britain just does all over the place. Still a peninsula though.
Living in North America plenty of places are named after British/Irish places. I forget that occasionally those names are no longer reflective of what those words originally meant. So Blackburn Hamlet, is a suburb of Ottawa, has 8100 residents, which makes it very much not a Hamlet.
@@Phreak0matic Some definitions class it as a small village, usually without a church. That seems pointless though as it's still a village, so you may as well call it a village. I've always gone with the definitionof it being a small settlement, one that is specifically too small to be it's own village.
Here in Western Canada (Alberta specifically), a Hamlet is just any community that is not incorporated separately, but is still under the jurisdiction of the county (or other) government. We certainly have some hamlets with a dozen or fewer people, some with hundreds, or even a few thousand people, and our largest hamlet is Sherwood Park with a population of about 72,000.
Some, not all, but definitely some Italian sports cars (with names ending with an "i"), are in fact often red. That could explain the higher mean insurance premiums.
I have a feeling that if this could be proven, a few police officers should definitely get an early, unpaid, retirement from the force, and a few higher ups shold definitely see jail cells from the inside for some time.
Congratulations. As an American, I was told, way back in 1980 when I first learned to drive, red is the typical color of sports cars, which people trend to drive fast. Therefore, cops will pay more attention to red cars. The black cars in this question threw me off the answer.
This is interesting. I would never have gotten the snooker reference. In the US, going back as far as the 1980's at least, there was this "conventional wisdom" that you don't buy cars of certain colors. With Red and Black cars, it was specifically because the colors were associated sports cars and lead footed drivers, so the police were on the lookout for them. Blue was a color to avoid because the color hurt resale value. Now, black may no longer have that same stigma, with so many SUVs, Vans, and Sedans (you know, cars typically driven by parents and older people) being offered primarily in black and white. Also, I live in Arizona, so people are often discouraged from buying black cars because of the Arizona summers. To be honest, I don't think the color really matters all that much here, as the summer turns all cars into ovens.
When I was 19 or 20 I was driving home from an under 21 club in San Francisco with a couple of friends. This would have been 1989 or 1990. It was 2 am, very few cars out, and I was going 90 MPH. I noticed a car coming up from behind and he was going much faster than I was. I was thinking drunk driver so I really wanted to keep an eye on him. The other car started to pass us just as we were passing the MacArthur BART station but rather than pass he went into my blind spot and did not come out. Alarmed I looked directly into the blind spot (as apposed to using my mirrors and I saw it was not a drunk driver, assuming the CHP logo on the side of his car meant anything. The National Speed Limit was still in place so the speed limit was 55 MPH. Driving 20 MPH over the limit is the cross over from speeding into reckless driving. He had me dead to rights. He fell back behind me and I made my way to the right hand lane and got ready to pull over as soon as he signaled me to do so. I was thinking the entire time I was thinking I would be lucky to get *JUST* a ticket. Though I was still very young was already good at getting cops to be more lenient with me, usually reducing the fine or giving me a warning. A big factor in getting a warning over a ticket was pulling over right away (if it's safe) so I wanted to be ready. But he just kept following me. I figured he was waiting for a safe place, but he only followed me for several miles, then exited the freeway. I was driving a white car.
There was an eclipse in 1999 and the only place in the UK in the path of totality was at the very southern point of Cornwall (Lizard Point), so people flocked there. Surprisingly it wasn't entirely ruined by cloud.
Only at 5:15 but she says "for entertainment" and now I'm wondering if it's some sort of automobile version of roulette where they bet on what the next car pulled over will be and the color.
For someone who generally has a shocking memory, I got this one in 12 seconds. In fact, I would have had to recuse myself - otherwise it would have been a VERY short episode!
I would have guessed that red and black cars were more likely to be from London, while white cars were more likely to be local. Some US states apparently have highway police that go after out-of-state license plates. Maybe that is a game, too?
We don't have 'county' indicators on our plates. We do have regions coded into the letters part of the registration but it's really nerdy to know where they are originally from. Especially if it is a non-standard issue with a slightly different format.
No, I’m fairly certain this was a whistle-tone (from Sophie) when she started to purse her lips from the end of “correct” to the start of “Julian,” moving the lips quickly from a pulled-back grin to a forward-O shape.
My initial guess was because red is one of the rarest colours that we see in our daily lives and seeing anything red (especially brighter shades) stands out to us.
'Small town hamlets' - SIR, a hamlet is barely even a village. It is a collection of houses, often in what looks to be the middle of nowhere. It's usually a place that isn't big enough to have a central administration or community building (but at the time when it was made, there might have been one, some of them were made to support mills or other large production or processing facilities, often which are no longer there. The village of Clent, for example, due to its unusual geography, is actually a cluster of 5 distinct hamlets.
The obvious answer is of course that a red car travelling at high speed appears to exhibit a greater red shift because the light leaving the car is already red, and therefore the car appears to be travelling faster.
I remember hearing that the police pull over (at least in the States) young, attractive women driving red cars than people driving colors of any other color. Obviously, I know almost nothing about Snooker.
I thought it was because it also included vans, which are usually white(or neutral color) as opposed to red and black which are more likely to be personal vehicles, and because people in vans were usually on the job, they broke the law less, couldn't speed because of the weight of the van and police were more lenient with guys working, as opposed to personal vehicles.
if that is that pool thing? then we have it over here, US. or at least did. usually any place that had pool tables would have at least one snooker table. i couldn't even follow some of the variations of regular pool. let alone snooker
throughout the first half, i couldn't shake my mind away from thinking "what if this was some weird government-issued persecution against anarcho-communists, and the white may have also represented royalism like it did in the wake of the october revolution?"
My intitial guess based on the title was that older radar guns basically got a faster reflection from red/black than white and therefore reflected greatwr speeds (which in hindsight I think was faulty because the difference would be miniscule)
In the 60s and 70s, you were more likely to be pulled over with a red car in the US because red cars tended to be sports cars. I saw more red Austin Healeys and MGs than white, black or even BRG.
Lateral is greatly enjoyable and I regularly watch the short format videos, albeit in random order. However it has brought to the fore an interesting limitation of Tom's universe, and also RUclips's algorithm. Apparently there is no other English speaking country in the world except UK and USA, since all if not most of the participants hail from these. Perhaps Australia manages to squeeze in one or two occasionally? Would love to see Japanese and Indian and Ethiopian and Spanish RUclipsrs on the show!
I’ve never heard of “snooker” (had to read the captions to know how to spell it) First I looked up “motorway snooker” (which appears to be an urban myth, never substantiated) but everything I read assumed that the reader knew what snooker is, so I looked that up as well. Apparently snooker is a game from India that became popular in the UK, sort of like pool, but with more balls (15 red, 6 other colors) and instead of sinking stripes or solids as in pool, one starts with red then other colors.
The Scandinavian peninsula is huge, but is still, in fact, a peninsula. Labrador and the Arabian peninsula are even larger. So it is safe to claim that Devon/Cornwall is a peninsula
Initial thoughts: red being associated with speed and urgency, but that's not really Lateral. So it could be a lidar/doppler thing, as white is more reflective than red. Couple them together, and we might have a winner.
Huh. My father was a police officer and once when I was riding with him he told me that statistically red and black cars are stopped more frequently. When I asked why he suspected it was because they looked more sporty than white cars.
Guessing before watching: culturally, red means fast for cars (grazie, Ferrari). But I don’t think it’s that police were biased because of the car’s color, I’m guessing it’s the other way around: cars that do go fast are more likely to be red. It’s not causal just correlated
I'm going to pre-emptively palce my guess on 'alphabetical order'. white's near the end of the list, maybe the magistrate hit the end of the day before finalising the tickets...
Presumably colours like silver weren't touched at all as they aren't in the game? I blew the engine of a black car on the A38 at 130mph soon after the survey was taken. Nice wide open roads and no cameras.
I confirmed with my insurance company one time when I was getting a new car whether the colour doesn't matter and being a coupe or sedan doesn't matter. They don't, it makes no difference to them.
@@Mike_Downey I vaguely know of pool rules, but it never really occured to me to check for snooker rules, since I thought they were the same thing. (They kinda use the terms interchangeably, alongside "billiards", for advertising purposes where I'm from, which doesn't help.)
@@Mike_Downey never even heard of anything related (I'm from Germany, and people love stories like this, even if nobody ever knows if they're any more than a rumour)
Those driving with veteran tags seem to get away with a lot of excessive speed. Many state police are veterans themselves. No correlation implied....allegedly.
The same game was played by Australian cops. It was only revealed when a cement trucking company that has pink trucks complained about how often they'd get pulled over.
Also snooker or a different game?
@@jendorei not 100% sure, it was years ago and only briefly reported in the media.
@@jendorei???
Readymix. My dad drove one of those pink trucks. 😊
In the US,police do a similar thing! Only instead of the color of the car it's the color of the people inside the car.
Do they have some kind of x-ray equipment to recognize the skin color of people inside the cars?
Actually British police do that too. Just less often
@@dansihvonen8218 Yes. It's a very advanced piece of technology called "windows", which they can look through.
@@dansihvonen8218 Yeah, they're called eyes.
@@Zelmel Oh, so they jump on the hood/bonnet of a speeding car ...
Of course... convertible.
Because you have to be extremely ignorant to believe that it is generally possible to see who is inside a fast-moving, speeding car that passes you a few lanes away.
I enjoy the episodes where Tom is allowed to truly shine, and make some odd connection. Truly brilliant.
My first guess based on the question alone - Red and black car owners are more likely to be speeding partially due to the prevalence of those colors on sports cars and partially because they just want to.
That’s what I thought as well. But then I thought, in Devon in the 1990s, a red car is much more likely to be a Fiesta than a Ferrari…
White is a popular color on sports cars too. Honda's racing color is white, in fact. Honestly, going purely by the sheer number of vehicles that are white, you will probably see a white vehicle speeding more often than a vehicle that isn't white. And if it isn't white, it's probably gray or black. Between those three colors you hit just over 60% of the vehicles on the road in the US. Obviously, the numbers might be different elsewhere, but I presume the UK is about as boring as the US with regard to vehicle color. 😂
Maybe just a coincidence in my area at the time, but throughout the '90s, before white, black and grey collectively became the colour of 95% of the vehicles on the road, there was a trend with certain types of people leaning to certain types of vehicles. Red cars were popular with pretty girls and black cars were popular with people who liked to show off that they can afford fancy European imports. I could see how pulling over both groups might solve that boredom issue for different reasons.
My guess was going to be that it was an artifact of statistics where a significant number of cars that are white are police cars, and therefore not stopped.
Not just Devon and Cornwall, this was known about in Leicester at the time as my brother driving a red car got pulled over for littering even though none of his windows were open at the time.
Leicester police used to have a very specific reputation over traffic policing (I was “warned” about it by a Staffordshire police officer when I was about to move to Leicester)
I was also advised by the same police officer to always buy white cars because the police are less likely to think you’re a hotshot!
SPOILER : It's worth noting that there was no evidence to prove that this was a widespread practice and may have just been one police officer playing it, or maybe joking about playing it.
The BBC News report was a tongue-in-cheek article saying that red/black cars were more likely to be stopped if this game was happening but they weren't saying that there was any evidence of red/black cars being stopped more. "Motorway Snooker" is a bit of an urban myth.
And I thought it was because the red cars were going faster then the white cars.
Spoiler alert ‼️
This was a plot line in the 1991 TV series ‘Specials’ about special constables. The desk sergeant twigged what was going on when a driver of a road sweeper (typically yellow at the time) came into the station to present his insurance certificate.
Surely there's no size limit on a peninsula? The Iberian one is a lot bigger than Cornwall and Devon.
If you count Europe and Asia as one continent you could call Europe the "European peninsula"
Yeah, what the commenter above said. There's an upper and lower limit, because a peninsula isn't an actual physical phenomenon, it's just a categorization tool. Same for continents vs islands, as well as cardinal regions (where Western Europe ends and Eastern begins etc.). There's no physical basis for many of these terms; they're cultural constructs. A good example of this is Lewis and Harris, an island in Scotland that doesn't have a name for the whole, only for two halves which are both referred to as their own islands.
Well sure, but the Iberian peninsula has a proprtionally smaller connection to France than Cornwall and Devon has to the rest of Britain. Maybe that's a factor?
@@samuelmellars7855 Interesting idea - but then the Korean peninsula is similar in its connectedness to the rest of Asia.
@@catherinebutler4819 having gone through the other comments, people have said it is indeed called a peninsula! The south-west peninsula, apparently
My first thought with red cars was the Warhammer 40K orcs that would paint their vehicles red to make them go faster (and because of their psychic ability, they actually would be faster)
And purple is the sneakiest colour
I don't know if Cornwall and Devon are actually on a peninsula, but size is definitely not disqualifying for them. Consider: The Iberian Peninsula containing Spain and Portugal.
On back of a quick search, Cornwall and Devon are on the South West Peninsula.
I think it feels different when the land just goes into a long pointy bit vs getting wider after an isthmus like Iberia or having its own weird shapes going on from that pointy bit like Italy. Or for example compared to Jutland, where an otherwise almost straight coastline gets interrupted while Cornwall just looks to be continuous with the shape of the island, widening from the neck down, and the water in between the peninsula and Wales is just a weird, more exaggerated squiggly bit that the west coast of Britain just does all over the place. Still a peninsula though.
god i was just sat here like, someone please tell julian that a hamlet is a tiny place made up of a couple of houses and not like an actual town
I believe (without checking) the definition of a hamlet is a small village
Living in North America plenty of places are named after British/Irish places. I forget that occasionally those names are no longer reflective of what those words originally meant. So Blackburn Hamlet, is a suburb of Ottawa, has 8100 residents, which makes it very much not a Hamlet.
@@Phreak0matic Some definitions class it as a small village, usually without a church. That seems pointless though as it's still a village, so you may as well call it a village. I've always gone with the definitionof it being a small settlement, one that is specifically too small to be it's own village.
In my mind
Hamlet - 0 churches
Village - 1 church
Town - multiple churches
City - multiple churches, with a biggun
Here in Western Canada (Alberta specifically), a Hamlet is just any community that is not incorporated separately, but is still under the jurisdiction of the county (or other) government. We certainly have some hamlets with a dozen or fewer people, some with hundreds, or even a few thousand people, and our largest hamlet is Sherwood Park with a population of about 72,000.
This isn't just a very quiz question, as Tom notes, but a very Only Connect question specifically!
Only Connect does love snooker!
OC is the only reason i know about snooker
Me at the start: "DA RED WANZ GO FASTA!"
1:40 Tom, if Scandinavia and Arabia get to count as peninsulas, I'm pretty sure the bit of land Cornwall and Devon are on, gets to count, too.
It's even called the South West Peninsula.
The white zone is for loading and unloading passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.
The red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a white zone.
I believe this was investigated but found to be false though it’s entirely possible as the police would never admit to doing this
Yeah, it's surprising how often the police investigate wrongdoing within their ranks only to turn up no evidence and reprimand no one.
I don't know how it works in the UK, but in many places the police tend to investigate themselves and mysteriously never find any wrongdoing.
Plausible too
When I was a younger motorist, about at that same time, I heard that French insurance was more expensive for red cars.
Some, not all, but definitely some Italian sports cars (with names ending with an "i"), are in fact often red.
That could explain the higher mean insurance premiums.
Do we think Tom is indulging his love for coffee at 2:26 or is he back to water and using the mug for subtle advertising?
I believe Tom was not a coffee drinker until he did a tasting led by James Hoffmann, who helped him discover his coffee preferences.
Plot twist: When you get a maximum break in snooker, it’s called a “hamlet.”
As soon as Tom said “the Americans aren’t going to get this” I shouted, out loud on the Tube, “omg they’re PLAYING SNOOKER!!!” 😂😂😂
Which is not a fair categorization, I've watched plenty of Richard Herring playing snooker against himself
It's strange that you shouted instead of just thinking it.
Is that like Numberwang?
@@outpostcheerfuloyster It's like Dog Poker and Dog Snooker.
This is one that I have heard about before so know right away.
Me as well but stayed for the hilarity
If it's not that red is a common color for a sports car and preferred by people who want to drive fast, then my guess is unfortunately wrong.
FYI to my fellow Americans, it does in fact rhyme with "looker" rather than "lucre" on this side of the pond.
I have a feeling that if this could be proven, a few police officers should definitely get an early, unpaid, retirement from the force, and a few higher ups shold definitely see jail cells from the inside for some time.
Wow, there must have been a lot of them stuck on 134, basically waiting for Barbie to drive past.
As an American, I'm quite pleased to have gotten the answer at 5:04!
Congratulations. As an American, I was told, way back in 1980 when I first learned to drive, red is the typical color of sports cars, which people trend to drive fast. Therefore, cops will pay more attention to red cars. The black cars in this question threw me off the answer.
This is interesting. I would never have gotten the snooker reference. In the US, going back as far as the 1980's at least, there was this "conventional wisdom" that you don't buy cars of certain colors. With Red and Black cars, it was specifically because the colors were associated sports cars and lead footed drivers, so the police were on the lookout for them. Blue was a color to avoid because the color hurt resale value. Now, black may no longer have that same stigma, with so many SUVs, Vans, and Sedans (you know, cars typically driven by parents and older people) being offered primarily in black and white.
Also, I live in Arizona, so people are often discouraged from buying black cars because of the Arizona summers. To be honest, I don't think the color really matters all that much here, as the summer turns all cars into ovens.
Black also hurts resale, since it shows scratches more than almost any other colour.
When I was 19 or 20 I was driving home from an under 21 club in San Francisco with a couple of friends.
This would have been 1989 or 1990. It was 2 am, very few cars out, and I was going 90 MPH. I noticed a car coming up from behind and he was going much faster than I was. I was thinking drunk driver so I really wanted to keep an eye on him.
The other car started to pass us just as we were passing the MacArthur BART station but rather than pass he went into my blind spot and did not come out.
Alarmed I looked directly into the blind spot (as apposed to using my mirrors and I saw it was not a drunk driver, assuming the CHP logo on the side of his car meant anything.
The National Speed Limit was still in place so the speed limit was 55 MPH. Driving 20 MPH over the limit is the cross over from speeding into reckless driving. He had me dead to rights. He fell back behind me and I made my way to the right hand lane and got ready to pull over as soon as he signaled me to do so. I was thinking the entire time I was thinking I would be lucky to get *JUST* a ticket.
Though I was still very young was already good at getting cops to be more lenient with me, usually reducing the fine or giving me a warning. A big factor in getting a warning over a ticket was pulling over right away (if it's safe) so I wanted to be ready. But he just kept following me. I figured he was waiting for a safe place, but he only followed me for several miles, then exited the freeway.
I was driving a white car.
I just want to praise the guy driving a yellow Alfa Romeo for their taste in cars.
I got it but not before thinking it was something to do with Doppler shift
There was an eclipse in 1999 and the only place in the UK in the path of totality was at the very southern point of Cornwall (Lizard Point), so people flocked there.
Surprisingly it wasn't entirely ruined by cloud.
The eastern south coast had over 98% coverage. Good enough for me!
I heard rumours about that but i had no idea they actually did it!
3:48 with the most valley girl "I feel like its cuuultural" ever
😊
Only at 5:15 but she says "for entertainment" and now I'm wondering if it's some sort of automobile version of roulette where they bet on what the next car pulled over will be and the color.
For someone who generally has a shocking memory, I got this one in 12 seconds. In fact, I would have had to recuse myself - otherwise it would have been a VERY short episode!
I actually knew this from just the title this time, and when I heard the question I knew that it 100% was police snooker.
I would have guessed that red and black cars were more likely to be from London, while white cars were more likely to be local. Some US states apparently have highway police that go after out-of-state license plates. Maybe that is a game, too?
We don't have 'county' indicators on our plates. We do have regions coded into the letters part of the registration but it's really nerdy to know where they are originally from. Especially if it is a non-standard issue with a slightly different format.
Lived down here all my life and never heard of that before!
Devonian here too and have never heard this one either 😅
How many pink cars, for the 6 points, would have been on the roads in 1999?! That one driver must of been stopped a lot
They were just the red ones left in the sun too long.
I actually had heard of this one before, additionally though wasn't red the most popular car colour for quite a number of years anyway?
Both red and black have traditionally been popular car colors for 'sporty' cars - in some cases the ONLY options given by the car maker... but...damn
Red is the third most common after white and black.
@@SenshiSunPower Depending on how you define colour, red is then the most popular colour.
Yep. It's called the South West Peninsula. Cornwall, Devon, most of Somerset and a fair chunk of Dorset.
I’m lucky to be from such a beautiful part of the UK :)
Are the full episodes ever posted on RUclips?
2:17 smoke alarm battery beep?
No, I’m fairly certain this was a whistle-tone (from Sophie) when she started to purse her lips from the end of “correct” to the start of “Julian,” moving the lips quickly from a pulled-back grin to a forward-O shape.
pretty sure that was just a noise made by Sophie 🥲
The cheif of police's wife drives a white car, his mother in law drives a red car.
Long before '99, traffic schools would promote the unconfirmed folklore that red cars get pulled over more. I remember it in the 1980s.
I only know the point order of snooker balls due to how infuriatingly catchy Chas & Dave's snooker loopy was.
5:17 nice accidental Christopher Walken, Julian!
My initial guess was because red is one of the rarest colours that we see in our daily lives and seeing anything red (especially brighter shades) stands out to us.
'Small town hamlets' - SIR, a hamlet is barely even a village. It is a collection of houses, often in what looks to be the middle of nowhere. It's usually a place that isn't big enough to have a central administration or community building (but at the time when it was made, there might have been one, some of them were made to support mills or other large production or processing facilities, often which are no longer there. The village of Clent, for example, due to its unusual geography, is actually a cluster of 5 distinct hamlets.
The obvious answer is of course that a red car travelling at high speed appears to exhibit a greater red shift because the light leaving the car is already red, and therefore the car appears to be travelling faster.
0:24 Why is the first 24 seconds repeated twice in a row? I thought I was losing my mind.
I remember hearing that the police pull over (at least in the States) young, attractive women driving red cars than people driving colors of any other color.
Obviously, I know almost nothing about Snooker.
I thought it was because it also included vans, which are usually white(or neutral color) as opposed to red and black which are more likely to be personal vehicles, and because people in vans were usually on the job, they broke the law less, couldn't speed because of the weight of the van and police were more lenient with guys working, as opposed to personal vehicles.
if that is that pool thing? then we have it over here, US. or at least did. usually any place that had pool tables would have at least one snooker table. i couldn't even follow some of the variations of regular pool. let alone snooker
throughout the first half, i couldn't shake my mind away from thinking "what if this was some weird government-issued persecution against anarcho-communists, and the white may have also represented royalism like it did in the wake of the october revolution?"
As soon as she said bored, i knew the sport they were playing
I suddenly remembered the answer when she said the officers were doing it for fun.
My intitial guess based on the title was that older radar guns basically got a faster reflection from red/black than white and therefore reflected greatwr speeds (which in hindsight I think was faulty because the difference would be miniscule)
Too funny! "Scandal! Coppers playing snooker along the motorways" would be a title in any UK-based tabloid, I suppose :D
How to describe Cornwall? Bleak 😅🤣
Speeding snooker!!!
In the 60s and 70s, you were more likely to be pulled over with a red car in the US because red cars tended to be sports cars. I saw more red Austin Healeys and MGs than white, black or even BRG.
Here in America, there's a standard urban legend that red cars are more often driven by men, who just supposedly just drive more aggressively.
Lateral is greatly enjoyable and I regularly watch the short format videos, albeit in random order. However it has brought to the fore an interesting limitation of Tom's universe, and also RUclips's algorithm. Apparently there is no other English speaking country in the world except UK and USA, since all if not most of the participants hail from these. Perhaps Australia manages to squeeze in one or two occasionally? Would love to see Japanese and Indian and Ethiopian and Spanish RUclipsrs on the show!
Because the red ones go faster?
Wah! Dis git getz it! (me dunno about black ones tho...)
My first guess was Roulette.
I’ve never heard of “snooker” (had to read the captions to know how to spell it)
First I looked up “motorway snooker” (which appears to be an urban myth, never substantiated) but everything I read assumed that the reader knew what snooker is, so I looked that up as well. Apparently snooker is a game from India that became popular in the UK, sort of like pool, but with more balls (15 red, 6 other colors) and instead of sinking stripes or solids as in pool, one starts with red then other colors.
Watch some Ronnie O' Sullivan clips, like his quickest perfect game. You don't need to understand the rules to be awestruck
My ork 40k brain: BECAUSE RED GO FAST!!!!!
So that one pink car got pulled over quite a few times as well.
If they were going for max breaks it would only get pulled over once.
@ Sure, but given the rarity of pink cars, the chances of getting pulled over if you happen to ride in that colour are still surprisingly high.
@@mrtnsnp True.
Dammit, now I have to find my headphones to see if I’m right
There are professionally-made captions available, if you enable them.
@@lateralcast : That'd require reading.. Which is too much like being at work/school
@@lateralcast : Wow, I was right.. I always assumed that was a myth - or it was my lying mate spouting his usual nonsense.
Is the question "why was it reported"? Because it's true? That'd be a tricky question
The Scandinavian peninsula is huge, but is still, in fact, a peninsula. Labrador and the Arabian peninsula are even larger. So it is safe to claim that Devon/Cornwall is a peninsula
I have a joke that red cars go faster than other coloured cars. Is that the answer?
So far, this is the only one I got immediately after reading the question.
Snooker!! I got it at 5:03...
Julian really has no idea just how SMALL a hamlet is 😂
Not a clue.
@jhug111 for future reference, hamlet is smaller than a village. It's essentially just a handful of houses without a church among them
Disappointed Tom didn't know of this 🤣
Initial thoughts: red being associated with speed and urgency, but that's not really Lateral. So it could be a lidar/doppler thing, as white is more reflective than red. Couple them together, and we might have a winner.
1999 in Devon and Cornwall - literally all I could think of was that it was somehow related to the solar eclipse. Nope, far too clever and logical!
CARACISM!
Here I was thinking the white cars were harder to see because of the fog
I assumed that it's because there were more red cars at the time. Red was a lot more common at the time.
Tom's face around 5:18
My guess was that younger drivers tend to have red or black cars for style, so they would be speeding just because they're young and reckless
Think of all the tradies in white vans on their phones... oh wait we didn't have those rules in 1999
Nice
I have a silver car, how would i have got on ?
Huh. My father was a police officer and once when I was riding with him he told me that statistically red and black cars are stopped more frequently. When I asked why he suspected it was because they looked more sporty than white cars.
I love snooker, but I'm American. I should have gotten this.
They don’t call it “arrest me red” for nothing. The same is obviously true with yellow and orange paint schemes.
Guessing before watching: culturally, red means fast for cars (grazie, Ferrari). But I don’t think it’s that police were biased because of the car’s color, I’m guessing it’s the other way around: cars that do go fast are more likely to be red. It’s not causal just correlated
Did Tom Scott get hot!? Damn bro, looking good
I'm going to pre-emptively palce my guess on 'alphabetical order'. white's near the end of the list, maybe the magistrate hit the end of the day before finalising the tickets...
Presumably colours like silver weren't touched at all as they aren't in the game? I blew the engine of a black car on the A38 at 130mph soon after the survey was taken. Nice wide open roads and no cameras.
1:01 (!) Oh, Sophie's wholly distracting 'Herr Flick' . . . ("Nurse! Quick, the screens, it's happening again!" : )
Some Americans love Snooker!
I know that red cars tend to have higher insurance rates in the US due to it being a common color for sports cars.
I confirmed with my insurance company one time when I was getting a new car whether the colour doesn't matter and being a coupe or sedan doesn't matter. They don't, it makes no difference to them.
before watching, police play snooker right?
if it is car snooker, then I'm surprised they didn't get it straight away - I thought this sort of thing was really well known
ayyy
@@Mike_Downey I vaguely know of pool rules, but it never really occured to me to check for snooker rules, since I thought they were the same thing. (They kinda use the terms interchangeably, alongside "billiards", for advertising purposes where I'm from, which doesn't help.)
@@Mike_Downey never even heard of anything related (I'm from Germany, and people love stories like this, even if nobody ever knows if they're any more than a rumour)
Those driving with veteran tags seem to get away with a lot of excessive speed. Many state police are veterans themselves. No correlation implied....allegedly.
6:18
Actually, isn’t it -4 points for a white?