Maths on Hole In The Wall

Hole in the Wall is BBC One's new Saturday teatime game show. Imported from Japan, it involves two teams of celebrities dressed in lycra space suits and crash helmets trying to form shapes to fit through the holes in a polystyrene wall that heads towards them.

If they don't make the correct shape, then end up in a small pool behind them. It's very silly and is taking the world by storm.

You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for a week or so here.

Anyway, one of the rounds is a "question" in which the team playing must select one of the two answers and stand behind that answer to go through a hidden door. The wrong door is solid and means that you'll end up in the drink.

This week's question was a maths problem, and you can see it below.

Anyone who's studied GCSE or O Level maths should also see the problem. The answer's neither 11 nor 12. It's 38.

There's something called Order of Operations in maths and it means that you calculate things like multiplications and division first - particularly when there's no more information to help you decide which order to do things.

So, in effect, this sum is the same as saying:

(3 x 12) + (8 / 4) = 36 + 2 = 38

You can't just read it from left to right as the producers (and indeed the contestants did). It's just wrong.

If it was worth it, I'd have complained to someone at the BBC. But it's not, although arguably the points different might have meant the other team won, and their (undisclosed) charity might have missed out on £10,000.

It's just a shame that the solitary question in the entire show was, er, wrong.