The World Championships Where Your Job Is... Convincing Worms to Come Out of the Ground

Every year, a quiet English village transforms into the centre of competitive worm persuasion. 

No joke.

Welcome to the World Worm Charming Championships.

Held annually in Willaston, Cheshire, England since 1980...

The rules are beautifully ridiculous.

You get a 3 × 3 metre patch of grass and 30 minutes to convince as many earthworms as possible to surface.

You can't dig.

What you can do is pretty much anything else.

Some competitors dance.

Some arrive looking like they've spent the last decade studying worm psychology.

Somehow... it works.

The current world record sits at 567 worms, set by a 10-year-old girl back in 2009. More than a decade later, nobody has managed to beat it.

Scientists reckon the vibrations trick worms into thinking hungry moles are on the move underground, so they make a run for the surface. Turns out, pretending to be a mole is a legitimate sporting strategy.

Honestly, we love this.

There's something epic about hundreds of people standing in a field, enthusiastically trying to outsmart worms.