Scott tests whether cake shops will write anything at all
Scott opened September in the grip of two seasonal irritations: people planning Christmas parties while summer was only just over, and the language people use when they do it. “Holly bobs”, “bubbly” and “hubby” all went straight onto his personal list of words he would rather not hear, although Beccy was much more forgiving.
There was a familiar Dear Scott dilemma about whether it is kinder to tell somebody they have toothpaste around their mouth, an open fly or something stuck to their face. Scott admitted he would usually stay silent because he hated the awkwardness of pointing it out, despite Chris having previously been left to discover the toothpaste problem for himself.
The day’s main game was Cake Calls. Chris rang bakers around the country with messages that sounded harmless until they became increasingly strange, and listeners had to decide whether the shop would agree to pipe them onto a cake. The first request was for Roger, who was supposedly being sent a nail file, baby hammer and key to a locker at King’s Cross as part of a prison escape.
To Scott and Beccy’s delight, the bakery was happy to take the order if the customer came in and paid a deposit. Another shop also agreed to the much less subtle dismissal notice: “Kevin, you’re fired with immediate effect. We’ve seen the CCTV. It’s gross misconduct.” The game’s joke was never that the staff were fooled, but that they stayed politely practical while being asked to ice wildly implausible messages.
Lee Nelson joined Scott afterwards, fresh from appearing in the Fun and Filth Cabaret in Edinburgh. They relived their night out and his strange holiday stories, before Lee promoted the new series of his BBC Three show in character. It gave the programme a suitably messy end-of-summer energy: cake-shop mischief, festival memories and a studio guest determined to make every ordinary answer sound absurd.
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