Scott makes Radio 1 the new home of Friends
With Friends temporarily absent from Channel 4 and E4, Scott decided Radio 1 could fill the gap. Simply playing a DVD on air was ruled out for obvious legal reasons, so the team staged their own version instead, acting out “The One with the Monkey” from the script and inviting listeners to treat it as the programme’s new radio home.
The unexpected breakout star was 1Xtra’s DJ Edu, whose distinctive voice made him an excellent Chandler. Scott was so pleased with the performance that he immediately started imagining Edu in other classic roles, including an extremely unlikely Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. The fake drama had exactly the charm of a good Scott Mills idea: just legal enough in spirit, and made funnier by everyone fully committing to it.
Scott also heard from a friend on holiday who was finding towel animals in her hotel room each day. Rabbits, swans and snakes were one thing, but the cleaner eventually arranged the guest’s clothes into a figure on the bed, which Scott felt had moved from hospitality to something genuinely unsettling.
There was a more serious check-in with David Walliams, partway through his Sport Relief Thames swim. Walliams had been hit by illness and “Thames tummy”, had fallen behind his target and sounded exhausted, but he remained determined to carry on. Scott encouraged listeners to text in a donation and played Walliams’s requested morale-booster, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”, while he prepared to get back in the water.
Later, Scott investigated an odd habit of his flatmate: making serious calls to banks, takeaways and call centres in deliberately bad accents. Listeners admitted to doing the same, from mock New York voices when ordering pizza to full cartoon characters while calling customer services. It was the sort of tiny social weirdness Scott loved, and it turned into a very busy show about imitation, performance and the things people do when they think nobody will challenge them.
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