Hayley Williams’ Matt Fincham campaign backfires
Hayley Williams and Chris reached the final morning of their week covering for Grimmy with a listener introduction that immediately set the tone. Natalie, a dog walker from Andover, explained that her dog had once sat on Cheryl Cole’s face during a photo shoot. Hayley treated the dog’s accidental celebrity encounter as a far better start to the programme than any conventional showbiz story.
The main campaign of the week was their determination to annoy producer Matt Fincham. Matt had stopped answering Hayley’s calls and messages, which she took as an affront rather than a signal to leave him alone. The team replayed their fake bank call about invented suspicious purchases, then produced an earnest acoustic song, followed by a Friday-style dance remix, devoted to the statement that they were annoying Matt Fincham.
Their attempt to make matters worse soon went in the wrong direction. Hayley asked listeners to unfollow Chris Moyles in retaliation for his own refusal to answer the phone, but the Fincham story spread instead. Lily Allen joined in online and began following Matt, giving him exactly the attention Hayley had hoped to deny him.
The programme also looked back at the week’s Innuendo Bingo, which Hayley described with mock emotion as it came to an end. Chris had initially misunderstood the idea of Hayley’s on-air plans, believing that an invitation to see Jay-Z and Eamonn Holmes together was a real social arrangement, then failing to attend the barbecue she held for the team. Their brief partnership ended with both pretending it had been a much longer and more meaningful broadcasting relationship.
Friday games brought Gary Lucy in for Oh, What’s Occurring?, with Danny Howard points treated as an increasingly chaotic currency. It was a suitably messy finish to the cover run, full of unnecessary campaigns, made-up banking alerts and Hayley’s growing frustration that the person they were trying to irritate was enjoying the attention.
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