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12 September 2012: Chris silences a café with an embarrassing confession

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12 September 2012: Chris silences a café with an embarrassing confession

 

Chris silences the café

Chris entered a busy coffee shop for a real-life test of the film cliché in which one loud revelation stops every conversation. He bought a hot chocolate, sat among customers using their laptops and agreed to say almost anything Scott gave him, provided it did not involve swearing or getting arrested.

Scott instructed him to stand, bang on the table and announce, “I’m an adult baby.” Chris objected because the statement sounded personal and thought the programme had agreed to retire the adult-baby joke, but Scott promised this would be its final appearance.

After pretending to conduct a normal telephone conversation, Chris stood and delivered the line too quietly. Scott ordered him to repeat it, producing a much louder declaration and an immediate silence. One member of staff left the room, Chris hurried outside and admitted that the experience had taken his breath away. The challenge worked, although his daily visits to that café were likely to become more awkward.

Scott’s two satnav taxi

Running late for work, Scott ordered a cab and discovered that the driver was simultaneously using a standalone satnav and a navigation app on his telephone. Both spoke throughout the journey but regularly contradicted each other, with one ordering a left turn while the other demanded a right.

The driver complicated matters by continuing to ask Scott for directions. Scott stealthily recorded the competing voices from the back seat and decided the man required a third device to break the tie whenever the first two disagreed.

Real or No Real and Scott’s private messages

Newsreader Chris Smith read the statements in Real or No Real, lending every claim an air of authority. Cheese really was described as the world’s most frequently stolen food, but Timmy Mallett had not nearly joined the 1984 Olympic boxing squad and the ancient Romans had not invented the doner kebab. Beccy scored 20 points while Chris Stark finished with none.

Beccy and Chris then resumed reading private messages Scott had sent them. A former Radio 1 presenter voiced the texts, including Scott waking unexpectedly in Spalding, announcing that he was “on double pork”, sharing an old computer password based on a pop star and repeatedly losing his keys or telephone.

One message proposed putting Rihanna, Pixie Lott, Jeremy Vine and Peter Andre on a webcam while they attempted to eat an enormous quantity of food. Scott maintained that watching Nicki Minaj consume her largest-ever lunch still had potential as a feature. Other messages described a woman as a media “fembot”, advised somebody to call a useful contact from You Me Bum Bum Train and asked how to handle a plumber who had ignored a Facebook request before returning to repair the bathroom.

Phoebe the pet sheep

The show introducer had wanted a lamb since visiting a petting farm as a child and eventually received six-day-old Phoebe from a farmer’s wife. Phoebe now responded to her name, waited by the front door and ran into the kitchen whenever it was left open, behaving more like a very large dog than a sheep.

A second sheep called Hannah kept Phoebe company and appeared to play football, headbutting balls around the garden after the introducer’s brother passed them to her. Scott and Chris immediately saw a possible Britain’s Got Talent act, although transporting two sheep from Northern Ireland would have been less straightforward than taking Ashley and Pudsey to an audition.

Deborah Meaden rejects the celebrity-appliance café

Chris returned to Deborah Meaden with the proposed café decorated exclusively with celebrity white goods. He offered Jeremy Vine’s toastie maker, Tom Green’s fridge and Suzanne Dando’s former fridge-freezer as attractions, arguing that people would rather inspect those than Brian May’s signed guitar.

Deborah asked whether he had discussed the idea with friends and whether anybody would want to eat surrounded by discarded appliances. Chris tried a final image of Tom Jones’s dishwasher across the room, but she replied that she would rather not and ended the call after one minute and 50 seconds. Her verdict was direct: it was good that he had an idea, but “I don’t think this is the one.”

Maximus Aurelius at the school recital

The off-key orchestra returned as Scott imagined Chris and Beccy married with a ten-year-old child called Maximus Aurelius. Their exceptionally strong son played a tuba in his first school recital while his parents tried to remain proud and supportive.

Beccy immediately objected to the child’s name and said it demonstrated why she would never marry Chris. Once the performance began, neither supposed parent could suppress their laughter at the orchestra, confirming Scott’s suspicion that Chris would struggle badly at a real child’s concert.

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