Noddy Holder’s advice becomes a song
The programme’s attempt to create a modern Christmas standard had reached its first recording. Noddy Holder had advised them that Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” was essentially a normal rock song with festive lyrics rather than a record built around sleigh bells. He suggested relatable references to family, turkey, stuffing, pigs in blankets, Christmas pudding, sherry and other seasonal details.
Chris wrote everything down and produced a short demo. His lyrics raced through turkey crowns, Brussels sprouts, chocolate coins, reindeer, beer, cheese wheels, trees, meat, mince pies, chicken thighs, sherry, pigs in blankets, snowballs and elves. A spoken section invited Santa and Mrs Claus inside for eggnog, before a final list wandered into half-price goods, carpet tiles, televisions, deep freezes and gold chains.
The problem was the backing track. Chris had reused the music from his rejected Skyfall theme, which itself sounded remarkably like the theme from Only Fools and Horses. Beccy remembered recognising it while recording the backing vocals, and Scott questioned whether they could build a song intended to last 40 years on somebody else’s tune.
Listener reaction was much more positive than Scott expected. A video placed every item from the lyrics on screen, including a glamorous Mrs Claus who explained Chris’s enthusiasm for more eggnog. The team treated the demo as a starting point, although Chris argued that the ultimate Christmas song might already be finished.
The pulled-pork recount
The show replayed the previous day’s discussion about packaged pulled pork and asked listeners how often the word “pork” appeared in 50 seconds. Chris guessed 12 and Beccy guessed nine. The initial ruling was 11, but listeners demanded a recount after hearing one of Chris’s pronunciations as “por”.
The team decided that the shortened pronunciation did not count without the final consonant, leaving the total at 11. Anybody who had given that answer received ten Danny Howard points, while the debate added another layer of confusion to a conversation that had already struggled to establish who did the pulling.
Dear Scott and the Italian toilet lesson
The Posh Radio 4 Lady read a message from Emma, who had visited the toilet in a chain restaurant and discovered that its speakers played an Italian-language lesson instead of music. She wondered whether learning vocabulary in a cubicle was normal. Chris suggested it was cheaper to buy a plate of bolognese and remain in the toilet than to pay for a language course, although Scott thought friends might become concerned after a few hours.
The discussion widened to unclear signs on toilet doors. Scott and Beccy objected to restaurants and bars replacing “men” and “women” with vague symbols which became particularly difficult after a drink. They tested examples involving a squirrel and a badger, a cowboy hat and boots, then the words “mango” and “no mango”. Every explanation required so much reasoning that the team returned to the simplest request: label the doors clearly.
Another listener asked why Chris always smiled with his mouth closed in photographs. Chris said he had disliked open-mouthed school and graduation pictures because showing his teeth also made his eyes widen and his eyebrows rise. After demonstrating it in the studio and producing a face compared with an excited Jim Carrey, he decided to continue with his usual half-smile.
The messages also inspired “Lawrence and the Machine”. Clips of the computer voice from Loving the Trolls were placed over a dance backing track, turning insults including “talentless twerp” and “You have the musical taste of a ten-year-old girl” into a short song.
Real or No Real
Taylor Swift really had spent part of her childhood on an 11-acre Christmas-tree farm. William Shakespeare had owned a pen, but “haha”, “lolz” and other online expressions had been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
There was no annual Shreddies knitting contest inspired by the cereal’s advertising campaign. Across the Bond films, James Bond really had killed 150 men and slept with 44 women. Buzz Aldrin did not have simultaneous phobias of open spaces and cheese slices, and Vinnie Jones had never eaten his own football boot to settle a bet.
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