Faliraki pushes the group too far
Chris returned to his 21st year at the Tap End for a second account of the boys’ holiday in Faliraki. Cantona had chosen the hotel with the worst reviews because he expected it to contain plenty of young people. Instead, their group were almost the only guests. Breakfast was served between 6.30 and 8.00am, making it almost impossible to reach unless they stayed awake all night, while each evening meal appeared to be the same unpleasant pasta under a different name.
Halfway through the week, the announcement of a barbecue briefly raised morale. Everybody paid a supplement and imagined fresh food being cooked beside the pool. The hotel instead produced a tray of unidentified meat which had apparently been prepared earlier. There was no barbecue in sight, and each guest received one sausage and one rib with a texture suggesting repeated cooking rather than an open flame.
Cantona finally broke. He knocked over his chair, disappeared for two hours and was found at the bottom of a hill with his head in his hands, using expensive roaming data to search for flights home. Chris delivered the motivational speech from Rocky Balboa about taking life’s hits and continuing to move forward. Cantona listened, reached into his pocket and produced a Zinger Burger which the pair shared while looking towards the sea.
Back at the hotel, a small black cat climbed onto the table. Chris treated its arrival as the sign everybody needed, although in retrospect it may simply have smelled the uneaten meat. Chazza distributed beers, the group went out in formation and the night ended at breakfast the next morning. What had started as a cheap holiday had become a test of unity, and Chris concluded that the group were no longer merely friends but a unit capable of surviving even the hotel’s barbecue.
Scott becomes the voice of the NTAs
Scott was due to work backstage at the National Television Awards that evening. During ITV’s commercial breaks, his voice would fill the O2 Arena with instructions and entertainment for the audience. Chris immediately saw the possibilities: Scott could falsely announce the final bus, tell Dermot O’Leary that his flies were open seconds before transmission resumed or empty the venue by delivering one of his convincing pub-closing announcements.
The National Television Awards had also allowed Scott to run their official Twitter account, which did little to reassure anybody responsible for the event. Scott promised to remain professional but liked a listener’s suggestion that he lead the arena in the Going Home Song. He had previously persuaded people to leave a crowded pub simply by adopting an authoritative voice, so Chris believed thousands of television guests would be equally vulnerable.
Blue contact lenses for Michael Bublé
In Real or No Real, the average person really would spend about two weeks of their life kissing. Natasha Bedingfield had not played tambourine through an instrumental version of the Star Wars theme during a 2002 Live Lounge. Diet Pepsi really had previously been sold as Patio Diet Cola, but Westlife were not known in South Korea as “boys wholesome like auntie’s bread”.
Michael Bublé did not wear blue contact lenses for television performances over Christmas to create his trademark seasonal sparkle. The claim sounded plausible enough for Scott to admit some of his own television tricks, including putting mascara on the upper lashes and using eye drops before appearing on camera. He still backed the false Bublé story and finished with only 20 points.
More essential holiday phrases
The latest comparison did little to support Chris’s Tenerife choice. His £25 share cost less than the disastrous Faliraki hotel, which had at least included meals. Scott’s old guidebooks offered phrases which might prove more useful if the new apartment went wrong. In Dutch, Chris could announce that everybody was having a terrible time or, less usefully, state that he was going to prescribe suppositories.
Other books taught him to ask “What year is this?” in Setswana, request that something be rubbed well with a rag, declare in Welsh that cricket was silly, warn somebody not to pester the girls next door and praise a woman’s excellent breasts. The programme also finally acknowledged that the fictional Isle of Fernando’s used for Take Me Out was filmed in Tenerife, a connection which listeners and even Paddy McGuinness appeared to regard as considerably less secret than Scott had imagined.
The show then searched BBC iPlayer for a glimpse of Scott and Chris in Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. Camera crews had spent several hours in the hot club where they were working, yet the result appeared at 23 minutes and ten seconds for less than a second. Chris could just be seen clapping before the edit moved on. After the effort required to find it, even he admitted that the appearance was barely worth watching.
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