Chris auditions for CBBC
In 24 Years at the Tap End, Chris returned to the age of 15 and the point when his interests in football, girls, music and radio began pulling him towards broadcasting. After attending a West Ham match with his aunt, he stopped at McDonald’s and found a BBC Talent leaflet on the floor. One section advertised DIY TV, a CBBC project looking for 12 young people who would live together, be followed by cameras and create a television programme.
Chris completed the application and unexpectedly reached an audition in London. The final 120 candidates were divided between London, Manchester and Scotland, and the London group appeared to him to be full of loud stage-school performers. Facing a panel which included Josie D’Arby, a television producer and a psychologist associated with Big Brother, he chose his guitar as the interesting object he had been asked to bring and performed the chorus of “Wonderwall”.
The audition seemed unremarkable until Chris went to the toilet and became trapped inside a cubicle by a faulty handle. He called for help for about half an hour before the male producer from the judging panel found him. Chris assumed the incident had destroyed his chances, but the producer found it funny and remembered his name. His mother, waiting elsewhere, had not noticed that he was missing.
The final 24 and three free texts
Chris reached the final 24 and travelled to Evesham for an overnight selection weekend. His parents bought him a Nokia 3210 for safety, giving him his first mobile phone and an allowance of three free text messages a day. Most of the other candidates still seemed loud and irritating, but he got on with a girl he called Mavis. She repeatedly listened to Robbie Williams’ “She’s the One”, permanently connecting the song with that weekend in his memory.
At the final decision, Josie D’Arby read 12 names and moved those candidates, including Chris and Mavis, into another room. They could not tell whether they had won until psychologist Linda Papadopoulos entered and revealed that their group had been rejected. Chris described it as his first experience of proper rejection, with no other project waiting to soften it.
He did leave with Mavis’s number and devoted all three daily texts to her for a while. They eventually lost touch, although she reappeared in his life at the under-18 club night previously recalled in a Christmas Tap End. Chris’s advice to future talent-show contestants was to enjoy the experience, avoid treating rejection as a catastrophe and remember that being locked in a toilet could sometimes make an audition more memorable.
Beccy hears Hanging in the Morning
Beccy had disliked S-Dosser’s first follow-up to “Bish Bash Bosch”, believing that he had abandoned what people enjoyed about the original. “Hanging in the Morning” immediately produced a different reaction. Its changed references from Fanta to beer, increasingly quick delivery, rhymes about being drunk and the repeated junk-in-the-trunk section won her over by the end of the first listen.
The team compared S-Dosser’s dance-rap style with will.i.am and decided that the principal differences were a better microphone, more expensive clothes and a larger budget. Both had even managed to feature a vocal which sounded like Fergie. Listeners were asked which performer they wanted more of during 2013, while Scott imagined S-Dosser replacing will.i.am in one of the spinning chairs on The Voice.
An apology letter at Mumbai airport
Scott’s flatmate had returned from visiting a friend in India and lost the small remaining part of his boarding pass while getting onto the aircraft in Mumbai. Despite still having his passport and having already passed through the airport, he was marched out of the terminal to an official’s office. The plane and roughly 300 passengers waited while the problem was resolved.
The official handed him a sheet of paper and instructed him to write an apology for losing the boarding pass. His first attempt, beginning with a conventional expression of regret, was read and rejected as not apologetic enough. He was made to start again and add several more “reallys” before the official accepted it and escorted him back to the aircraft. Nobody could decide whether this was genuine airport policy or one employee enjoying an unusual amount of power.
Real or No Real with Jameela Jamil
Jameela Jamil joined the game after spending part of the day dressed as a polar bear. Rich people in China really had hired body doubles to serve prison sentences in a practice called ding zui, leading everybody to nominate their own possible substitutes. Plan B’s real name was not Plantation Beetroot VII, and the phrase “a square peg in a round hole” had not been updated for younger people to “an HDMI in a USB”.
Women did remain angry for longer than men following arguments, according to the stated research, a result which Jameela and Beccy accepted rather too enthusiastically for Chris’s comfort. Shop mannequins were not all Dutch, despite an attempt to support the claim with accents and a story about somebody who fancied a mannequin in a wedding-dress shop. Chris initially awarded Beccy points for an answer she had got wrong; after Jameela exposed his scorekeeping, the result had to be corrected.
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