The iPad problem gets bigger
The photograph of a man holding up an iPad during the introduction of Pope Francis had opened a wider argument about people using tablets as cameras. Rebecca had encountered the same problem at an Olly Murs concert, where somebody in front of her held a large screen towards the stage and blocked a substantial part of the view. Scott thought anybody doing it looked as if they were filming with a baking tray.
The response to Nina Nesbitt’s “Stay Out”, Scott’s Big Thing for the week, was much more positive. Listeners who had seen her supporting Ed Sheeran or at T in the Park rang to declare themselves Nesbians. Gordon, aged 23, delivered his declaration loudly in the street, while Scott revealed that Nina would come in the following Thursday for a special edition of Innuendo Bingo.
Mystery shoppers reveal their secrets
Scott remained fascinated by mystery shopping after learning that a friend’s first assignment involved standing at a railway station and recording late trains. Former workers and shoppers explained how the system operated. A coffee-shop employee recognised a regular assessor by her shaved head, backpack and clipboard. The woman ordered a cappuccino, carried it back to her car and weighed it to check the proportions of milk and froth. Once the employee realised that she was an old schoolfriend’s mother, friendly questions about her son helped produce a perfect score.
Car-showroom staff became suspicious of visitors wearing oversized handbags in the wrong position, apparently to conceal cameras. They would warn one another when somebody lingered near an unattended desk and asked obvious questions. A listener who had worked as a shopper at the age of 12 gave such a bad report about a dirty bowling alley that she later found it boarded up, leaving Scott impressed by the power she had held as a child.
One man discovered an easier route to a free meal. He overheard restaurant staff saying that they expected an assessor, then took out the notebook he had brought for work. When the bill arrived, the meal was on the house. He had never actually claimed to be a mystery shopper, but the misunderstanding was useful enough to make Scott wonder whether the trick could work again.
Chris goes undercover very badly
Chris was sent to a busy café near Radio 1 with a bag of equipment he had not seen. It contained a white T-shirt with “Mystery Shopper” printed across the front, a notebook, a newspaper with eyeholes cut into it, a pipe and a plastic glasses, nose and moustache disguise. The eyebrows and moustache moved whenever he wound up a small mechanism.
Scott directed him through an earpiece. Chris asked for the café’s best table and queried why the recommended one was at the back. He ordered the finest coffee, praised the speed of the service and wrote “Good table” and a conspicuous mark of seven out of ten across an entire notebook page. Each time he wanted attention, he wound up his eyebrows and moustache.
The staff remained remarkably calm. A server brought his mocha without reacting to the disguise, the notes or the T-shirt. Chris attempted to sound important by announcing that it was “a lovely coffee for a very important person”, but his delivery made the line stranger rather than more convincing. He then asked directly for something on the house and was politely refused.
With subtlety having failed completely, Scott told him to stand, bang the table and announce, “For ’tis I, the mystery shopper.” Chris delivered the reveal and fled into the rain. The café had neither challenged him nor given him anything free, making the attempt both the world’s worst disguise and an unusually unsuccessful piece of intimidation.
Back at Radio 1, the team repeatedly watched the short video of him entering the café. The discomfort reminded Chris of an old feature in which Scott instructed him to question men from inside a toilet cubicle. When listeners asked for it to return, Scott promised a new edition of Scott Talks to Men in the Toilet on Monday.
Dear Scott
The Posh Radio 4 Lady read a complaint that reports about Chris’s Mila Kunis interview had described S-Dosser, the Convict and Chango the Beast as fictional characters. Chris insisted they were real friends who had appeared throughout 24 Years at the Tap End. S-Dosser even had a Twitter account, although Chris did not think he should have to parade his friends online merely to prove their existence to BBC America.
Another listener wanted badges for the “hard-core Starkies” who had followed Chris before the Mila video. Scott compared the idea with music fans boasting that they knew a band before it became mainstream and suggested that everybody calm down. The team also confirmed that there were no plans for a third full series of Tap End, although Chris still liked the possibility of an occasional special.
Andy, a former peasant in the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, had embarrassed himself on ITV’s Tipping Point. Asked a quick-fire question whose answer was Martin Luther King, he had inexplicably shouted “Germans”. That prompted a search for other terrible quiz-show answers and another attempt to watch Scott’s appearance on Hole in the Wall. Scott had previously banned all mention of the programme, but the clip was still extremely easy to find online.
Real or No Real with Matt Edmondson
Matt Edmondson joined for Friday’s game and heard that Chris Packham had not once dressed as a panda to encourage real pandas to mate. The discussion did reveal that zoos had shown pandas footage of other pandas mating, but Packham had not supplied an enticing dance himself.
Hartlepool really had elected the football club mascot H’Angus the Monkey as mayor in 2002. Scott and Chris then became distracted by their different pronunciations of “mayor”. The full name of Lake Chaubunagungamaug in Massachusetts was also accepted as real, despite being sufficiently complicated that Scott and Matt struggled to repeat it.
Sara Cox had ridden in a charity horse race, a memory Chris initially feared he had dreamed, but she was not preparing a dressage routine to LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem”. Scott won by 40 points to 20. Matt left to prepare a weekend programme involving the Saturdays, pie tennis and a rap battle with Sway, while Scott confirmed that the toilet experiment would return after the weekend.
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