Sarah-Jane Crawford takes aim on Innuendo Bingo
Sarah-Jane Crawford arrived from 1Xtra with unfinished business after placing Scott and Chris only 97th in her Hot 100 list. Trevor Nelson had apparently offered one piece of tactical advice before she crossed over to Radio 1: aim for the groin. Sarah-Jane took it remarkably literally. Almost as soon as Innuendo Bingo began she was firing water directly at Chris’s trousers, and the combination of her accuracy and the amount of water she could hold left him drenched.
The clips began with a BBC local-radio discussion about climbing Lord Hereford’s Knob and moved through another excitable local caller, Radio 4 having trouble getting a Second World War bomber “up”, and Britain’s Got Talent producing another unfortunate description of what a contestant did while watching television. Thomas Schafernaker’s name cropped up during an especially useful Radio 4 question about things people had never tried, while an interview with Union J supplied a line about whipped cream which sounded very different once isolated from its innocent context.
There were several returning favourites too. Nicholas Crane’s “clunch” appeared again, Fern Cotton contributed a classic clip, the Today programme continued struggling to get the bomber raised and Dick Strawbridge once again needed to get his beef out on Saturday Farm. By the end Sarah-Jane had abandoned any concern about her own clothes and Chris was walking awkwardly around the studio because his trousers were so wet. Scott was impressed by how much water she seemed able to store in her cheeks, while Chris was mainly impressed that Trevor’s aiming advice had been followed with such dedication.
Scott discovers Hardcore Pawn
Scott admitted that one of his television obsessions had changed. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo had started as exactly the kind of programme he expected to love, but after a handful of episodes he had drifted away from it. Its replacement was Hardcore Pawn, the American reality series following a Detroit pawn shop run by Les Gold and his family.
The title gave Scott an obvious opportunity to announce that he had spent six hours watching “hardcore porn” before eventually clarifying that he meant Hardcore Pawn. He had recorded a run of episodes and watched them in a marathon, fascinated less by the objects being bought and sold than by the extraordinary people who came through the shop. Chris was less convinced by the description, although Scott pointed out that he had already been pulled into another reality obsession, Storage Hunters, after hearing about it on the show.
That conversation led neatly into another fly-on-the-wall programme which was about to begin much closer to home. BBC Three’s The Call Centre was following a Swansea workplace run by Nev Wilshire, and Scott was already convinced it was going to become essential viewing.
Nev and The Call Centre arrive on Scott’s radar
Before the first episode had even aired, Scott was playing clips of Nev managing hundreds of staff at the Swansea call centre. His philosophy was wonderfully direct: happy people sell, so new recruits were expected to stand up and sing. In one clip he launched a group into The Killers’ “Mr Brightside”, specifying C sharp as though this were the most normal induction process in Britain.
Nev’s management style also extended far beyond sales figures. When an employee was heartbroken after discovering her boyfriend was texting other women, Nev marched around the office trying to find her a single man. His mantra was “some will, some won’t, so what, next”, and Scott loved the relentless positivity of it. The employee was less impressed when Nev assumed that any available man would meet her standards.
Scott compared the whole thing to a real-life David Brent, while also sensing that Nev was much warmer and more supportive than that comparison suggested. The call-centre staff themselves were waiting to find out which moments the programme-makers had kept in. Scott predicted that, much like the characters from The Hotel, they were about to become identifiable personalities online as soon as viewers met them properly that night.
Scott tests YouTube’s terrible English lessons
The show returned to a YouTube channel which purported to teach viewers how to pronounce English words but actually mangled them beyond recognition. Dolce & Gabbana became something resembling “Donovan Doxingabana”, Veuve Clicquot turned into “Fufi Carl Kufi”, cappuccino became a baffling repeated “can’t put”, and Lamborghini emerged as “Lambrosellio”. Scott decided that listening to the clips was not enough: he needed to see whether anybody in the real world understood them.
He went into a clothes shop and asked for Dolce & Gabbana using the invented pronunciation. The staff had no idea what he wanted. At an off-licence, seven years of experience were not enough for the owner to recognise Scott’s version of Veuve Clicquot. A coffee-shop worker eventually interpreted the cappuccino attempt as some form of coffee and handed Scott a black one, while the car-wash staff were surprisingly happy to promise that they could clean his imaginary “Lambrosellio”.
The joke kept growing as the team found more videos. Benedict Cumberbatch and Ralph Fiennes were reduced to strings of nonsense syllables, and Jake Gyllenhaal received an equally unusable lesson. Scott was pleased that he had managed to deliver the absurd words with a straight face in public, even if almost nobody had understood what he was talking about.
Charlie Sloth brings fat babies to Real or No Real
Charlie Sloth joined Scott for Real or No Real, immediately reviving their mock argument about Charlie being “Gran Canaria” and Scott being a “fatist”. The claim that it was impossible to lick your own elbow was false, something Scott knew because the show had recently received photographic evidence from a listener who could do it. A supposed story about Piers Morgan having a framed satellite image of Bluewater shopping centre on the wall was also invented.
Steve Angello of Swedish House Mafia really did have the much longer birth name Steve Patrik Angello Josefsson Fragogiannis, giving Scott another pronunciation challenge after the afternoon’s YouTube experiments. The final fact claimed that mothers from across America had taken babies to a New York museum in 1885 for a fattest-baby contest. Charlie suspected the entire fact had been chosen only to continue the show’s jokes about him, but the contest was real.
Scott won the round 40–20. Charlie then used his remaining time to promote the “Miguel Leg Drop Freestyle” he had made after the show’s long-running fascination with Miguel and the wrestling move, before Scott previewed Chris’s next Plan B: stepping in when a pilot could not attend a 747 simulator session.
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