Innuendo Bingo gets a yoghurt edition
Scott decided normal Innuendo Bingo was not messy enough. For the latest “extreme” version there was no second contestant and no cup of water. Chris lay on his back on the studio floor while an assistant spooned yoghurt into his mouth. If a clip made him laugh, the yoghurt would shoot upwards and fall straight back across his own face. Scott delivered a mock safety warning that Chris was a trained professional and nobody should reproduce the idea at home.
Rachel Riley opened the game by talking innocently about a relative who liked to spit-roast anything on a barbecue. The Gadget Show supplied the real headphone brand Fanny Wang, The Apprentice offered somebody expecting a good drilling, and a Radio 1 Call or Delete clip created another unfortunate sentence about somebody wanting to come on the stage. Different flavours of yoghurt followed, including strawberry and blueberry, and Chris became suspicious that the team had tampered with one mouthful when it tasted stranger than the others.
The clips kept coming. Test Match Special, railway history, BBC Northampton, Springwatch and Saturday Farm all contributed, while Sara Cox described being sprayed all over and Doctors discussed somebody spending hours playing with a woggle. By the time BBC Breakfast introduced a “boffin coat”, Chris’s face, beard and clothes were coated. The experiment had proved Scott’s basic theory perfectly: making Chris punish himself every time he laughed was even more ridiculous than having somebody opposite him with water.
Ice cream weather creates childhood panic
Warm weather had Scott and Chris thinking about ice cream vans. Neither had bought an ice cream from one that year, but both recognised the immediate sense of urgency created by hearing the van’s music in the distance. Even as adults, the sound still triggered the childhood fear that the van would disappear before they could get outside.
Scott’s complaint was that the soundtrack had barely changed. If vans were going to create that much excitement, he thought they should update the tunes and play something current rather than the same melodies heard for decades. He wanted to hear songs such as “Blurred Lines” approaching down the street.
The conversation also exposed a shared history of campaigning for food. Scott had once signed a petition to prevent a local ice-cream parlour closing, while Chris had become an unofficial celebrity spokesman for Birmingham’s Mr Egg when that late-night institution was threatened. Apparently nothing inspired civic engagement from the pair quite like the prospect of losing cheap food.
Dear Scott accidentally plans the show’s legacy
An email to Dear Scott made the mood unexpectedly reflective. A listener worried that decades in the future there would be little physical record of the strange phrases and recurring stories which had become part of life for regular listeners. Scott immediately disliked the idea of discussing the show ending at all, while Chris pointed out that memories such as Molly Codling and the Tap End would still be triggered by the right phrase.
The listener proposed an album built around show memories, beginning with the team’s existing “Perfect Christmas Single” and expanding the idea to other events during the year. Scott initially dismissed it, then became interested in a different part of the suggestion: instead of everybody competing for Christmas number one, perhaps the show could deliberately corner another occasion such as Father’s Day or Halloween and create the definitive record for it.
Another listener, an American preparing to visit Broadcasting House, wanted to challenge Chris to Real or No Real. Scott could not promise an official addition to the building tour, but suggested they might manage an impromptu fact if they bumped into each other. A third email about somebody singing Atomic Kitten’s “Eternal Flame” in a doctor’s waiting room revived memories of the show trying to persuade strangers to sing the Home and Away theme together in public. Scott and Chris began searching for a new universally known song which might work for another public singalong.
Summer clothes come with rules
With one of the warmest days of the year underway, Scott surveyed the summer behaviour appearing around London. Sandals were acceptable in the right setting, but socks with sandals definitely were not. Driving with a top off received an equally firm rejection, as did the social-media habit of proudly posting fresh tan lines.
Clothes shopping itself remained a problem for Scott for an entirely different reason. He and Chris had been in a large shop and Scott once again became irritated by how easy it was to find an escalator going further into the store and how difficult it could be to locate the exit. Chris thought the confusion was mostly a Scott problem. Scott was convinced retail architecture was deliberately trapping him.
Greg James reveals the pedestrian-crossing secret
Greg James arrived for Real or No Real. Robin Thicke was not 53, despite his long career and the sunglasses which had made him look older when Scott met him. The first Saturday in June really was associated with Gay Days at Walt Disney World, a fact Greg immediately decided sounded like an excellent holiday.
The most useful fact was about pedestrian crossings. Many crossings have a small rotating tactile cone underneath the push-button box. When the green man appears, the cone turns so visually impaired pedestrians can feel that it is safe to cross. Scott already knew the fact from an earlier show, but Greg had never heard it and wanted to test the underside of the next crossing he encountered.
A claim that an orchestra had handed out popping candy during Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was false, although everybody agreed it would have been a clever way of involving the audience in the climactic sound effects. The round ended 20–20, leaving the secret crossing cone as the fact most likely to be repeated to somebody else later.
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