Zane Lowe discovers he cannot beat the speech jammer
Friday’s experiment with delayed audio had left Scott with one obvious target. If a fraction-of-a-second delay could reduce Chris to slow, strangely pitched speech, what would it do to Zane Lowe, one of the fastest talkers on Radio 1? Zane arrived confident enough to suggest he might actually beat it. He was used to hearing processing and delay while broadcasting and wondered whether he could “destroy science”.
Scott began by letting Chris demonstrate again. The delay in his headphones immediately turned a simple attempt to say “sausages” repeatedly into an erratic mess, before he struggled through an ordinary Radio 1 link. Zane watched with interest but still seemed to think his years behind a microphone might give him an advantage.
The proper test was deliberately unfair. Scott told Zane he was about to be interviewed by a genuine music journalist about his major four-part Jay-Z interview airing that week. The “journalist” was Greg, who began asking perfectly straightforward questions just as Scott switched on the delay in Zane’s headphones.
It worked instantly. Zane could still get words out, but his pace collapsed, phrases repeated and his normal fluency disappeared. Greg kept asking what Jay-Z had been like and whether everything was all right, while Zane became increasingly exasperated by sounding unlike himself. Eventually he decided the safest response was simply to tell everybody to listen at 7pm and end the interview.
Zane admitted afterwards that he had misunderstood how disruptive the effect would be. It was not like the familiar sort of delayed monitoring he had experienced before, it genuinely seemed to scramble the process of forming the next sentence. Scott concluded that the jammer might be a useful tool for tight-lipped pop stars who wanted to survive interviews without accidentally revealing anything.
Chris, meanwhile, was delighted that somebody else had suffered after Scott made him phone a colleague while sounding drunk. Scott promised his own turn would come, although he wanted to invent a suitably awful situation first.
Jen Long makes a very wet Innuendo Bingo debut
BBC Introducing presenter Jen Long came in for her first Innuendo Bingo, having already borrowed a towel from the gym in preparation. Scott introduced her Radio 1 work with Ally McCrae and was equally fascinated by her BBC Three continuity voice, persuading her to demonstrate the sort of links she recorded for Family Guy and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents.
Jen had heard the game and seen photographs but had never played. She made up for that lack of experience with enthusiasm. BBC Wiltshire’s Graham Seaman started proceedings with an instruction to “stand there and blow yourself”, before Five Live supplied a presenter lubricating his lips and This Morning moved onto knocking one off during a coconut shy.
There was no cautious settling-in period. Jen repeatedly sprayed Chris and quickly soaked the front of her own clothes. Familiar sources including Dinner Date, Test Match Special, Grand Designs Australia, Big Brother and Rick Stein kept the water coming, with lines about being “comfortable in the beaver”, an enlarged deck and buying sausage by length all doing damage.
By the time the game finished, Jen was grateful for the borrowed towel but had another problem: she had a BBC Three planning meeting shortly afterwards and had not brought a change of clothes. Scott had expected a nervous newcomer. Instead, he thought she had produced one of the wettest debuts the feature had seen.
Pillow menus blow Chris’s mind
Jen’s borrowed towel led into another form of hotel etiquette. Scott mentioned that Demi Lovato apparently liked to take a pillow from hotels and replace it with one from the previous place she had stayed. Chris thought that sounded reasonably harmless until Scott pointed out that some hotels offered entire pillow menus.
The concept genuinely baffled him. Scott explained that guests could choose between firm synthetic pillows, different kinds of down, neck-support options and much more. Chris could not imagine phoning reception to order a specific pillow without feeling absurdly demanding.
Listeners quickly confirmed that pillow menus were not limited to the most expensive hotels. Scott found one offering a startling number of choices and enjoyed imagining the formal room-service call required to request the most elaborate goose-down option. It also ruined the apparent simplicity of Demi’s pillow swap: she might be exchanging carefully selected pillows of entirely different types without realising it.
Is Britain ready for a national siesta?
The heatwave was continuing and Scott thought Britain might need to adopt another feature of hotter countries: an afternoon siesta. His first proposal was a short nap around lunchtime, but that would collide rather badly with his own programme.
One listener improved the idea by suggesting Radio 1 simply go silent for half an hour from 2pm. Everybody could leave their radios switched on, sleep, then wake when Scott put on something suitably loud at 2.30. Chris pointed out that dead air might make people think the station had broken, but Scott believed a properly announced national siesta would solve that.
He planned to raise it with weather presenter Laura Tobin when she came in on Thursday. If temperatures were going to remain this high, he wanted official permission for the country, and conveniently the Scott Mills show, to take a little afternoon break.
Real or No Real turns into a Radio 1 social club
Alan Dedicoat arrived for Real or No Real after Chris warned Scott that their previous encounters had started sounding less like a quiz and more like two friends forgetting they were on the radio. Scott promised to be sensible. That promise lasted almost no time at all.
Zane Lowe was still around, Greg James appeared and the studio gradually filled up. A claim that Brad Pitt’s real arm injury had been incorporated into Seven was real. Trevor Nelson had not voiced a giraffe in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, despite the programme becoming distracted by the idea that Trevor and 1Xtra’s Nick Bright sounded alike. The enormous number of combined working hours attributed to the animation of WALL-E was accepted as real.
From there the game dissolved. A claim involving Robert De Niro’s weight at the Oscars prompted more teasing, people began talking over one another and an arm wrestle suddenly broke out. Even Scott admitted he had no idea what had happened during the previous ten minutes.
There was effectively no point worrying about a final score. The warning that Real or No Real had become too much like a social club had been followed by the most social-club edition possible, with Alan, Zane and Greg helping to turn the studio into exactly the chaos Chris had been asked to prevent.
—
COMMENTS