Laura Tobin arrives prepared for Innuendo Bingo
After BBC forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker’s soaking the previous week, Daybreak weather presenter Laura Tobin arrived for Innuendo Bingo with specialist equipment. She produced a pair of blue novelty glasses fitted with tiny working windscreen wipers. If anybody ought to arrive prepared for a downpour, Scott decided, it was a weather presenter.
Before the game, Laura explained that weather forecasters across rival broadcasters largely knew one another because so many had trained through the Met Office or worked together earlier in their careers. Scott was fascinated by the idea of a secret “weather circle” and wanted an invitation to its Christmas party. Laura talked about Ian McCaskill, while Scott and Chris pictured Carol Kirkwood arriving in grand style and everyone spending the evening talking about the weather anyway.
The glasses looked excellent but offered little practical protection. Laura immediately lost water at clips from Daybreak, Radio 1 and the familiar Radio 4 material about watching birds grow. Jonathan Agnew asking Phil Tufnell whether the members had risen for him produced another hit, while Grand Designs Australia supplied discussion of an especially large deck.
Scott kept returning to established favourites too, including Dale Winton’s “I accept beef, I’m looking for beef” and the fishing line about the pull on a rod. Laura’s laughter developed into a noise that neither Scott nor Chris could identify, and by the end the wipers had become irrelevant. The forecast had been correct: she was drenched.
The Fifth Element produces Chris’s new look
The previous night’s Movie Week gathering at Nick Grimshaw’s house had gone ahead, complete with popcorn and a group watch of The Fifth Element. Scott admitted he had left before the ending, which meant the effort to educate everybody about films had not completely succeeded.
Chris’s greater sacrifice was visual. He had been dressed as Leeloo, the film’s orange-haired central character, with makeup and a bright wig. Chris maintained that the makeup was a first until Scott pointed out his existing willingness to try various grooming products. Scott also put on the wig and concluded that he looked less like Leeloo and more like Mary Portas.
The programme posted the pictures for listeners, despite Chris briefly trying to believe that nobody had taken any. For a week supposedly designed to improve Radio 1’s film knowledge, the most memorable lesson so far seemed to be that Chris Stark could be turned into a surprisingly convincing Fifth Element character.
Chris’s mysterious visitor and the possible Mr Hudson
Chris had told Scott about a strange late-night sight outside his house. A small woman, heavily wrapped in scarves and with her face obscured, appeared to spend hours moving a wheeled shopping trolley along the street. Chris initially thought an animal was moving near the bag before realising somebody was crouching beside it. By the time Scott drove him home the following night, the story had acquired the shorthand of “the witch”.
Their journey then produced another mystery. At a petrol station they saw an older white-haired man stepping from a people carrier and somehow decided he might be Mr Hudson. The description did not really fit, but the kind of vehicle looked sufficiently pop-star-like for them to investigate.
Scott pulled alongside the driver’s cab and asked whether there was a booking for Hudson. The driver appeared to answer yes, which only made the situation more confusing. Scott tweeted the actual Mr Hudson asking whether he had just been at the petrol station. No reply had arrived, so the programme was left with the wonderfully flimsy conclusion that it probably was not him, unless it was.
Scott discovers the perfect insult: salad
Before the previous night’s film, Scott and Chris had encountered a man in a pub who instantly became the sort of stranger they could not stop listening to. He was loud, extremely confident and spent ages telling a member of staff about being a film producer, inviting her to Brighton and then making a conspicuous phone call about money and a Maserati.
Scott desperately wanted the staff member to escape rather than having to politely listen. Chris had found the ideal description: the man was an “absolute salad”. The insult had been borrowed from Example’s Twitter feed and meant, roughly, an idiot or somebody behaving unbearably.
Listeners who had never heard it needed an explanation, but Scott and Chris were already sold. “Salad” had the advantage of sounding ridiculous enough to be funny without requiring anything stronger on daytime Radio 1, and the pub film producer had provided a near-perfect demonstration of when it should be used.
A photograph becomes an intentionally awkward video
Scott had been in early to record an interview for the Official Chart Show and decided to end it with a trick. He asked the interviewee to pose for a photograph with him, while the person holding Scott’s phone was secretly recording video instead.
The aim was simply to discover how long two people could continue smiling before the silence became unbearable. Scott held the pose, the camera operator pretended it was not working and the guest patiently stayed in place. When the lack of conversation became too strange, Scott filled it with desperate small talk about the royal baby.
The pose lasted for the best part of a minute before Scott finally admitted the phone had been on video. He thought the result was far better than an ordinary photograph: a long record of two people smiling fixedly while both waited for a shutter that was never going to fire.
Greg James plays Real or No Real
Greg James joined Real or No Real, starting with a story that the United States flag had been designed by a school pupil who originally received a B-minus for the project. That was real, much to Scott and Greg’s surprise. John Newman’s “Love Me Again” did not contain Morse code spelling out “love me”, despite a sequence in the track that made the claim sound plausible.
The programme also declared real a deliberately precise claim about how high the average 57-year-old man wore his trousers, leading Scott and Chris back to their theory that everybody eventually reaches an age at which the waistband rises and a permanent shirt and tie appears.
Finally, the idea that The One Show had recorded a new “two, two, two” version of its theme when Glastonbury coverage moved it from BBC One to BBC Two was no real. Greg finished on 30 points to Scott’s 20, while Scott prepared for Friday’s much bigger appointment: the first Radio 1 play of One Direction’s new single.
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