Hayley from The Call Centre plays Innuendo Bingo
Hayley from BBC Three’s The Call Centre arrived with the tea trolley which had made her one of the programme’s breakout characters. She explained that she had even taken the trolley home because colleagues kept joking about replacing her when she was away. Scott’s more immediate concern was her reputation for swearing: live Radio 1 and a mouthful of water were not an ideal combination.
Hayley chose deliberately harmless substitute words including “sausage” and “badger”, then admitted she was sometimes slow to get jokes and might understand the innuendo only after everybody else. That prediction proved accurate. Clips about hairy dos, a 14-inch putter, a webcam “growler”, footballers hanging in the air and the birdwatching term “jizz” repeatedly caught Chris while Hayley was still processing what she had heard.
She nevertheless became steadily wetter, at one point trying to protect herself with an improvised covering. The final twist was a cup of tea in place of water, an appropriate finish for The Call Centre‘s tea lady. Scott was mostly relieved that she had completed the game without deploying any of the words he had been worried about. The show’s listeners loved her, even if Scott gently disputed the messages claiming she had been exceptionally good at spotting the innuendos.
Wimbledon grunting becomes part of the music
With Wimbledon under way, Scott had become fascinated by the noises tennis players made on court. The usual “Brian Belo” nickname for Wimbledon returned, and recordings of players including Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams were now being treated as production elements rather than sporting sounds.
The show dropped the grunts into Bruno Mars’s “Treasure”, continuing the joke through the programme and promising different players over different songs. Scott’s enthusiasm was already moving beyond a one-off Wimbledon observation and towards the game that would dominate the next day’s show.
There was also a brief detour into celebrity diets after Scott caught himself searching for Gary Barlow’s diet and wondering what had happened to his life. The answer appeared to contain rather more seeds and rather fewer enjoyable snacks than he was hoping for.
Fernando complains about five birthday celebrations
Chris announced that a friend called Fernando wanted to get something off his chest. “Fernando” then appeared sounding remarkably like Chris with an accent. His complaint was about a female friend who had arranged roughly five separate events around one birthday, including meals and weekend celebrations, leaving him wondering why one birthday could not simply mean one night out.
Scott was openly sceptical about Fernando’s identity, particularly because Chris seemed unusually able to explain his friend’s feelings. The situation became much worse when Jess texted the programme. It was her birthday, Chris was due at her meal that evening, and the list of celebrations sounded suspiciously similar to the one Fernando had just criticised.
Jess called in and said she did not believe Fernando was a different person. Chris desperately insisted that he was looking forward to all her birthday events and that the resemblance between the two stories was pure coincidence. Fernando even reappeared to defend Chris and explain that his own problem concerned somebody else. Nobody was convinced. By the end, Scott was enjoying what he described as an exceptionally awkward piece of radio, while Chris faced the prospect of sitting across from Jess at dinner that night.
Charlie Sloth demands a stewards’ inquiry
Charlie Sloth joined Scott for Real or No Real. The longest Wimbledon match really had stretched over three days in 2010, a fact which encouraged still more tennis-grunt sound effects. A claim about an airline charging passengers according to their weight initially produced confusion when the game marked it false, because Charlie was certain he had discussed the real policy on his own show. A check confirmed he was right: Samoa Air had introduced weight-based charging, so the points were corrected.
Scientists really had reported that a silence becomes awkward after about four seconds. Danny Howard, however, had not been responsible for the exclusive first play of Billie Piper’s “Honey to the B”. With the disputed airline fact put right, Charlie and Scott finished level on 30 points.
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