A drink beats the England match
By day five, listeners were singing Scott’s Lisa and Steve theme tune in supermarkets and thinking about the couple during England’s football match. Scott began to realise he had accidentally created a miniature radio soap opera.
Lisa described the previous night’s date as her favourite so far. Steve had wanted to watch the football, but when Lisa told him it was his choice he stuck to their original plan and took her out for a drink instead. They compromised by checking the score on their phones.
There were small signs of couple behaviour everywhere. Lisa trusted Steve with her bank card and PIN while she rushed to the toilet, but complained that he repeatedly bought her full-sugar Coke when she asked for Diet. Steve insisted he was looking after her by avoiding artificial sweeteners, an argument Scott treated with the scepticism it deserved.
A scientific test says they should stay friends
Scott found an American magazine quiz titled along the lines of “Is he more than just a friend?” and subjected Lisa to it. Questions about Facebook walls, compliments and baseball-team friends were so obviously aimed at teenage American readers that they barely described Lisa and Steve’s lives at all.
Her answers nevertheless produced a verdict: they were “totally BFFs” and should not complicate things. Scott was unimpressed with the science but enjoyed the awkwardness of a friend-zone quiz arriving in the middle of a national experiment designed to escape exactly that zone.
Chris gives Steve dating advice
For the first time, the show spoke to Lisa and Steve separately in the hope they might be more candid. Steve agreed the drinks date had gone extremely well and revealed that he too considered it the best one so far.
Chris had phoned him privately before the date with techniques inspired by The Game. Steve was supposed to make a slightly backhanded compliment, stop talking to see whether Lisa restarted the conversation and perform Chris’s favourite “magic” trick by asking her to choose a number between one and ten.
The compliment never found a suitable moment. The silence test worked because Lisa resumed the conversation. The magic trick failed completely: Chris’s theory said she would choose seven, but Lisa chose four.
Face/Off versus Beauty and the Beast
The next date would be movie night at Steve’s house. He wanted Lisa to watch his favourite film, Face/Off. Lisa agreed, on condition that he sat through her favourite, Beauty and the Beast.
Steve tried to argue that giving up the full football match the previous evening should count as his romantic sacrifice. Scott refused. If Lisa was accepting Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swapping faces, Steve could make time for Disney.
The show then returned to another growing obsession, Ylvis’s “The Fox”. Scott had heard it do well on Edith Bowman’s Review Show and was increasingly convinced that, if listeners could actually buy it, it had the ingredients of a number one.
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