One more visit to the café
Chris thought the underwear delivery should have ended the story. Scott disagreed. He needed to know whether the café owner liked the pants, why he had wanted them in the first place and whether Chris could ever order lunch there normally again.
The previous day’s brown-paper-bag exit had left too many questions. Scott therefore sent Chris back towards the café for another late lunch, while Chris complained that every situation on the show had to escalate one step beyond the point at which a sensible person would stop.
Then Scott escalated it several more steps without telling him.
Scott phones the café behind Chris’s back
While Chris was walking over, Scott rang the café directly. He explained that he was calling from Radio 1 and asked whether somebody had dropped off a bag of pants the previous day. The owner immediately knew what he meant.
Scott finally confessed the misunderstanding. Chris did not actually know “Matt”; he had simply been too embarrassed to admit it the first time the name came up. The café owner was horrified to learn that Chris had gone out and bought the underwear himself.
The mystery suddenly became mundane. The real Matt worked at a nearby clothes shop and had apparently been in the café before. The owner had mistaken Chris for somebody associated with him. He had wanted to ask the real contact to source underwear for a friend and had intended to pay for it. Chris had turned an ordinary favour into a four-month fiction entirely by saying “yeah, he’s fine” to the wrong question.
The last test of the lie
Scott could simply have told Chris. Instead, he recruited the café owner for a final prank. When Chris walked in, the man began asking increasingly specific questions: how was Matt, when had he last seen him, what was his girlfriend like and would Chris be attending a party at the weekend?
Chris improvised desperately. Matt was fine. His girlfriend was somehow both blonde and brunette. Yes, of course he would be at the party. The owner also confirmed that the new underwear was the right size, although he was not currently wearing it.
Chris left exhausted and convinced he could never return. Only then did Scott reveal the phone call and play him the explanation. The interrogation had been a setup; the actual misunderstanding was finished.
For once an escalation solved the problem. The café now knew Chris was not the person it thought he was, Chris finally knew who Matt was, and most importantly they were allowed to keep buying lunch there.
More Naked and Afraid and Sara Cox
Scott and Chris’s fascination with Naked and Afraid continued as they dug further into the American survival show, still amazed by the combination of dangerous wilderness, no clothes and two strangers meeting for the first time.
Sara Cox also returned for Real or No Real. The show mixed pop and celebrity facts with the increasingly familiar problem that Scott could remember interesting stories from previous rounds without always remembering whether they had been “real” or “no real”.
By the end, however, Wednesday had supplied a genuinely real answer to the only question that mattered: Matt existed.
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