Scott gets needy about Freshers
Scott had a seasonal problem. Every September he met large numbers of listeners at university Freshers events, all of whom promised they would keep listening to Radio 1. Then they made new friends, stayed out late, slept through the afternoon and disappeared.
This year he wanted proof they had not abandoned him. The answer was a dedicated Freshers check-in phone line which students could ring at any hour to leave a message saying who they were, which university they attended and what they were doing.
Scott was open about the motivation: it was needy. He wanted to know the freshers were still there. Messages could be played on air, provided callers were adults and understood that Radio 1 was not an emergency service.
Can you take a bearded dragon to halls?
Moving weekend also produced endless uncertainty about what students could take into halls, so Scott made Chris ring his old university, Southampton, and ask directly.
The call began plausibly with a tin opener, hairdryer, straighteners and a Teasmade, then steadily deteriorated. Chris asked about keeping wildfowl, putting up a nude poster of “an elderly lady called Mrs Mead”, taking a dartboard, a tuba, a gnome collection and eventually a bearded dragon.
Scott added animal sound effects while the patient person at the university tried to distinguish real belongings from increasingly obvious nonsense. A goat was not allowed. Neither, unsurprisingly, was the dinosaur noise with which the call eventually ended.
Kodaline give everybody Goosebumps
Kodaline had played the Live Lounge and Scott instructed listeners to send messages using #Goosebumps describing exactly how the performance made them feel. They responded by turning emotional reaction into competitive creative writing.
One listener felt wrapped in marshmallow and dipped in Kodaline cocoa. Another imagined an army of hamsters running up their spine. There were magical forests, hummingbirds drinking nectar and even the sensation of lying in a pool of butter while Morgan Freeman read a book.
Fearne Cotton had read some during the Live Lounge; Scott collected the even stranger leftovers. The feature worked partly as praise for the band and partly as a test of how florid Radio 1 listeners could make a simple “that was good” message.
George Takei discovers Innuendo Bingo
The previous day’s Matthew Lewis video received a remarkable outside boost. George Takei, Sulu from the original Star Trek, shared the clip with his enormous Facebook and Twitter audience and challenged followers not to laugh.
Scott could hardly believe it. Within a short time the video had hundreds of thousands of views, many from people who had never encountered Innuendo Bingo before and were thanking Takei for introducing it to them.
This also gave Scott an excuse to rewrite the Arctic Monkeys as “Why’d You Only Call Me George Takei?”, a joke he enjoyed enough to repeat long after everybody else understood it.
Friday therefore ended with two new audience-recruitment systems: George Takei unexpectedly bringing the world to Innuendo Bingo, and Scott actively phoning metaphorical roll-call on every fresher he feared he was about to lose.
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