Scott does Breakfast after a very short night
Scott was unexpectedly on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for one morning, arriving after a weekend break in Spain that had not provided quite the sunshine he expected. Saturday had been rainy enough to ruin his espadrilles, Sunday had finally turned sunny enough to leave him with a bright red face, and a delayed flight had deposited him at Luton at about 1.30 in the morning.
He also revealed a new enthusiasm for buses. Scott had discovered that drivers were far more sympathetic when they could see a would-be passenger making a genuine effort to run for the stop. Somebody strolling towards a closing door might be ignored; somebody arriving breathless had demonstrated sufficient commitment to deserve mercy.
The papers meanwhile showed One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson being heavily tackled during a charity football match and then being sick. Scott and Chris urged angry One Direction fans not to target the player responsible, pointing out that he had been trying to make a legitimate tackle rather than deliberately trigger the aftermath.
James Arthur prepares for the difficult second single
James Arthur came in to introduce “You’re Nobody ’til Somebody Loves You”, the first major step beyond the X Factor winner’s single “Impossible”. He admitted that the first Radio 1 play of his own new material made him nervous in a way the cover version had not.
Arthur described the strange rhythm of winning The X Factor: months of appearing in millions of homes every weekend, the huge Christmas single, then a comparatively quiet period while an album was actually made. He regarded the show as an extremely compressed form of artist development and said Simon Cowell had heard the new material and liked it.
He had also been working with Naughty Boy, whom he described as one of his closest friends in music. That immediately interested Scott and Chris because they had heard legendary accounts of Naughty Boy’s parties without ever quite managing to attend one. Arthur admitted that even he was a little frightened of going.
Scott and Chris also tried to undermine Arthur’s improved diet by repeatedly offering food. James had moved away from his old fondness for buckets of chicken and was attempting to be disciplined, while Chris adopted the dangerous philosophy that one small lapse surely did not count.
When the moment finally arrived, Arthur was openly anxious. Scott’s solution was simple: stop building it up and press play.
Lisa and Steve make it through the weekend
The seven-day relationship experiment had begun on Friday, and Lisa and Steve returned with three dates to report. Friday involved meeting friends at the pub and ending up at McDonald’s. There was a brief awkward period when they first saw each other in their new official roles, but within minutes they were back to their normal friendship.
Saturday was a wedding. This time other guests already knew about the Radio 1 experiment and wanted to meet Steve. More importantly, he and Lisa behaved more like a couple, dancing together and holding hands. They still teased each other exactly like old friends, which Scott decided was encouraging rather than a sign that nothing had changed.
Sunday brought a bowling double date, complete with an argument over Lisa using the barriers. By Monday they had still spent most of their time around other people, so Steve had planned their first proper one-on-one evening. He would not tell Lisa where they were going, though he reassured her that it was not fishing.
Both said the experiment was going well, but Scott repeatedly reminded them that they did not owe the programme a happy ending. The point was to find out whether friendship could become a relationship, and he wanted them to say so if it started feeling wrong.
Monday therefore ended with two different kinds of first: James Arthur hearing his new single go out on Radio 1, and Lisa and Steve about to find out what an actual date felt like without their friends around them.
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