Sophie gives her mum the worst-case scenario
Freshers season had already produced worried parents, but Sophie from De Montfort University offered Scott and Chris a particularly promising candidate. Her mum Katie had recently assumed Sophie had been kidnapped simply because she had slept late and missed a string of calls.
The show decided to confront that anxiety with the least reassuring phone call possible. Sophie would claim she had abandoned horse riding for the university cocktail society, joined a party bus at 8pm the previous night and was somehow still aboard the following afternoon.
Scott supplied party noises while Sophie improvised her way through the conversation. Katie sounded increasingly resigned rather than furious, eventually giving the impression that she had simply accepted university life was now out of her control.
The joke was revealed quickly. Katie was relieved to discover her daughter had actually attended her lecture, and Scott suggested she had now experienced the worst possible version of events without any of it really happening. Sophie, meanwhile, had demonstrated an alarming ability to lie convincingly to her own mother on national radio.
Too many Strictly allegiances
The show had acquired a Strictly Come Dancing problem. Scott and Chris had already been photographed holding a Team Feltz shirt for Vanessa Feltz, but they also knew Rachel Riley and Deborah Meaden, while Scott had discovered a new enthusiasm for Susanna Reid.
Chris worried that publicly supporting everybody made them look fraudulent. He floated the idea of withdrawing from Team Feltz and backing Meaden instead, partly because she had been a friend of the show for years and looked like more of an underdog.
The timing was unfortunate. Vanessa had heard him.
She rang during the discussion and announced herself “heartbroken”, “distressed” and eventually “deeply hurt”. It was delivered with the full theatrical force Scott expected from her, but it left Chris trying to explain a defection he had barely completed. Vanessa argued that the other contestants were better dancers and therefore needed their support less.
By the time she returned to rehearsals with James Jordan, Scott was firmly back behind her. Chris had learned that attempting to manage multiple reality-show allegiances live on the radio was much harder when the contestants could simply phone in.
Giant wasps and Real or No Real
The afternoon also became preoccupied with reports about unusually large wasps, exactly the kind of story capable of sending an already anxious Chris into a spiral.
Rhianna Dhillon joined Real or No Real, with facts including cars ending up in Amsterdam’s canals and Gordon Brown’s alleged KitKat habit. The latter turned out to be true: Scott recalled the former prime minister’s famous support for JLS and enjoyed imagining how much government time could apparently be devoted to chocolate and The X Factor.
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