The laugh on the Edinburgh bus
Scott and Chris both arrived with sore throats, but an Edinburgh bus passenger supplied a more contagious sound. Her extraordinary laugh repeatedly set off the people around her and then the studio, even though none of them knew what had caused it.
The recording became one of those pieces of radio that needed no setup beyond pressing play. By the end, the woman’s laugh had outlasted the original joke and was making strangers laugh at other strangers laughing.
Susie meets the wrong Chris
Listener Susie had spotted a man in a London club who looked remarkably like Chris Stark. Her friends decided he really was “Chris from bbc.co.uk” and encouraged her to approach him. Photographs only strengthened the resemblance.
Susie kissed him before discovering that he was not Radio 1’s Chris. The confusion was helped by the fact that his real first name was also Chris. He continued the joke long enough to offer her a television shout-out, leaving Scott with the rare problem of a celebrity impersonator who was barely impersonating anybody.
The team obtained his telephone number and arranged to hear his version the next day. The genuine Chris was fascinated that another man could apparently borrow his identity, get a kiss and leave before the paperwork arrived.
What breakfast would she make?
Chris explained a questionable code for rating how attractive somebody was by imagining the breakfast she would prepare. Pancakes occupied the top tier, French toast suggested something approaching a demigod, and the scale descended through a full English, beans on toast and cereal.
Callers were invited to apply the system to the presenters. Scott received a full English while Chris was allocated beans on toast. Neither result settled whether the code described attractiveness, domestic ambition or simply what Chris wanted to eat.
Clare Balding’s famous trolley
At the Sochi Winter Olympics, Clare Balding’s shopping trolley had become an unlikely broadcasting companion. It carried equipment rather than groceries, yet appeared often enough in coverage for Scott and Chris to begin tracking it as a character in its own right.
The day’s Real or No Real established that Barbara Windsor really had childhood imaginary friends called Barty and Sarah who lived in the fireplace, and that Danny Howard and Twin B genuinely lived together. The BBC had not employed mystery shoppers to test presenters’ grammar on Twitter. Scott won by thirty points to twenty while Clare’s trolley continued its progress around Sochi.
—
COMMENTS