Lessons from student radio
Scott returned to student radio for the first time in years, joining University Radio Bath for its chart programme. The tiny, overheated studio contained about twenty enthusiastic people, forcing everybody to open the window whenever a song played.
One member of the team had a particularly useful job. Gilbert calculated exactly how long Scott could speak before the next track or the news. A typical intervention gave him one minute and four seconds, removing any need for the presenter to add song durations or work backwards from a fixed junction.
Scott decided Radio 1 needed the same system and made Chris his Gilbert. This turned a simple timing exercise into Monday maths involving three songs, links and a news bulletin at precisely 1.30pm. Chris’s calculations quickly unravelled, Scott failed to wrap up when instructed and the news arrived without the smoothness that Gilbert had provided in Bath.
The student station had another dedicated role: somebody followed lyrics during explicit songs and muted every unsuitable word manually. The concentration required impressed Scott, particularly on tracks containing so many edits that missing one seemed inevitable.
Always the one before the one
A book called Why Am I Always the One Before the One? contained an unexpected reference to Scott. Its author, Charlotte Ward, had once arranged work experience at his local radio programme after developing a crush on him. She tried to impress him between records before discovering that, like her, Scott was wild about boys.
The title led into the idea of knowing immediately that somebody was “the one”. One of Chris’s friends, the Convict, emerged from Chris’s birthday night in Watford declaring that he had met the woman he would marry. Scott remembered a former flatmate reaching the same conclusion after a romantic New York weekend, only for the relationship to collapse when the woman visited Britain.
Listener Katie had met a man that weekend and also believed he might be the one. A badly directed text supplied the reverse experience: after a first date, one woman accidentally sent the man himself a message intended for her friend announcing that she had found her future partner.
The next friendship experience
Scott and Chris reviewed their spray tans. Scott’s had lasted; Chris’s appeared to vanish by the following day. Their next shared experience would be Lebanese food as a late birthday celebration, complete with Scott’s promise of “all the meats”.
They considered adding a night in a tent to the list. Scott had camped before but not with Chris, creating the possibility of something closer to Bear Grylls than their normal meals and pub visits.
Greg’s Real or No Real asked whether a Lancashire town had erected a statue of Coronation Street character Hayley Cropper and explored other unusual memorials. The game closed a programme in which Radio 1’s most valuable new idea remained a student with a calculator telling Scott when to stop talking.
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