Bamboleo Wednesday escapes the studio
Bamboleo Wednesday had grown too large to stay inside Broadcasting House. Chris took a loudhailer onto the steps and performed the now-established dance in public, turning a private studio ritual into a spectacle for passers-by. Scott stayed close enough to narrate the scene while enjoying the fact that Chris had become the visible face of it.
The celebration supplied a suitably chaotic opening, but even a public Bamboleo could not compete with the latest story from Gary’s apparently endless run of bad luck.
Gary finds a small fortune
Gary had spotted a €500 note on the ground near the BBC. He stood on it for about two minutes, trying to look natural while deciding what to do, then picked it up and put it in his pocket. His intention, he insisted, was to hand it in rather than spend it.
Two young men then approached him, called him “boss” and asked whether he had picked up their money. A flustered Gary immediately replied with the crucial detail: “What, €500?” He had supplied the denomination himself. The men accepted the note and ran away laughing, leaving Gary to realise that he had probably just given a stranger the equivalent of roughly £419.
Listeners pointed out that €500 notes were difficult to use and frequently associated with counterfeiting, but none of that improved the story. Scott and Chris were fascinated by the way Gary had transformed a lucky find into another entry for his unlucky list without anybody else needing to do much at all.
The official list of Unlucky Gary moments
Gary revealed that he kept a handwritten list in an office drawer. It included the time a bird fouled on him before CD:UK, the day he became trapped in a car wash, and the occasion when Jay-Z laughed after somebody hit him. There was also the Coke spilled over a boss, Gemma’s unsuccessful attempt to wax him, a Lovefilm employee apparently laughing before hanging up, and an awkward date on which Gary somehow sat on himself.
Read together, the incidents made his nickname look less like an exaggeration and more like a useful filing system. The €500 episode went straight onto the list.
More student songs and Alice LeKeen
Scott and Chris revisited the recent crop of student-election music videos, including George Bradley’s two-style campaign from Leeds. The songs were now becoming a recurring part of the show, with every candidate attempting to force policies, names and voting instructions into familiar hits.
Alice Levine arrived for Real or No Real and was introduced with the latest variation on her name: Alice LeKeen. The stories included research suggesting that sleep-deprived men were more likely to think women were flirting with them, a claim about the names of the artists behind “Changes”, and an alleged Klaxons jigsaw habit. The most extraordinary item concerned an American therapist who really had claimed that listening to Adele could make people gay.
Alice finished with 40 points while Scott scored nothing, giving Gary at least one person in the building who had suffered a worse result that afternoon.
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