Back from Glasgow with a sore face
Scott and Chris returned from Radio 1’s Academy after a flight on which Chris became agitated by a short delay and then posed for a selfie with cabin crew while the aircraft was descending into Gatwick. The previous day’s broadcast had left him with a genuine red mark from the Waterloo Road acting workshop. Watching the slap again made him visibly uncomfortable, but it was soon overshadowed by a much bigger recording.
Scott had been away when Hugh Jackman offered to play Innuendo Bingo. Rather than miss the opportunity, the programme found the only substitute Scott considered suitable: Kylie Minogue. She introduced herself as the host of the Danny Howard Show, joked that Scott was on his annual teeth-whitening holiday and insisted her contract allowed her to work only with Australians.
Hugh Jackman brings Wolverine to Radio 1
Hugh was promoting X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time-travel story that allowed Wolverine to appear with both generations of the franchise’s cast. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halle Berry occupied the future, while Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender appeared in the past. Hugh described it as the largest and most emotional instalment so far.
He was due to read with six British actresses for a play immediately afterwards but agreed to be soaked first. Both he and Chris had recently taken antibiotics, making the planned exchange of water even less appealing. Chris nevertheless regarded receiving Hugh Jackman’s germs as a story worth telling his friends.
Kylie asked whether Hugh had ever gone home dressed as Wolverine. His wife Deborra-Lee Furness was not especially attracted to the claws, mutton chops or leather costume, although she appreciated the body underneath. Hugh said she would be more interested in the prison uniform from Correlli, the drama on which they had met. Chris contributed that his own worst fancy-dress journey home had been made as a Smurf.
Kylie takes control of Bingo
Kylie handled the clips with the confidence of a regular presenter. Downton Abbey needed to go down, Grand Designs Australia admired an enlarged deck and a concert host told a guest how much she liked coming. Seve Ballesteros’s wife kissed his balls, rugby wondered about the top of a hooker’s head and a traveller discovered it was unsafe going down on a donkey.
Hugh and Chris repeatedly drenched one another, and Kylie began taking water herself despite being the host. An Autumnwatch bird feeder required a sniff around its bottom before Crimewatch Roadshow finished with a busy police horse that had been “in the arena” the previous night. Hugh threw himself into the game and Chris ended visibly soaked.
Listeners immediately called it one of the best editions the programme had made. Scott could hardly believe he was able to sit back and watch Kylie presenting Hugh Jackman’s game, and began considering more celebrity guest hosts for future editions.
Windows 95 gets the Friends treatment
Scott had discovered a 1995 video guide to Microsoft Windows starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry at the height of Friends. The “cyber sitcom” placed them in Bill Gates’s supposed office, where they explained taskbars, menus and My Computer through scripted jokes.
Whenever a punchline arrived, slap bass told the viewer to laugh. Scott and Chris tested whether the technique could rescue their own computer jokes about dongles, bugs and trees logging on to the internet. The bass helped, but not enough to explain why two of television’s biggest stars had agreed to the original production beyond what Scott assumed was an enormous fee.
Charlie Sloth’s Thursday helping
Charlie Sloth returned for an extra Real or No Real, wearing a heavy gold chain that Scott and Chris took turns modelling. Packets of crisps really did carry Saturday best-before dates because their long shelf life allowed manufacturers to round the date. Dappy was officially three inches shorter than the Queen, while Ryan Gosling did not eat raw onions like apples as part of his bodybuilding diet. Charlie claimed he did eat raw onions in exactly that fashion without requiring any diet at all.
Australia’s World Cup team, the Socceroos, really had adopted “Hopping our way into history” as its tournament slogan. Scott and Charlie finished level on 20 points, and Charlie used the size of the show’s podcast audience to secure repeated promotion for his own “Sloth pod”.
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