Results music and Chris’s private celebration
With students finishing exams and university, Chris remembered refreshing a library computer to discover his degree result. He had realised at the last moment that the moment required a soundtrack and selected Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” because it sounded suitably emotional. The result was a 2:2, a “Desmond”, and the song remained attached to the memory.
His other end-of-exam ritual was more peculiar. Chris would leave early, go to the toilet for what he described as a celebratory visit and then begin the day’s drinking. Listeners admitted to similar private ceremonies, while others remembered the anticlimax of handing in a dissertation and receiving none of the fireworks they had imagined.
A dangerous survey for every Scott and Lauren
Chris found a survey claiming that Scott was the male name most associated with cheating. He converted it into an improvised service, inviting listeners to submit partners’ names so he could consult the list. Aaron, Robert, Graham, Tom, James, Ben and Sam were declared safe; Dean and Lee were among the supposed dangers.
The calls quickly made the joke uncomfortable. One woman was told that Lee ranked fourth while sitting beside him on a drive to Great Yarmouth, and a text claimed somebody had ended a relationship with a Scott. Chris hurriedly introduced terms and conditions explaining that nobody should make a real decision on the basis of a flimsy survey.
A corresponding list for women placed Lauren at the top. That produced the inevitable message from a Scott preparing to marry a Lauren, while another listener named Jason asked whether the survey meant he ought to be cheating. The feature had started as a way to irritate Scott and ended with the show apologising to whole populations of Deans, Lees, Scotts and Laurens.
Scott mistakes 1966 for breaking news
Scott was following Match of the Day’s recreation of the 1966 World Cup final on Twitter and briefly believed England had just won the tournament. Chris explained that Bobby Moore being lifted by his team-mates was a historical event retold in real time, not evidence that the 2014 competition had somehow begun early.
The misunderstanding sat neatly beside Scott’s repeated promise that his own football song was nearly ready. He had played the 5 Seconds of Summer “woah” vocals and his four-line rap, but the full record had moved to the following Monday. Chris compared the grand claims and shifting deadline to the pre-fight promotion for Carl Froch and George Groves.
Chappers resumes his old position
Mark Chapman returned to the studio in a flashback to the programme’s earlier years. Scott introduced him as a 1990s music expert and played football records for comparison, including “World in Motion”, “Vindaloo”, “Three Lions” and England United’s “(How Does It Feel to Be) on Top of the World”. Chappers immediately corrected Scott’s dates: football had come home at Euro 96, not during the 1998 World Cup in France.
He agreed that Scott’s song contained familiar ingredients from successful predecessors. The communal “woahs” supplied a chant, Guy Mowbray provided proper commentary and the 5 Seconds of Summer chorus was strong. Scott’s visibly lower, flatter voice in the group recording did less to strengthen the case.
The greatest scrutiny fell on the rap. Chappers compared Scott’s delivery with Keith Allen, while Chris was far more animated by John Barnes’s famous “World in Motion” verse. They pointed out that Barnes danced in the video and would still perform the rap whenever asked, establishing a standard Scott had no desire to meet.
Chappers insisted that Radio 1 was the home of live music and asked for an immediate performance. Scott said he could no longer remember the words, read them from a page and still refused to rap them properly. He also revealed that the passage had originally been intended to last 20 or 30 seconds until the team decided it needed severe shortening.
When the recording played again, Chappers observed that the words about heartache, tension and pain made Scott sound as though he were struggling on the toilet. After four and a half years away, he had slipped straight back into puncturing Scott’s confidence. He left having endorsed the rest of the record, corrected its creator’s football history and made the prospect of a future live performance much harder to avoid.
Lettice Rowbotham becomes posh noise
The conversation moved to Britain’s Got Talent. Scott had seen Ellen DeGeneres supporting young rap duo Bars and Melody, but was more fascinated by violinist Lettice Rowbotham. Her extraordinarily clipped introduction — her name, her age and an invitation to ask anything else — sounded to him like a parody of a very posh person.
The show reduced the speech to a sequence of noises for listeners who supposedly could not translate it, then learned from people who knew Lettice that she genuinely spoke that way. She had previously appeared in the Live Lounge with Olly Murs and had reached the talent show’s final, but Scott remained as interested in the name Lettice and possible salad jokes as in her violin playing.
Skream brings garage shouts and a ten-all draw
Skream joined Real or No Real and thanked the show for restoring Scott and Chris’s exaggerated garage shout-outs to his programme. He was preparing a Friday-night show with Secondcity and Christoph, but first had to judge four stories about Radio 1 and Big Weekend.
David Rodigan really did begin 1Xtra links by greeting DJ Target’s mother, as recordings of “sweet reggae music” and “time to get nutty” proved. Tiësto had not ordered Martin Garrix to reduce his pyrotechnics for fear of being upstaged, although Skream said warm-up DJs playing a headliner’s own records had caused genuine arguments in the past.
Alan Titchmarsh had not requested a hot-water bottle on his Big Weekend rider. Skream’s own requirements were comparatively simple: drinks and pitta breads, even though some American venues supplied far more food than anybody could use. The cold Glasgow weather made the invented Titchmarsh comfort briefly plausible.
Nick Grimshaw really had attempted to crowd-surf at a Glasgow club and lost both shoes. Scott remembered Grimmy already being in a celebratory mood before releasing giant balls during the Friday dance event, making the escalation entirely believable. Scott and Skream both finished with ten points, and the week ended with a firm promise that the completed World Cup song would finally be played on Monday.
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