Pointless history and a live audience
The Student Tour opened at the University of Stirling, with the entire programme shown live on the BBC Red Button. Scott and Chris were delighted by the campus, which they compared with Center Parcs, and slightly unsettled by having an audience react to every line like a sitcom crowd.
They could finally discuss Saturday’s Pointless Celebrities. The pair had produced two consecutive pointless answers, although Chris’s uncontrolled celebration embarrassed his mum and appeared to confuse Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman. They had not won, but felt they had avoided the public humiliation many viewers expected.
A service students did not deserve
The Situation Phone was supposed to help students with genuine campus problems. Its first caller, Jack, stood beside an empty swimming pool in a robe and claimed that his trunks had fallen into the water. He could easily have retrieved them himself. An irritated Scott and Chris eventually pushed him into the pool, allowing him to recover the shorts while giving their customer service a poor score.
Another caller said a model had failed to attend a life-drawing class. Scott brought Chris into a room filled with waiting art students and left him to realise that he was the replacement. Chris reluctantly removed his clothes, then attempted painfully ordinary small talk while everybody drew him. He asked whether the students had nightclubs and tried to behave as though the situation were normal, despite clearly hating every second.
Laura’s lecture crush
Laura contacted the show about a man she fancied in her lectures at Southampton. She had barely spoken to him and knew almost nothing about him, so the team named him Hot Lecture Guy. Scott promised to provide a special date spread when the tour reached Southampton on Friday if Laura asked him out before then.
The challenge immediately became the Tour’s continuing story. Laura expected to see him in an English lecture the next day, while listeners began offering approaches that ranged from a straightforward coffee invitation to shouting “straight in my basket”. Scott insisted that she act before Friday rather than allowing the crush to remain entirely theoretical.
Nicole alarms her mum
Nicole lived with her mum in Glasgow and travelled to Stirling, but her mum still worried about the imagined excesses of student life. The show placed Nicole in a fake bedroom and asked her to make an ordinary video call while increasingly suspicious figures entered behind her.
A half-dressed man, red cups, noisy partygoers and a person in a squirrel costume turned a supposed group-work session into a parent’s nightmare. Nicole repeatedly insisted that everything was fine until Scott and Chris appeared and admitted the set-up. Her mum was relieved, although not entirely convinced by their promise that Nicole would return to serious work.
Sports president Jess played Real or No Real with the fact reader dressed as a giant squirrel. Stirling’s 2013 University Challenge team really had consisted of alumni, Andy Murray really did spend £4,000 on his entourage while drinking lemonade himself, and the university genuinely had a wizarding society with a sorting ceremony, potion lessons and Quidditch. The tour then boarded its bus for Liverpool, where Grimmy and an unprecedented Innuendo Bingo were waiting.
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