Nobody believed healthy Chris
Chris had been following a strict food and fitness regime for several weeks and had even stayed in while friends went out to watch the rugby. He admitted the weekends were the hardest part because everybody else appeared to be having fun while he was in the gym and eating controlled meals.
Scott identified a professional problem: Chris’s established reputation around Radio 1 was being the person who went out too much. Even colleagues who saw him behaving healthily kept asking whether he was genuinely sticking to it.
Chris realised that years of building a particular image meant nobody believed him when he finally became disciplined. Scott worried that an excessively sensible Chris might also be a less useful source of stories for the programme.
Country music was creeping into Radio 1
Scott’s Tune of the Week was Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be”. Together with Justin Timberlake working with Chris Stapleton, it prompted a conversation about how country influences were entering mainstream pop.
Chris admitted he did not really understand what “full country” sounded like and suggested that older country music seemed particularly alien to him. That effectively created the next day’s feature on air: Scott would educate Chris and the listeners in proper country music.
Moya accidentally became internet famous
Listener Moya had gone out on Friday night and ended up at Alibaba, a kebab shop in Dalston, East London. She had recently bought a new phone and, for reasons that were hazy the next morning, apparently decided the staff behind the counter deserved a full portrait session.
She woke to a message from a friend about the photographs and discovered she had uploaded an entire set to Instagram. The pictures looked unexpectedly polished: staff gazed into the camera, some posed with food, and the whole collection had the quality of a deliberately commissioned shoot rather than an impulsive post-night-out visit for food.
Moya did not even remember eating her kebab. She initially thought she had lost it, until a friend explained that she had eaten it while simultaneously uploading the portraits.
The photographs spread far beyond her own followers and became a Twitter Moment. By the time she spoke to Scott and Chris, Moya was joking that the attention had made her “unbelievably arrogant”. Her name was appearing in the same trending area as major celebrities, politicians and Martin Lewis.
Scott suggested Alibaba should now employ her to replace the traditional food photography above the counter, because her spontaneous portraits were considerably better than many of the pictures normally found in takeaway menus.
The Take Me Out game returned
Scott and Chris again used genuine questions from *Take Me Out* and attempted to invent the sort of innuendo-heavy answers contestants might give. They tackled fictional characters, wrestling names and imaginary perfumes.
The main difficulty continued to be remembering which role they were supposed to be playing. Chris repeatedly had to remind Scott that they were answering as the women rather than the male contestant, while both discovered that ten seconds was more than enough time to produce a bad pun but not necessarily a good one.
WordPress headline: 20 February 2018: PowerPoint Boy went viral before he had even met his Tinder match
One-line excerpt: Grace’s Tinder match built an elaborate PowerPoint profile, Scott discovered why he was an Only Connect answer and Chris received an education in old-school country music.
Tags: Scott Mills, Chris Stark, PowerPoint Boy, Tinder, Grace, Twitter Moment, Only Connect, Thunderbirds, country music, Bangers, February 2018
Date: 20 February 2018
Scott was an answer on Only Connect
Listeners alerted Scott to an appearance he had made on *Only Connect* without actually being there. He had been the final answer in one of the programme’s notoriously difficult connection rounds.
The sequence involved Gordon Brown, Alan Bennett and Virgil, with contestants expected to work out that the next name was Scott. The connection was the first names of the Tracy brothers from *Thunderbirds*: Gordon, Alan, Virgil and Scott.
That explanation took Scott and Chris some time to understand, largely because the quiz itself confused them before they even reached the answer. Once the *Thunderbirds* connection was established, however, Chris decided the more important point was that Scott also physically resembled one of the puppets.
Scott objected to the suggestion that he had a plastic Thunderbird face. The internet naturally agreed with Chris and began producing comparisons and Photoshops, turning what had started as an obscure quiz answer into a running joke that followed Scott through the week.
Chris got an education in old country music
The previous day, Chris had admitted he did not really know what traditional country music sounded like. Scott arrived prepared with examples from his own collection, while stressing that modern country had moved on considerably.
They started with Zac Brown Band’s “Chicken Fried”, which turned out to have more fans among Radio 1 listeners than Chris expected. Then came songs whose titles and lyrics sounded almost like comedy sketches when removed from their musical context.
Scott played “Grandma’s Feather Bed”, a song about a bed large enough for an enormous family gathering, followed by “My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend (And I Sure Do Miss Him)”, where the joke was that the singer missed the friend rather than the wife.
Next came Deana Carter’s “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”, about somebody making a serious effort for romance while her partner remained interested in the television and beer. The final title, “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly”, convinced Chris that old country songwriting had operated under a very different set of rules.
Another Radio 1 listener became a Twitter Moment
After Moya’s kebab-shop portraits went viral, the show found another listener who had unexpectedly become part of Twitter Moments.
Grace had matched on Tinder with 21-year-old Sam from the University of Leeds. Instead of a conventional profile, Sam had built what amounted to a PowerPoint presentation arguing why people should swipe right.
The slides included “notable qualities and skills” such as being generous on a night out, owning a Netflix account, being considered funny by friends and being a “great guy to take to family events”. He had even included supporting photographs and mock celebrity reviews, including Donald Trump supposedly rating him five stars and calling him “not the worst Sam I’ve met”.
Grace found the profile funny enough to share in a group chat and then on Twitter. It spread rapidly and became a Twitter Moment before she and Sam had even met in person.
Scott and Chris decided this created unusual pressure. The internet had already invested in their potential relationship, meaning the first date was now carrying the weight of a story arc before either of them had discovered whether they actually liked each other in real life.
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