James the PI took listeners’ questions
James the private investigator returned for an extended question-and-answer session, giving listeners the chance to probe the parts of his job that had not yet come up in his weekly stories.
One question asked whether he had ever been hired to follow somebody famous. James confirmed that he had both investigated well-known people and been hired by famous clients, but he was careful not to identify anybody. Scott and Chris tried to narrow one case down with a game of higher-or-lower style clues, getting as far as British television and soap territory before deciding that both James’s professional discretion and the BBC’s lawyers were better served by leaving the identity alone.
Twenty-one withheld calls in an empty cinema
Sam rang from a cinema in Bolton, where he and colleagues had been working overnight fitting seats. During the shift, they had experienced a sequence of strange events: things seemed to have moved and, between roughly 3.30am and 5.45am, the phone received 21 calls from a withheld number.
Most of the calls ended as soon as they answered. The final one lasted longer and appeared to contain around 15 seconds of white noise. Sam wanted to know whether a private investigator could trace the number. James explained that an ordinary PI could not simply uncover a withheld caller in the way a network provider or police investigation might, although he was intrigued enough to offer surveillance if the mysterious calls continued.
The cinema setting also prompted a discussion about staff using night-vision equipment. James and the team clarified that its practical purpose was spotting people attempting to record films, rather than monitoring which audience members were getting romantically acquainted in the back row.
What private investigators keep on their phones
A female listener, given the name “Barbara” and a disguised voice, asked James about the sort of secure or vault-style apps people can keep on a phone behind an additional passcode. James confirmed that he used protected storage for sensitive material connected with investigations.
It was another reminder that much of his work involved handling information that could not simply sit in an ordinary camera roll or message thread, even if Scott and Chris were much more interested in the spy-film possibilities of it all.
Jake discovered he was Backwards Boy
The show returned to listeners with unusual “superpowers”. Joshua’s contribution was extraordinarily specific: in summer, at around 9pm, he said he would sneeze exactly three times. Scott and Chris wanted evidence when the weather became warmer.
Jake’s skill was more immediate. He could hear a name or word and say it backwards almost instantly. Scott and Chris tested him with their own names and then moved on to increasingly awkward examples, including celebrity names. Jake barely seemed to need thinking time.
The speed of it turned a throwaway phone-in into something they wanted to explore again. He was christened Backwards Boy and invited back for a future challenge, although nobody was quite sure what practical career path existed for a man whose principal power was reversing words at speed.
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