The Beast from the East arrived at Radio 1
Snow and the much-hyped “Beast from the East” dominated the start of the week. London initially had the sort of snow that Scott considered disappointing, although forecasts suggested much worse conditions were on the way.
His dad was already worried about whether Scott would be able to get home by 6pm. Scott was more distracted by weather warnings that referred to “yellow snow”, a phrase he could not hear without thinking of the other reason people are traditionally advised to avoid it.
The weather also made Greg James’s latest challenge look even more brutal. Greg was cycling as part of his Pedal to the Peaks effort, and Scott and Chris checked in on his progress while describing the entire undertaking as both admirable and slightly insane.
Take Me Out returned to the radio
Scott and Chris continued their game of answering real questions from *Take Me Out* with deliberately cheesy lines of their own. One round asked for celebrity crushes.
Scott chose Leonardo DiCaprio and offered a *Titanic* reference about being painted like one of the French girls. Chris selected David Dickinson, combining his tan and antiques career into a line about enjoying “a good rummage through a downstairs cabinet”.
As usual, the problem was that some of their invented lines were more elaborate than the actual television answers.
Ella thought the first date had gone well
Ghostbusters returned with Ella, who had met a man through a dating app and gone on what she believed was a very successful date. There had been flirting, a hand on the knee, jokes and a kiss at the end.
Then communication almost stopped. He took around three days to contact her, and later replies could take ten or even 24 hours. Ella eventually left the conversation with “let me know whenever you’re free”, and the message sat unread for days even though she could see he had been online.
Ella accepted that he probably was not interested, but wanted to understand what had changed between the apparently good date and the silence afterwards.
The ghost refused to play along
Chris tried calling him. The first attempt went unanswered, creating an unusual problem for a feature built around finally reaching the person who had disappeared.
They tried again and this time got through, but the conversation went badly enough that the programme could not simply broadcast it. The man did not want to take part and made that very clear.
Instead, listeners heard Ella’s reaction as she listened to the call. She was shocked by how rude he had been. The man apparently claimed not to remember her particularly well, while simultaneously making it clear enough that he did know who the call was about.
What Ella wanted was a reason. What she actually got was a blunt statement that he was not interested. Scott and Chris concluded that this was effectively the answer, even if it did not explain why the tone after the date had changed so dramatically.
Ghostbusters had technically located the ghost, but for the first time the service ended with less closure than almost anybody wanted.
WordPress headline: 27 February 2018: Kidz Bop made “eating that grub” a certified bop
One-line excerpt: Chris discovered child-friendly rewrites of major pop hits hiding on an adult party playlist, while Harry revealed the unanswered Instagram messages he had sent Stephanie Pratt.
Tags: Scott Mills, Chris Stark, Kidz Bop, Stephanie Pratt, Harry, Instagram, Greg James, Pedal to the Peaks, Sport Relief, Rita Ora, Bangers, February 2018
Date: 27 February 2018
Scott discovered he really did not suit a hat
The Beast from the East had made London cold enough for Scott to abandon one of his usual rules and buy a hat on the way into work. It was a cheap beanie, purchased simply because he was freezing, but Chris was immediately distracted by how unfamiliar Scott looked in it.
Scott already knew the problem. “I don’t suit a hat,” he said, before putting a picture on Instagram so listeners could judge for themselves.
The early comments were not especially reassuring. One compared him to Danny Howard, another suggested “the thug life chose him”, while Chris thought the hat made Scott look slightly more threatening than anybody was used to.
Scott’s defence was straightforward: everybody’s hair looked terrible anyway because the weather had forced most of the country into hats. Warmth had finally beaten vanity.
Chris found the secret child-friendly versions of pop songs
Chris had been at a party on Sunday when he gradually realised something was wrong with the music. The songs were current, people were dancing and at first nobody seemed to notice anything unusual, but familiar lyrics kept changing.
He checked the playlist and discovered they were listening to Kidz Bop-style recordings, cover versions in which unsuitable lyrics had been rewritten for children. The fact that an adult party had carried on perfectly happily with them playing made the discovery even better.
Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” provided the clearest example. The original instruction to “fill my cup, put some liquor in it” became the considerably healthier “put some water in it”. Scott had not realised these versions existed at all.
Little Mix had also been cleaned up where a lyric became too sexual, while Jason Derulo’s “Want to Want Me” swapped the more adult thought running through the original for a line about somebody making his heart fly.
Elle King’s “Ex’s & Oh’s” required an especially obvious repair. The line about exes who “always want to come but they never want to leave” became a much safer version about people who “always want to hang”.
Drake’s “Hotline Bling” changed the line about somebody “wearing less and going out more”, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” turned “sipping that bub” into “eating that grub”, and Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” had to negotiate some of its own less child-friendly language too.
Scott and Chris became increasingly fascinated by the people whose job it was to invent the replacements. “Eating that grub” was so absurdly wholesome that it became one of the favourites, and the show repeatedly declared the altered songs “certified bops”.
Chris admitted that once he had noticed what was happening at the party he could no longer ignore it. Everybody else had apparently been too busy enjoying themselves to care.
Greg hit the first properly miserable stage of Pedal to the Peaks
Greg James continued his Pedal to the Peaks challenge for Sport Relief, combining huge cycling distances with the Three Peaks during some of the worst weather of the winter.
Earlier in the day he had already ridden roughly 50 miles and described being hit by an extraordinary blizzard. By the time Scott spoke to him again, Greg was a few miles outside Lancaster, eating a peanut butter sandwich and drinking hot orange squash at the side of the road.
For the first time during the challenge, he sounded genuinely fed up. His hand hurt, he was exhausted and a planned two-mile stretch to the next stop had unexpectedly become five. More importantly, snow and bike problems had left him around two hours behind schedule.
Greg explained how those seemingly small changes mattered when every stage had become a mental checkpoint. He had expected to reach his own Radio 1 show, but now realised he might have to broadcast parts of it from the road instead.
Support from listeners continued to make a difference. Greg described an Audi driver stopping at traffic lights in Lancaster, shouting encouragement and handing over £40 in cash. Children had also appeared beside the route on bikes asking whether they could join in.
Those encounters briefly broke the isolation of hours spent cycling through difficult conditions. Scott urged listeners to keep donating, particularly because this was the first time he had heard Greg sound properly low.
Scott asked which celebrities people had been forced to unfollow
The cold weather also inspired a much less serious social-media problem. Scott had found Rita Ora’s glamorous holiday pictures so irritating while Britain froze that he had temporarily unfollowed her.
He was clear that he still liked Rita. The problem was simply seeing somebody apparently having an idyllic time in the sun while he was dealing with snow and a beanie he hated. He suggested he might follow her again in the summer.
Chris nominated The Body Coach as somebody whose relentlessly healthy posts could sometimes become too much. Listeners then supplied their own examples, including Liam Payne, former *Love Island* contestants and influencers whose feeds had become dominated by diets, holidays, advertising or lifestyles that were simply too enviable to look at every day.
The point was not necessarily that anybody had stopped liking the celebrity. Sometimes unfollowing was just self-preservation.
Harry had spent Christmas sliding into Stephanie Pratt’s DMs
Listener Harry from Bournemouth then admitted to a much more committed use of Instagram. After Stephanie Pratt’s split from Jonny Mitchell, Harry had decided the *Made in Chelsea* star might appreciate hearing from him.
He sent a series of messages over the Christmas period. The first suggested going for dinner or a drink. An hour later, with no response, he followed it with “worth a try, eh?”
Three days later he tried again: “Hello. I hope you’re doing okay today. How was your night?” Other messages asked about her Christmas plans, how her Sunday was going and whether she had watched the Bournemouth game.
The final attempt became considerably more specific. Harry told Stephanie it was his birthday on Friday and said it would be great to see her, adding that dinner was at The Cliff at 6.30pm.
There had been no reply.
Harry said his friends had begun finding the whole campaign extremely funny. Eventually he unfollowed Stephanie and went further by deleting Instagram from his phone entirely, largely to remove the temptation to send another message.
Scott and Chris dubbed the behaviour “beggy Mitchell”, but Harry was good-humoured about the whole thing and still wondered whether Radio 1 might somehow help arrange a date.
Scott told him to leave it with them. Harry had not got Stephanie Pratt, but he had at least acquired a sizeable group of listeners now willing him on.
Bangers produced a reunion with a listener from Los Angeles
Bangers also returned with Chris from Burnley, who had previously met Scott and Chris in Los Angeles while they were attending a recording of James Corden’s show.
Scott put forward the Ian Carey Project’s “Get Shaky”, while Chris Stark chose The Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy”. The feature again turned a listener’s request for a record into an unnecessarily competitive argument over which of the two choices deserved to be played.
COMMENTS