Greg reached Scafell Pike in brutal conditions
Day three of Greg James’s Pedal to the Peaks challenge took him to Scafell Pike, and the Beast from the East had turned an already difficult climb into something much more serious.
When Scott and Chris spoke to him, Greg was at the top of the mountain. Snow was up around his knees in places and he described winds of roughly 40 to 50mph. The wind chill was extreme, his whole body ached and he was beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed from the effort.
Scott repeatedly stressed that Greg was not alone. Mountain experts and the wider challenge team were with him and conditions were being assessed continuously. With severe weather affecting the country, there was no assumption that the original plan would continue regardless of safety.
Greg had already climbed two peaks and cycled huge distances between them. The next part of the challenge would take him towards Snowdon, but the worsening weather meant every stage now depended on what the experts considered possible.
Adele Roberts later checked in from the support operation and said Greg was making his way back down. People were still turning up to cheer him on, including one supporter who had come in person with a £5 donation, exactly the kind of small encounter that had repeatedly lifted his mood during the week.
The show continued asking listeners to support Sport Relief while making clear that the conditions had transformed the challenge into something nobody could treat casually.
Yesterday’s celebrity unfollows opened an even bigger conversation
Scott and Chris returned to the previous day’s discussion about celebrities people had stopped following on social media. A showbusiness journalist joined them to describe the kinds of posts that had pushed her over the edge.
They included celebrities posting endless enviable beach pictures, famous people filling feeds with praise about themselves and the habit of signing posts with unmistakably personal-looking initials. Victoria Beckham’s “VB x” style of sign-off came up as one example.
The discussion quickly moved from people listeners had stopped following to the exact opposite: what happened when an ordinary person actually messaged somebody famous and got a response.
That was the beginning of “Down in the DMs”.
Harry panicked that Stephanie Pratt might finally see the messages
Harry from Bournemouth returned after reading out his unanswered Stephanie Pratt messages on the previous programme.
Deleting Instagram had been his way of stopping himself from sending anything else, but appearing on Radio 1 created a new concern. What if Stephanie heard the show, checked the message-request folder containing DMs from people she did not follow and suddenly found his entire history?
So Harry reinstalled Instagram and, inevitably, sent another message.
“Evening Steph,” he began, explaining that he hoped she had enjoyed the start of the year. He then warned her that he had read their one-sided “conversation” out on Radio 1 with Scott Mills and Chris Stark.
After all that, he still finished by saying the offer of dinner remained open.
There was still no reply and no blue tick showing that she had read it.
Harry’s friends had encouraged the new message, and Scott and Chris pointed out that Stephanie had never actually written “no”. At the same time, after roughly eight unanswered approaches, even the most optimistic interpretation was beginning to stretch.
Harry had nevertheless become the show’s case study in what it looked like to keep sliding into a celebrity’s DMs when absolutely nothing slid back.
“Sarah” had a very different level of success with famous people
An anonymous listener was brought on with a false name and electronically altered voice because her DM stories had gone considerably further.
“Sarah” explained that she had once tweeted a comedian after seeing one of his London shows, simply telling him she had enjoyed it. He replied publicly, then followed her, which allowed the conversation to move into private messages.
They eventually met and, in Sarah’s carefully understated description, had some “fun times”. It was not a one-off. She had seen him several times and said they still occasionally hooked up.
Scott and Chris tried to establish how famous he was without forcing Sarah to identify him. He was not a stadium-level comic, but she placed him at roughly the same level as, or possibly a little more famous than, Seann Walsh. She also confirmed that he was not in a relationship, removing the obvious complication from the story.
For Sarah, this had all started from one perfectly ordinary message after a comedy show.
Tinder produced a television and film actor as well
Sarah then revealed that the comedian was not even her only celebrity story.
She had matched with a man on Tinder and arranged to meet him before properly investigating who he was. When she Googled his name, she discovered he was an actor with television and film credits.
They went on to see each other occasionally, including meetings at a hotel in Liverpool. Scott and Chris again tried to place his level of fame without identifying him. Sarah described him as bigger than a soap actor, but not a Hollywood star.
The actor was now in a relationship, so Sarah said she no longer saw him and respected that boundary.
Her success rate left Scott and Chris fascinated. One encounter had begun with a public tweet, another with an ordinary Tinder match, and both had turned into real meetings with recognisable people.
Sarah admitted that her life regularly felt like a sitcom and hinted that there were more stories where those came from. The show asked her to keep in touch.
Even Radio 1 appeared to be freezing up
The cold weather continued to produce increasingly strange moments around the programme. Photographs circulated of frozen water around Southend seafront, prompting the inevitable clarification that the entire sea had not, in fact, frozen solid.
A repeated Radio 1 handover clip also became one of Scott and Chris’s favourite running jokes. Clara Amfo’s line, “And I do believe we have Greg on the line. Gregory, hello,” had developed a tiny audio glitch which made the delivery sound robotic when replayed.
They played it over and over, declaring that Clara had finally been exposed as “an actual robot”. By the end of February, even the presenters appeared to be malfunctioning in the cold.
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