Alan Carr brought his own dinner bowl to a charity quiz
Scott had been at a Centrepoint charity quiz hosted by Alan Carr. Alan was dieting and had taken the arrangement unusually literally: he brought a bowl from his own house, covered in foil, with a single piece of salmon inside.
In a room of hundreds of people, Alan peeled back the foil and ate the meal he had brought with him, then spent part of the end of the night trying to make sure the bowl itself had not disappeared. Scott also had audio of Alan singing, although he had apparently promised not to put the performance online.
Could Scott and Chris arrange a date without mobile phones?
Scott had been talking to his aunt about how she and his uncle arranged dates before mobile phones. The answer sounded almost reckless by modern standards: agree a place and a time on the home phone, then trust that the other person would appear.
His aunt remembered waiting as long as two hours when Scott’s uncle was delayed by work. There had been no text saying he was running late, no live train information and no “still okay for tonight?” message before leaving the house.
Scott and Chris acted out their own old-fashioned arrangement. They agreed to meet at 7pm outside Woolworths on a Southampton high street, opposite BHS, after a deliberately awkward conversation on a fixed home telephone. Scott decided he would wait until 8pm and then assume Chris no longer wished to “pursue this any further”.
The pair remembered the reality of waiting outside places such as McDonald’s for friends and eventually deciding, after perhaps 20 minutes, that they simply were not coming.
Confessions of a letting agent
The day’s anonymous professional was a London letting agent given the fake name Hugo. His job involved regular property inspections and viewings, which meant walking into homes where tenants had sometimes forgotten exactly what they had left on display.
One memorable inspection began with a note at the bottom of the stairs reading “pick your weapon”, followed by a trail of rose petals and a collection of unmistakably adult bedroom accessories upstairs. Hugo still had to continue the viewing and find estate-agent language to talk around what potential tenants were seeing.
The more surprising confession concerned empty homes for which agents held keys. Hugo confirmed that agents knew which vacant properties had useful extras, such as a good satellite television package. An empty house could therefore become somewhere to watch football without paying for the channels at home.
Scott then asked about using those properties for pre-drinks or after a night out. Hugo carefully framed the stories as things that could happen rather than personal admissions, but agreed that empty, furnished properties could be treated as impromptu venues by people with access. The conversation escalated to the obvious question of whether somebody might take a date back and pretend the place was their own. Hugo insisted this was never him, while acknowledging that somebody must surely have tried it.
James the PI was almost recognised in the wild
James the private investigator had left the studio after his previous appearance and got on a train while trying to listen back to Radio 1. A woman nearby began talking to him about the programme, then asked whether he had heard the regular feature with “James the PI”.
James had to sit beside somebody recommending his own radio appearances without revealing that she was speaking to the man himself. He changed his voice slightly and bluffed his way through it, leaving Scott and Chris impressed that even his journey home had become an exercise in maintaining a cover story.
Scott’s childhood plan involved cowboy chaps
Away from radio, Scott said one of his childhood ambitions had been to become a cowboy. His idea of the life involved a huge breakfast, boots, a hat and, most importantly, chaps, followed by ranch work, living off the land and finishing the evening around a campfire singing mournful songs about a wife who had left him.
It was less a realistic career plan than a complete western-film fantasy, but one he had apparently considered with some seriousness before radio won.
WordPress headline: 9 February 2018: Jaguar Skills turned school assembly into a rave and HRVY made his Radio 1 debut
One-line excerpt: Assembly Anthems got a full Jaguar Skills remix, HRVY discussed his new music and disastrous IKEA bed, and James the PI revealed some of his strangest requests.
Tags: Scott Mills, Chris Stark, Jaguar Skills, Assembly Anthems, HRVY, Personal, The Vamps, James the PI, private investigator, Radio 1, February 2018
Date: 9 February 2018
James the PI went undercover for bags of manure
Friday meant another visit from James the private investigator. This time he began with a job that had nothing to do with cheating partners. A business owner suspected that staff at an agricultural yard were selling bags of manure for cash and keeping the money rather than putting it through the books.
James went in undercover as an ordinary customer and asked to buy some. The employee loaded five bags into his car, but when James offered to pay, he was told there was no charge. The suspected crime had therefore produced the opposite result: James had driven a long way, filled the car with horse manure and established that the employee was apparently giving it away for free.
His client was satisfied. If the worker was giving away unwanted manure rather than secretly pocketing cash, the owner was not particularly concerned. James was left with the less glamorous problem of driving home with five bags of it.
Cats, wardrobes and other PI requests
Listeners wanted to know about the cases James refused. One woman had asked him to conduct surveillance on her cat because she wanted to know where it went and whether it had another household feeding it. James explained that following a cat through gardens, fences and roofs was beyond even his surveillance skills.
Another woman wanted James to hide in her wardrobe while she slept. She believed somebody was entering the house at night and spraying her furniture with a strange smell, and wanted a PI waiting with a camera to catch them. James declined that one too.
He had also been approached for an unusual variation on a honey trap. A woman supposedly wanted him to test whether her girlfriend would be unfaithful, but James eventually realised the client appeared to be trying to arrange a date with him herself, using a private-investigator booking as a cheaper substitute for hiring company.
James also introduced Scott and Chris to the surveillance term “dry cleaning”: deliberately changing route, circling or making unexpected turns to establish whether another vehicle is following you. It immediately became one of their favourite pieces of genuine spy vocabulary.
Jaguar Skills created Assembly Anthems
The week’s school-hymn obsession reached its logical conclusion when Jaguar Skills turned the songs remembered from assembly halls into a DJ mix. Scott and Chris had expected it to be funny. They had not expected it to work quite so well as an actual dance mix.
The result cut familiar primary-school songs together with drops, beats, bells and club-style transitions. Listeners messaged about being instantly transported back to sitting cross-legged on hard wooden floors, while Scott and Chris treated it as though Radio 1 had unexpectedly discovered a new dance-music genre.
They decided one mix was enough for the day because another instalment was already too good to waste. Assembly Anthems would return the following Friday.
HRVY made his Radio 1 debut
HRVY joined Scott and Chris for his first visit to Radio 1. His single “Personal” had previously been made Tune of the Week while he was in Los Angeles, and he admitted waking at around four or five in the morning because he was so excited to hear it played on the station. Friends and family had also sent him clips of the broadcasts.
He was preparing to tour with The Vamps, although his touring lifestyle sounded considerably less rock-and-roll than Scott and Chris expected. HRVY said he liked getting around ten hours’ sleep and was far more likely to prioritise bed than a night out after every show.
That made the timing of his latest domestic disaster particularly unfortunate. He had bought a bed from IKEA, spent until around 2am constructing the frame and only then discovered that the slats were sold separately. With a completed frame but nothing to hold the mattress, he ended up sleeping on the mattress in the hallway.
“Personal” had reached around 60 million online views, and HRVY explained that the girl in its video was a good friend rather than his girlfriend. He liked putting friends in videos and invited Scott and Chris to get involved in a future one, although Chris became less enthusiastic when the possibility of school uniform came up.
The show then tested superfan Gemma on how much she knew about him. She correctly knew details including his birthday, his favourite drink, the name of an Uber driver he had mentioned from Los Angeles, his dad Lee and his nickname, and even how many bags of crisps HRVY had eaten earlier in the week. HRVY was genuinely surprised by the depth of her knowledge and remembered meeting her previously at a Christmas event.
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