The Gregathlon restarted exactly where it had stopped
Greg James returned to finish the Pedal to the Peaks challenge after the Beast from the East had forced Radio 1 to suspend it for safety reasons.
Rather than simply restarting from a convenient point, Greg wanted to go back to the exact place where the challenge had been paused. He described it as pressing play again after two weeks.
The original attempt had already raised £703,156 for Sport Relief and generated a huge response around mental health. Greg said the unfinished challenge now felt like a story that needed a proper ending.
He planned to leave after his programme, cycle for the rest of Wednesday and through Thursday, then complete the remaining mountain on Friday.
Greg also connected the restart to the mental-health message behind the challenge: hitting something you cannot get over does not mean the story is finished, because people can regroup, get support and try again.
Meghan Trainor returned with No Excuses
Meghan Trainor joined Scott and Chris with “No Excuses” and an unreleased new album already taking shape.
The transcript repeatedly misheard her name, but the conversation itself was unmistakably Meghan: she discussed the new single, her family appearing on the recording and her engagement to Daryl Sabara.
Meghan said voices on the track included members of her family, including her brother Ryan, her fiancé and her parents.
She also showed Scott and Chris her engagement ring and explained how Daryl had proposed. He drove her a couple of hours outside Los Angeles, told her to pack for several days even though they were only staying one, and took her to a zoo without initially revealing where they were going.
Meghan had already picked the ring with him because she wanted to make sure they got the right one, but Daryl had then taken so long to propose that she had started wondering when it would actually happen.
Meghan became a nightmare house buyer
Chris knew an estate agent called Matt and decided Meghan could help wind him up.
The premise was that Meghan was considering moving from Los Angeles to Rickmansworth with Daryl and wanted Matt to find her a property. Her actual manager helped set up the call, introducing his client before passing the phone over.
Meghan then transformed herself from an extremely friendly pop star into a deliberately impossible customer.
She asked for a bath big enough for three people because she and Daryl liked to have space to “swim a little”. She became excited at the idea of living near Ronan Keating and demanded to know whether the house was fully vegan and completely organic.
When Matt understandably struggled to explain what a vegan house might be, Meghan pressed him to find somebody who could answer.
Two houses in exchange for one chorus
Meghan then offered to buy two houses if Matt would sing one of her songs.
He resisted, so she tried to make the deal easier by suggesting “All About That Bass”. Meghan began the line herself: “Because you know I’m all about that bass…”
Matt still refused to sing.
He became suspicious when he thought he could hear people laughing in the background. Scott and Chris finally revealed the Radio 1 set-up and confirmed that the woman on the phone really was Meghan Trainor.
Meghan apologised for being so obnoxious and insisted she was not actually like that. Matt took the prank well and even managed to get one final request in: Meghan sang “Happy Birthday” to his colleague Fiona.
Scott and Chris declared the whole operation a success, while Meghan jokingly demanded $500 for the birthday performance.
Innuendo Bingo material was still arriving
The programme also noticed a Kim Wilde appearance on BBC Breakfast which produced exactly the sort of accidental line that used to feed Innuendo Bingo.
Listeners were still sending clips in despite the feature being off air. Scott made clear that the game was not necessarily gone forever, promising it would return “bigger and better than ever”.
WordPress headline: 15 March 2018: Scott revealed how he secretly rigged Meghan Trainor’s entire visit
One-line excerpt: Scott, Meghan Trainor and the show team conspired before her interview to make Chris believe Scott and Meghan were secretly close friends.
Tags: Meghan Trainor, Chris Stark, Scott Mills, James the private investigator, Greg James, Gregathlon, Bangers, March 2018
Date: 15 March 2018
Something had felt very odd during Meghan Trainor’s interview
Chris had spent the previous day convinced there was something strange about Meghan Trainor’s visit.
Meghan had greeted Scott with enormous familiarity, behaved as though they were already close friends and mentioned that they had been texting. Chris, who had expected the usual friendly interview, was left wondering why Meghan appeared to know Scott so well while giving him a much more ordinary greeting.
Scott finally admitted the truth: the entire thing had been set up specifically to confuse Chris.
The plan grew out of an earlier conversation in which Scott had insisted Meghan would remember him better than Chris. Before she came into the studio, Scott, Meghan and the rest of the team agreed to exaggerate that relationship as much as possible. Chris was the only person who did not know.
The cameras had been rolling before they went on air
The show had secretly recorded what happened before the interview.
Meghan entered and immediately piled attention onto Scott, complimenting him and behaving as though they had been seeing each other socially in Los Angeles. Scott played along, talking about places they had supposedly visited and asking about her new house.
Chris could be heard becoming increasingly baffled. He later said he had assumed something was being done to him, but he could not work out what.
Scott then played the audio recorded after Meghan left. Chris was still trying to solve it, asking why Scott had never mentioned texting Meghan and saying: “I feel like I’ve slipped into some kind of weird parallel universe.”
He had even spent the opening minutes of the actual interview wondering what Scott had secretly arranged.
The reveal also exposed more genuine pre-show habits than Scott had intended. Chris accused him of fussing over camera angles and lighting before guests came in, while Scott insisted some of that had only been exaggerated for the prank.
James explained how private investigators search for bugs
James the private investigator returned with another side of his work: electronic bug sweeps.
He said listening devices or cameras could be hidden inside apparently ordinary objects, including air fresheners and picture frames. He also carried out corporate sweeps of boardrooms before sensitive meetings because commercial espionage was a real concern for some clients.
Scott immediately wanted James to sweep the Radio 1 studio, convinced rival stations might somehow be listening to their off-air conversations. Chris pointed out that, given some of the things they said when the microphones were supposedly off, they would probably already have been fired if that were true.
James ended up hiding in a spare room
James then described a bug sweep at a woman’s home. She suspected her husband might have installed listening or recording equipment and arranged for James to visit while he was at work.
The sweep had barely begun when the husband unexpectedly pulled up outside.
James’s first instinct was to escape through the back, but the client panicked and ushered him upstairs instead. He ended up shut inside a tiny spare room with his equipment, trying to make no noise while the husband was downstairs.
The situation looked particularly bad because James was dressed normally. If the husband had opened the door, he would have found an unknown man hiding upstairs in his house with no immediately convincing explanation.
The story prompted Scott and Chris to admit their own experiences of hiding from people in bedrooms and cupboards, although James’s version had the added problem that he was supposed to be searching for surveillance equipment without alerting the very person who might have installed it.
Greg was soaked, freezing and struggling
Greg James was back on the road continuing the restarted Gregathlon and was having an extremely difficult day.
He described relentless rain, wind, spray from passing lorries and then snow. Water had filled his shoes and he was soaked to the skin. He told Scott and Chris he was “okay, but not okay” and admitted the previous hour had been one of the hardest parts of the challenge.
Greg had been looking forward to speaking to them because it gave him a brief break from the bike. Even the device on his handlebars had stopped being useful because everything was so wet.
Scott and Chris used the call to encourage more Sport Relief donations and tried to give Greg enough of a lift to get back on the bike and continue north.
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