Scott and Chris were embarrassed by their own awards performance
The morning after the BBC Radio and Music Awards, Scott and Chris were still unhappy with themselves.
They had gone on stage to present Best Podcast and felt they had contributed almost nothing. Other presenters had arrived with jokes, impressions or stories, while Scott and Chris followed the card, made a joke that did not land and left feeling flat.
They spent so long analysing it afterwards that the disappointment briefly became an existential conversation about whether they were any good at this at all.
Keith Lemon wanted Celebrity Juice to go wrong
Keith Lemon joined ahead of another live *Celebrity Juice*.
He admitted that, when doing live television, part of him wanted something to go wrong because that was where the fun was. A completely smooth programme was almost less appealing.
They discussed the audience, the impossibility of wandering out halfway through and the sort of unpredictable behaviour that could happen in a live recording.
Keith even encouraged anybody attending to streak, promising enthusiastically that it would make good television.
The Naked Game
Scott and Chris had prepared a game perfectly suited to Keith.
Three callers would each claim to be completely naked. Only one actually was. Keith had to work out who was telling the truth by asking questions and listening carefully to what happened on the other end of the phone.
The first caller, Abby, said she was naked in her living room. Keith asked her to sit down and stand up repeatedly on a hard surface, then complained that he could not hear the “slappage” he expected from bare skin.
Luke sounded more convincing simply because Keith thought he had the confidence of somebody who really had taken everything off. He was asked to dance so they could listen for body movement.
The game continued through a third caller before Keith made his final judgement. Abby turned out to be the genuinely naked one.
The supposed prize was tickets to *Celebrity Juice*, but Scott immediately admitted they were too in-demand to give away and Abby was not actually getting them.
Bangers was becoming a rout
Scott’s run in Bangers was becoming a problem for Chris.
Listener Luke had to choose between Chris’s track and Scott’s M.I.A. “Paper Planes”. Scott won again, leaving Chris three down for the week and facing the possibility of a complete five-day defeat.
The show had not actually decided what should happen if somebody lost 5–0, which was typical of a feature whose rules often developed only when a new situation occurred.
The questions Radio 1 was not allowed to ask William and Kate
A year earlier, Scott and Chris had interviewed the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The interview had later been nominated at the BBC Radio and Music Awards, but had not won.
With the awards over, the team finally read out some of the questions their bosses had refused to let them ask William and Kate.
Suggestions included whether a coin toss between the couple became “granny or tails”, whether they had secret social-media accounts, whether they had ever pulled a sickie from a royal engagement and whether William had ever folded a £5 note to make the Queen’s face appear to smile or frown.
They also wanted to know whether the couple had ever tried on the suits of armour at Windsor Castle after a night out, whether William ever woke up thinking “my actual grandmother is the actual Queen”, and what disguises they would use if they wanted to sneak out on a Friday night.
One scenario asked whether William became embarrassed when Prince Charles was persuaded to join in with a local dance during a foreign visit.
The questions made it very clear why somebody at the BBC had decided a more conventional royal interview was probably safer.
WordPress headline: 22 March 2018: Scott discovered his stolen plastic cutlery technically made him a criminal
One-line excerpt: A criminal barrister confirmed Scott had technically committed theft after he walked into a café, took a plastic knife and fork without buying anything and left.
Tags: Scott Mills, Chris Stark, James the private investigator, A303, Maidenhead, Liam Payne, Bangers, criminal law, March 2018
Date: 22 March 2018
Scott had taken something from a café without paying
Scott arrived with a problem that had begun at lunchtime.
He had brought his own food into work but realised he did not have anything to eat it with. There was a café he visited regularly, so he went in, took a plastic knife and fork from the self-service display and walked straight back out without buying anything.
Only afterwards, when he opened his bag and saw the cutlery, did he start wondering whether being a regular customer actually entitled him to take it.
Chris was not persuaded by the argument that Scott had spent plenty of money there on previous days. Scott offered to return the knife and fork after using them if necessary, although that raised the fairly obvious problem that the café probably would not want them back by then.
The discussion widened into other small things people routinely treated as free, including going into a pub purely to use the toilet. Scott argued that a “public house” sounded as though the public ought to be allowed in, while pub-owning listeners pointed out that toilets, water, paper and cleaning still cost money.
A barrister gave Scott the answer he did not want
The show eventually got a legal opinion from criminal barrister Adam.
The basic answer was uncomfortable: if Scott deliberately took property belonging to the café without permission and intended to keep it, then technically the ingredients of theft were there.
That did not mean police were about to raid Radio 1 over a plastic fork. Adam explained that something on that scale was not going to send Scott to prison, although in theory a theft could still lead to police action or a caution depending on the circumstances.
Scott immediately promised not to do it again and decided the sensible answer was to start bringing metal cutlery from home.
James had acquired a private-investigator imposter
Thursday also brought James the private investigator back to the studio, this time with an unexpected professional problem.
A potential client had contacted him after speaking to another investigator called James who had apparently claimed he was “James the PI off Radio 1”.
The real James had not authorised anybody to trade on his Radio 1 appearances and had no idea why another investigator would pretend to be him. Scott pointed out that James was at least unusually well qualified to investigate somebody impersonating a private investigator.
James said he intended to get to the bottom of it.
The A303 became part of an imaginary affair map
James was also working on a case involving a lorry driver and explained why the job was taking him towards roadside lay-bys.
Long-distance drivers could spend long periods away from home and some cabs contained beds, making the vehicle a surprisingly practical private space. James was trying to establish which lay-bys his target regularly stopped at and whether anybody joined him there.
Scott suggested the A303, a road he knew well from the south-west, and James said he had also heard stories about particular stopping places on the route.
James then revealed that Maidenhead, where he lived, had previously been described in a 2014 survey as a UK cheating hotspot. In his own work, he felt clients with more money sometimes appeared more likely to be dealing with affairs, although he stressed that was based on his experience rather than a rule applying to everybody.
The studio began rating occupations. Hairdressers landed around six out of ten, plumbers around four or five, people working in PR scored highly, and James considered IT particularly dangerous because somebody technically capable might also be better at covering their digital tracks. Personal trainers were another profession he encountered quite often.
By the end they had invented an “affair map of the UK”, with listeners supplying roads and stopping places for James to investigate. One of the locations sent in was the Cartgate truck stop on the A303, giving him a very specific lead for the following week.
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