Scott discovered why the supermarket checkout felt impossible
Scott’s mum Sandra was staying with him, which had forced him into something he rarely needed to do for himself: a proper food shop.
He chose one of the cheaper supermarket chains and found the checkout intensely stressful. Items were being scanned at what felt like Olympic speed while the packing area was tiny, leaving Scott desperately trying to stop his shopping reaching the end before he could bag it.
Listeners quickly explained the system. He was not supposed to stand at the till carefully packing every item. The idea was to put the scanned shopping back into the trolley, move away from the checkout and use the separate packing benches.
Scott realised the famously rapid checkout had not been designed to defeat him personally. He had simply been using it incorrectly.
“Danny Howard on Gangs” received its first demo tape
A listener said her partner had become obsessed with the idea that Danny Howard should make a Ross Kemp-style documentary about gangs. Scott should have shut the idea down. Instead he began developing it.
Danny argued that nobody would commission such a programme, but Scott pointed out that Ross Kemp had once simply been known as one of the Mitchell brothers in *EastEnders*. Reinvention was possible.
They produced an imagined extract in which Danny followed a gang in Los Angeles. The spoof documentary had him asking one member how he protected himself, only to describe the supposed weapon as looking like “a large trumpet”.
Danny then tried to find common ground by asking the gang member whether he liked Little Mix. When the answer was negative, documentary-Danny decided he had learned enough and left.
Listeners enthusiastically backed the terrible idea. A friend of Scott’s who worked in television replied with an unequivocal “absolutely no”, but Danny said he could always offer the project somewhere else.
Five Seconds of Summer’s dog-snogging returned from the archive
Scott rediscovered an old Radio 1 video in which 5 Seconds of Summer had taken part in “Five Seconds of Snogging”. Blindfolded members of the band had to kiss mystery objects for five seconds and identify them.
The objects had included a sausage, a hairy fruit and, most memorably, a dog. Scott had assumed the video had disappeared into the internet without much attention, then discovered it had actually accumulated around two million views.
That immediately prompted the question of what they would have to make the band kiss next if they returned to the show.
Zoe sent celebrity DMs to almost everybody
The programme continued looking at listeners who had attempted to contact famous people directly. Zoe admitted that one late-night session had involved sending messages to a long list including James Corden, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Justin Timberlake, Leonardo DiCaprio and stars from *Made in Chelsea*.
James Corden received a selfie and a love-heart emoji shortly before five in the morning. Leonardo DiCaprio got a message praising the environmental point of *Titanic* in extremely confused terms. Other celebrities received pictures or improvised conversation starters.
The strategy produced no meaningful replies. Even after Zoe lowered the fame level from Oscar winners and global pop stars to reality-TV personalities, the silence continued.
One of the messages asked why “fridge” had a D while “refrigerator” did not, a question Scott thought was at least more distinctive than another selfie.
The failures led the show to ask listeners who actually had received celebrity responses what they had done differently.
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