Who is Maya Jama?
Maya Jama joined Scott and Chris for Friday and found herself subjected to a test of how famous she really was outside Radio 1’s usual audience.
Scott took photographs of Maya out into the street and showed them to older members of the public, asking who they thought she was and what she did for a living.
The answers varied wildly. Some people thought she was a model or actress, one suggested a brain surgeon, and another described her as some kind of “adult model”. A photograph of Maya dressed as Cleopatra for Halloween produced guesses involving Romans, while “dominatrix” also entered the conversation.
There were compliments too. People described her as “very pretty”, said she had a famous look and assumed she must be some sort of entertainer or personality, even when they could not actually name her.
One older man was less impressed by her outfits and said they were not the sort of clothes he would want his wife wearing.
Maya had once auditioned for Skins
The conversation turned to Maya’s teenage years when she revealed that she had auditioned for *Skins*.
The programme had held auditions at her school in Bristol when she was about 15. Maya went along and made it through more than one stage of the process before it eventually went no further.
It meant that, long before presenting and modelling made her familiar to a younger audience, there had been a possible alternative version of her career involving one of the era’s defining teen dramas.
Grimmy had already tested Maya’s loyalties
Scott was still processing a game Maya had played with Grimmy in which she had been forced to choose between spending time with Scott or Chris.
When presented with a hypothetical year on a desert island, Maya had not chosen Chris, explaining that he already had his girlfriend and family. On another occasion she had picked Scott for a night out because she already knew Chris better.
Scott suspected Maya had become very skilled at finding diplomatic reasons for every answer rather than actually ranking the two of them.
The Speech Jammer still had unfinished business
Maya’s earlier encounter with the Speech Jammer was still being talked about after she had used it on her mum the previous week.
The device played a person’s own voice back with a slight delay, making ordinary speech unexpectedly difficult. After the success of Maya’s call home, there was already demand for the feature to return, preferably with more people being forced to attempt completely normal conversations while sounding anything but normal.
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