Matt left money behind
The day after Scott and Chris broadcast from Swansea Grand Theatre, listener Matt called with an unusual message.
He had left them money.
Matt ran a kindness project called We Make It Happen and one of its ideas was “Tenner for Good”.
He hid £10 notes in public places with two rules for whoever found them.
Do not spend the money on yourself.
Use it to do something good.
At the Swansea venue he had hidden ten notes for members of the public, plus one each for Scott and Chris.
That meant £120 was waiting around the building.
A £20 scratchcard win started the idea
Matt worked as a cameraman and traced the project back to a particularly strange day.
He had been filming at the home of a famous person for an American programme about social causes when Bill Murray unexpectedly appeared.
Matt left feeling extraordinarily lucky.
On the way home he bought scratchcards.
For a moment he thought he had won £250,000.
The real prize was £20.
After the initial disappointment, he decided to treat the smaller win as an opportunity.
He used the money to take a Big Issue seller into a supermarket and told him to fill a basket with things he wanted.
The emotional reaction stayed with Matt.
It convinced him that relatively small amounts of money could create meaningful moments.
The project grew from there.
Marjorie got a hundredth-birthday party and a new family
One of Matt’s favourite examples involved a care home resident called Marjorie.
She was turning 100 and did not have family around her.
The group organised a large birthday party at the care home, involved the other residents and then went further.
They effectively adopted Marjorie as their gran.
Scott and Chris were unusually moved by the story before remembering that their own £10 notes were still hidden somewhere in the theatre.
They began considering what good deed they could turn the money into rather than simply spending it on each other.
“Man from Japan, big CHVRCHES fan, coming through”
The other practical concern of the week was how people managed to reach the front of enormous festival crowds.
Josh supplied one of the best methods.
At Reading Festival in 2016, he found himself near a Japanese man who had travelled a huge distance and was a major CHVRCHES fan.
Josh decided the man deserved to get closer.
He put him on his shoulders and started moving through the crowd.
As they went, he shouted: “Man from Japan, big CHVRCHES fan, coming through.”
People moved.
The pair reached almost the very front.
Scott loved the fact that the method worked because the story was true enough to make everybody want to help.
Other listeners offered less elegant methods, but the Japanese CHVRCHES fan became the benchmark.
The week before Biggest Weekend had now produced festival advice on everything from shoes to crowd navigation, and Radio 1 had found perhaps the only queue-jumping phrase capable of making the people being passed actively cheer you on.
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