Friday Extra Show: management had made jingles
Extra podcast edition
The Friday podcast had reached episode six.
What began as Chris improvising an extra edition because the weekday show no longer ran on Fridays had become established enough for Radio 1 to produce jingles.
Chris was strangely proud.
Different names had been tried for the format.
One voiceover called it the Friday behind-the-scenes bonus extra bits podcast.
Another attempt became tangled up completely.
Chris had also been given the raw outtakes from the imaging session.
Normally Radio 1’s station voices sounded impossibly confident.
Here they stumbled over words, restarted lines and accidentally said things such as “with Willy Wonka”.
Chris loved hearing the machinery of polished radio briefly go wrong.
The podcast was supposed to reveal what happened behind the scenes.
The jingles accidentally provided the perfect example.
Scott was literally behind the Strictly stage
Chris called Scott, who was back working on the official *Strictly Come Dancing* podcast.
Scott walked around the actual studio while describing what he could see.
Some bar props had fake drinks.
Some fruit was real.
The access still felt slightly surreal after being a contestant several years earlier.
He now moved around areas of the show without the anxiety of knowing he had to dance.
Chris was beginning to regard Scott’s Strictly side project as another recurring strand of the Friday podcast.
Nicole was finally at the airport
Nicole’s first-ever flight day had arrived.
She was at the airport ready to travel to Amsterdam.
Weeks of Radio 1 preparation had included a dangerous amount of false information.
Scott and Chris had told her to salute cabin crew, consider dressing specially and applaud the landing.
Nicole’s family already thought she had embarrassed herself enough on national radio.
She remained excited.
The Friday podcast caught her at exactly the moment when all the imaginary flight etiquette was about to collide with a real airport.
Chris checked whether she was still intending to follow the advice.
Nicole had begun to realise not every instruction deserved complete trust.
The show had successfully turned one listener taking an ordinary short flight to Amsterdam into a month-long storyline.
Ant’s podcast description went catastrophically wrong
Chris also introduced Ant, one of the people who helped produce and publish the weekday podcast.
Ant had written a description for the previous episode using speech-to-text on his phone because he was in a hurry.
He scanned the result.
He did not scan it carefully enough.
The intended copy mentioned Scott’s suspicious yellow drink, pigs in blankets, Adam attempting eye sex with 50 Cent and the Christmas-obsessed caller getting through again.
Speech recognition transformed that.
The published version asked whether Adam had achieved his goal of having sex with 50 Cent.
Even worse, it appeared to ask how the lady had sex with Christmas.
Chris could barely believe the wording had made it onto a BBC podcast description.
Ant admitted the mistake.
He also pointed out that the accidental explicitness may have helped the downloads.
Listener questions kept the Friday format alive
The episode continued with the questions which had made the extra show different from the weekday programme.
Listeners could ask how Radio 1 worked, who performed particular jobs and what happened after things went wrong.
Chris answered as honestly as he could.
By the end of September, the Friday Extra Show no longer felt like a temporary replacement for a missing fifth podcast.
It had its own jingles, its own regular listeners and, thanks to Ant, its own spectacular publishing errors.
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