Chichester had apparently rewritten S Club 7
Chris had been DJing a silent disco at the University of Chichester.
Because the crowd were wearing headphones, the music itself could not be heard clearly from the stage.
The singing could.
Chris played S Club 7’s “Reach” and started filming the crowd.
That was when he heard something wrong.
Instead of “reach for the stars”, thousands of students appeared to be singing:
“Reach up for the stars.”
This was not one or two people being carried along by somebody beside them.
Everyone had headphones.
The mistake appeared to have been learned independently by an entire generation of freshers.
Scott and Chris were appalled.
The song had been released in 2000, around the time many of the current students were born, and the presenters decided that somewhere along the line a new version of the lyric had entered circulation.
Listeners reacted with extraordinary seriousness.
Some insisted they had always sung “reach up”.
Others treated the added word as evidence that society itself was deteriorating.
A Chichester student messaged to say she had never been more ashamed of her university.
Scott wanted somebody from S Club to settle it properly.
Georgia’s FIFA revenge was exposed by the podcast
The show also caught up with Georgia.
The previous week, Georgia had explained that her boyfriend had effectively abandoned her for the new FIFA game.
Her planned revenge was simple.
Wait until he scored an important goal and switch the television off during the celebration.
She had even promised to film it.
The problem was that her boyfriend listened to the Scott Mills podcast.
He heard the entire plan.
According to Georgia, he played the relevant section back while she was in the room with a pleased look on his face.
He then refused to buy FIFA at all.
The refusal was not because he had lost interest.
He wanted to deny Georgia the satisfaction of carrying out the prank.
Even when they stood in a supermarket looking at the game, he would not buy it.
Georgia said he planned to wait until enough time had passed for her to forget about the revenge.
Scott doubted she would.
Their relationship was built on pettiness
Georgia admitted that this was normal for the pair.
Her boyfriend was capable of sustaining a joke or an “I told you so” for an unreasonable length of time.
Earlier in the year, Georgia had desperately wanted to visit a theme park for the opening of a new rollercoaster during the Beast from the East.
Her boyfriend insisted the attraction would be closed.
Georgia refused to accept it.
He drove across the country in terrible weather without complaining too much, largely so he could arrive and prove that he had been right.
The park was shut.
Scott loved the idea of relationships where both people regularly created unnecessary inconvenience simply for the pleasure of winding the other one up.
Other listeners joined in with their own petty habits.
Olivia said her boyfriend regularly hid around her university accommodation when she went to the toilet, waiting inside cupboards or wardrobes so he could jump out when she returned.
She now lived in a constant state of suspicion.
Radio 1’s names could not be trusted
The programme had also been thrown by hearing a Radio 1 colleague refer to Mistajam by his real name.
Scott and Chris realised that people accepted stage names without ever thinking about whether they appeared on a passport.
They began cautiously discussing other DJs whose public names were not necessarily their legal names.
Neither wanted to reveal something they were not supposed to.
Scott joked that “Gran Canaria” was not somebody’s real name either.
The more they discussed it, the stranger “Mr Jam” sounded when treated as an ordinary surname.
October had begun with Radio 1 questioning both the lyrics people had been singing for 18 years and the names of the people playing them.
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