Rita Ora met the most unsettling fan yet
Superfan Steve returned after successful encounters with Anne-Marie, Charli XCX and Zara Larsson.
This time the target was Rita Ora, straight after her Live Lounge.
Rita was told she was competing against one of her biggest fans.
“Steve” was, as ever, Chris in another room with the answers in front of him.
Scott remained obsessed with how far they could push the character before a pop star recognised what was happening.
Steve knew the shoe size and the pizza
The questions became deliberately invasive.
Steve knew one of Rita’s earliest collaborators.
He knew her primary school.
He remembered how many outfit changes she had made while co-hosting the Teen Awards.
He knew the hot sauce she had previously admitted carrying in her bag.
He knew that Ora related to the Albanian word for time.
He knew Meghan Trainor had appeared alongside Rita during her *X Factor* judging era.
Then Scott asked Rita’s shoe size.
Steve answered six.
Correct.
The game moved to Rita’s 2009 attempt to represent Britain at Eurovision through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s selection programme.
Steve knew the song too.
Rita was now openly impressed and slightly unnerved.
A final question involved the topping on a room-service pizza visible in an old Instagram picture.
Steve knew that as well.
When Scott revealed the superfan was actually Chris, Rita could barely believe the amount of effort which had gone into the deception.
She said the prank had genuinely worked.
Scott immediately began worrying that British pop stars would eventually compare notes and discover they had all met exactly the same suspicious fan.
Never Happened put more lyrics under oath
The show also returned to Never Happened, treating pop lyrics as though they were evidence in court.
Adele was accused of claiming she had “set fire to the rain”.
Physically impossible.
Never happened.
Listeners picked apart other songs too.
Scott enjoyed the fact that once the feature existed, almost any poetic image in pop became vulnerable to literal analysis.
A songwriter could spend weeks finding the perfect metaphor.
Radio 1 could dismiss it in three seconds because the event could not actually occur.
Chris sabotaged the fragrance research
The show’s perfume project had moved on from François the Nose providing three possible scents.
Scott sent an intern around Radio 1 to gather proper market research.
The reactions were disastrous.
One sample smelled like fish, old rubbish and something left too long in a fridge.
Another reminded people of incense, gym deodorant and, according to one person, a fart.
Scott could not understand what François had created.
Then Chris confessed.
He had swapped two of the professional samples for deliberately horrible smells because he thought ordinary perfume testing would be boring radio.
The alternatives were fish paste and egg mayonnaise.
Only one genuine François sample had been tested.
That one went much better.
People described citrus and clean fragrance notes, and one listener said they could imagine paying a serious perfume price for it.
Scott was annoyed that Chris had corrupted the market research.
Chris thought he had improved the feature considerably.
The fragrance project survived.
The scientific integrity did not.
Nathan Dawe remained part of the show’s extended family
Scott and Chris also played new music from Nathan Dawe and reflected on knowing him from years of club bookings and warm-up DJ appearances.
They were pleased to see his audience growing beyond the nights where their paths had first crossed.
The same show which had invented Superfan Steve was now becoming old enough to watch genuinely new artists move through different stages of their careers.
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