Friday Extra Show: the final extra edition of 2018
Extra podcast edition
Chris opened the last Friday Extra Show of the year by looking back at how strange Radio 1 became near Christmas.
A normal run of contemporary pop could suddenly be interrupted by Paul McCartney, Cliff Richard, Robbie Savage or something from years earlier.
The final week had been particularly chaotic.
Chris had even managed to win Bangers on Thursday despite not being there, thanks to a pre-recorded choice.
The Extra Show was also becoming the place for audio which could not fit, or could not quite be said, on daytime Radio 1.
Sam’s conception story became even longer
The first bonus was an extended version of Sam’s Where Do You Think They Were?
His dad Peter went through the Twickenham trip in even greater detail.
There was Jim Davidson.
There were oysters.
There was Sancerre.
There was Andy Williams.
And there were the Bri-Nylon bedsheets whose static electricity had somehow become an important part of the family story.
Chris and Scott kept pushing Peter for increasingly specific details while Sam listened.
The original broadcast had already been awkward.
The Friday version proved there was still more material which had been removed before transmission.
Complaints about complaints about complaints
The Mistletoe and Wine saga also continued.
Scott had stopped Cliff Richard halfway through the song.
Cliff fans complained.
Radio 1 then played the missing minute and 15 seconds.
That produced complaints from people who had no interest in hearing the rest of Cliff Richard.
Chris realised the show had now reached a stage where people were effectively complaining about the complaints generated by earlier complaints.
He decided the only sensible solution was to stop discussing it before another layer appeared.
The phrase “hashtag no more Cliff” felt like the natural endpoint.
Christmas week would become Tap End week
Chris also explained what listeners would receive while the usual show took its Christmas break.
The daily podcast would not simply disappear.
From Christmas Eve onwards, BBC Sounds would serve a run of classic 24 Years at the Tap End episodes.
The stories would revisit Chris’s schooldays, university years, holidays and disasters.
It was effectively a festive archive season.
Before that began, Chris wanted to provide one final archive discovery.
Chris met Mila Kunis and forgot how interviews worked
Chris joked about searching through the old tapes in Scott’s archive basement and finding an interview from the period when he was beginning to do Hollywood press.
The guest was Mila Kunis, promoting *Oz the Great and Powerful*.
Chris was visibly nervous in the recording and admitted it.
Mila immediately made the conversation easier by treating him like a normal person rather than somebody who needed to deliver a polished film interview.
The discussion quickly drifted away from the film.
Chris talked about going to the pub with his mates.
He tried to explain Watford and the experience of standing at a football match with a pie and a pint.
Mila said she liked beer and could pour a pint without foam.
Chris was delighted.
He tried to invite Mila to a mate’s wedding
The interview then became even less conventional.
Chris mentioned that his mate Dico was getting married and wondered aloud whether Mila Kunis might come as his plus-one.
Mila had already acquired a reputation for saying yes to unusual invitations after attending a Marine Corps ball.
She did not immediately reject the idea.
Then practical reality arrived.
She was going to be working.
Chris followed up by trying to explain the British wedding behaviour he called dropping trou, where men might lower their trousers during dancing.
Mila responded by revealing she had appeared in *Baywatch* twice as a child: once as a girl who ran for help and once as a blind girl who became lost in a forest.
The film promotion had almost entirely disappeared.
Chris had somehow moved from Oz to Watford, beer, weddings and Baywatch.
He considered it one of his best interviews.
The Friday Extra Show preserved it exactly because it was so unlike the kind of interview he had originally expected to conduct.
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