Archive special: Christmas Eve went back to Halloween
24 Years at the Tap End archive edition
The normal daily show had finished for Christmas, so BBC Sounds began a week of vintage Tap End stories.
Christmas Eve deliberately chose the least seasonal possible subject.
Halloween.
Chris went back to his 18th year at the Tap End, during his first months at Southampton University.
He was still living at Glen Eyre Halls, still recovering from freshers’ flu and still working out who his university friends were.
Halloween gave everybody an excuse for another major halls night out.
Chris chose the cheapest possible devil
The evening began at Glen Bar.
Chris had not put much creativity or money into fancy dress.
He bought a standard devil costume: red horns, a tail and a plastic pitchfork.
Scott and Beccy immediately became distracted by the wider question of why so many women’s Halloween costumes were sold as sexy versions while men could simply wear an ordinary Ghostbusters outfit or devil horns.
The halls bar had been decorated with fake cobwebs and Halloween decorations.
There were themed drinks with names including Pumpkin Punch and Satan’s Balls.
The smoke machine repeatedly interfered with the fire alarm and forced everyone outside.
Nobody allowed that to stop the night.
Icon became the main event
Buses took the halls into Southampton city centre for Icon.
Chris remembered the club being packed with students in fancy dress.
He found dancing easier because he had the devil’s pitchfork in his hand.
Then the *Ghostbusters* theme came on.
This mattered.
Chris regarded it as one of his favourite songs from childhood and wanted to enjoy the moment properly.
A group nearby had already been barging into Chris and the people he was with.
He had been trying to ignore it.
The combination of the pushing, the ghost costume one of the men was wearing and the actual *Ghostbusters* theme finally broke his patience.
The pitchfork became a weapon
One of the men knocked Chris and the woman beside him to the floor.
Chris responded with his plastic devil fork.
He pronged the man.
A pushing match followed.
Security arrived almost immediately.
Chris was grabbed and removed from the club.
He was told he was banned and should not come back.
Scott was fascinated that being banned from places had become a recurring enough theme in Chris’s stories for him to need to count them.
He tried a disguise later
Chris did eventually return to Icon at a later event.
The tactic was simple.
Wear different fancy dress.
Instead of the devil, he appeared as a sheep, covered in cotton wool.
He reasoned that if somebody remembered the banned man in horns and a tail, a sheep looked sufficiently different to slip through.
The Christmas Eve archive special ended with Chris remembering the original walk home alone from Icon, eating cheesy chips with his devil tail in his hand.
It was not a conventional festive story.
It was absolutely a conventional Tap End story.
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