Friday Extra Show: Chris had been working with everybody except Scott
Extra podcast edition
Scott was still away, so Chris opened the December run with another Friday Extra Show after a week of presenting with different Radio 1 names.
He joked that he had been on with “Barbara Windsor” and “Vicky Pollard”, his long-running nicknames for Alice Levine and other colleagues, and admitted that working without Scott had made him unusually loose.
One feature he had enjoyed was Wrong Number, Right Answer.
The idea was to ring a completely unrelated business and somehow work a trivia question into a normal conversation without the person realising they were effectively taking part in a quiz.
Chris had been given one of the easiest-sounding questions imaginable: where was the River Nile?
He then discovered he was not entirely sure of the answer himself.
A cheese shop accidentally joined the quiz
Chris rang a cheese shop pretending he wanted to put together an international cheese selection as a present.
He began asking about cheeses from different countries and gradually steered the conversation towards Egypt.
The shop worker patiently talked through French, Dutch and German options while Chris tried to force a geography question into something which sounded vaguely relevant to dairy products.
The joy of the feature was the mismatch.
The person answering believed they were helping a customer choose cheese.
Radio 1 knew Chris was desperately trying to extract an answer about the Nile.
Chris thought Alice was much better at the game because she could disguise the question naturally.
His own attempt felt increasingly obvious.
“Do you have big baubles?”
The second call was even more dangerous.
Chris rang a Christmas shop and asked about decorations.
He wanted shiny purple baubles.
Then he had to start asking about the size.
The phrase “big baubles” immediately became impossible to say with a straight face.
The shop worker continued completely professionally.
Chris knew exactly what the Radio 1 audience was hearing.
The entire feature effectively became Funny Business in festive clothing.
Radio 1’s old Christmas ideas came back
The extra podcast also looked back at festive ideas Radio 1 had tried over the years.
There had been Christmas-themed Live Lounge concepts, station trailers and deliberately overblown seasonal imaging.
Chris loved hearing how seriously people could present something called a Christmas rave simply because December had arrived.
The Friday show had become a useful home for these pieces of station archaeology.
Chris’s own Christmas song was finally played again
Before Scott returned, Chris dug out one of his personal festive records.
He had made his own Christmas song years earlier.
The lyrics were essentially a list of seasonal objects and foods: turkey crown, Brussels sprouts, chocolate coins, reindeer, beer, cheese, Christmas trees, mince pies and family-sized everything.
Then, halfway through, the track wandered into a much stranger spoken section and deliberately ridiculous references.
Chris admitted the song became weird.
He still thought Radio 1 did not play it enough.
The Friday Extra Show ended with the programme’s first December edition sounding exactly like Christmas at Scott Mills should: cheese, baubles, old jingles and a song nobody had asked Chris to record.
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