Scott and Chris thought they had found the best one yet
Where Do You Think They Were? closed January with Billy.
His mum Serena sounded delighted by the opportunity to overshare.
Billy sounded much less certain.
The story began in 1993 in a small Oxfordshire community.
Serena was working as a postwoman.
She described the job as giving her a useful view of the people living on her round.
Names on letters could reveal whether somebody appeared to be single.
Driveways could provide additional clues.
Then she met the man who would become Billy’s dad.
The plumber argued with Serena’s father
Billy’s future father was a plumber.
He had installed central heating in Serena’s parents’ house.
The first thing which made Serena properly notice him was hearing him argue with her dad about how the work should be done.
Rather than putting her off, the confidence attracted her.
Valentine’s Day was approaching.
Serena decided being a postwoman gave her the perfect excuse to send him something.
She wrote a poem.
Spanners, radiators and leaks became romance
The poem transformed plumbing equipment into flirting.
Serena imagined being a spanner he could hold and a radiator he could decide where to position.
The later lines played with leaks and lagging.
Scott and Chris kept replaying the plumbing puns while Billy became increasingly uncomfortable.
The verse was audacious enough without hearing your own mother perform it decades later on Radio 1.
Most importantly, it worked.
Serena and the plumber got together.
Then came the bed of love
Scott moved to the question which always mattered.
Where had Billy actually been conceived?
Serena and Billy’s dad were living in a rented cottage.
The likely location was the upstairs bedroom, which Serena happily described as their “bed of love.”
Then she added the detail Billy absolutely did not need.
That room later became Billy’s bedroom.
Billy had spent part of his childhood sleeping in the exact room where his parents believed he had been conceived.
Scott and Chris considered the reveal almost unbeatable.
Billy said he had wanted the feature to stop around ten minutes earlier.
Even the carpet entered the story
Serena kept going.
When the family eventually redecorated, the room had needed new carpet.
She remembered worn patches.
Billy immediately objected to the implication.
The programme had moved past simply identifying the location and was now giving him a visual history of the room.
Listeners began messaging to call the edition a 12 out of 10.
Scott agreed.
The family song provided the ending
Serena also remembered a song associated with the relationship: Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”
After plumbing poetry and the bed of love, a huge romantic ballad sounded almost conventional.
Billy finally received the programme’s sympathy.
January’s last Where Do You Think They Were? had established a new benchmark.
A postwoman.
A plumber.
A Valentine’s poem.
And a childhood bedroom Billy would never think about in the same way again.
Gerry Cinnamon became a group effort
Elsewhere, Chris expanded the show’s Gerry Cinnamon chant by involving more voices until it became a communal Radio 1 performance.
The feature had grown from a simple bit of enthusiasm around the singer into another audience participation ritual.
It was a suitably noisy ending to the first month of 2019.
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