8 March 2019: The LOLathon entered a new dawn with Homes Under The Hammer

LOLathon special edition

The third 8 March source file captured the strange period when night slowly became morning.

Scott and Chris had been awake long enough that normal standards for what counted as funny had collapsed.

The studio could see daylight returning.

That was psychologically important.

The finish was finally somewhere on the same day.

The show introduced a simple experiment.

Play comedy which lots of people loved and see whether extreme tiredness made Scott and Chris laugh at it too.

Clips included mainstream sitcom material and programmes such as *Mrs Brown’s Boys* and *The Big Bang Theory*.

The presenters agreed to donate whenever something genuinely broke them.

It turned personal taste into another small fundraising mechanism.

The results were unpredictable.

A line Scott might ordinarily dismiss could suddenly become hilarious after an entire night without sleep.

Clara Amfo arrived while the LOLathon was moving back towards normal Radio 1 hours.

Her presence immediately made the studio feel more like an ordinary morning.

Scott and Chris were still visibly operating on a different plane of consciousness.

Clara joined them for one of the show’s familiar television games.

The game involved the famously literal music choices on *Homes Under The Hammer*.

Scott played a property clip.

The players had to predict the song producers would use next.

A line about turning living areas and bedrooms around led to Blazin’ Squad’s “Flip Reverse It.”

The joke was exactly as obvious as everybody hoped.

At six or seven in the morning after a sleepless night, that simplicity was ideal.

The biggest event in this podcast was not one guest or joke.

It was the sunrise.

Scott and Chris had survived the stage they had feared most.

They were not finished.

But the programme could now talk about the home stretch rather than the middle of the night.