LOLathon special: the restrictions loosened
LOLathon special edition
The first of four separate 8 March podcast files captured the part of the 24-hour broadcast where normal daytime boundaries had disappeared.
Scott and Chris had reached roughly the halfway point.
The adrenaline of the opening afternoon had gone.
The finish still felt impossibly far away.
The tiredness finally became emotional.
They sat outside and stared into the dark
At one point, Scott and Chris left the studio and sat outside.
Neither needed to say much.
They looked into the darkness and admitted they had both become close to tears.
The feeling was not that the fundraiser was going badly.
It was the physical effect of remaining constantly alert, talking and performing for hour after hour.
Chris planned to wash himself in a sink and change his underwear.
This now counted as luxury.
Scott realised they had crossed into the genuinely difficult section.
Then the rude guests arrived
The late-night slot deliberately used material the afternoon programme could not.
Hosts from the BBC podcast Unexpected Fluids joined and brought stories about sex and embarrassing bodily mishaps.
The jokes became much more adult.
Scott and Chris repeatedly warned listeners that this was the rude part of the LOLathon.
The timing was deliberate.
If a story was too explicit for normal daytime Radio 1, the middle of an overnight Comic Relief marathon was the place to try it.
A frozen sausage entered the conversation
One of the adult stories involved a frozen Cumberland sausage in circumstances which did not need to be reconstructed in graphic detail for the archive.
The important point was the level of the conversation.
By this stage, the LOLathon was no longer pretending to resemble an ordinary Scott Mills afternoon.
The material had become the kind of thing normally left to podcasts with explicit warnings.
Exhaustion made everything funnier and worse
The guests supplied the content.
Scott and Chris’s tiredness supplied the atmosphere.
Tiny phrases became hysterical.
Stories which would normally generate one laugh could derail the studio for minutes.
At the same time, both presenters were visibly and audibly struggling.
The podcast preserved the point where the LOLathon stopped being an extended radio show and became an endurance event.
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