Friday Extra Show: another April in the archive
Extra podcast edition
The archive experiment had received good feedback, so Scott and Chris continued it.
The previous Friday had gone back to April 2013.
This time they chose April 2014.
The pair admitted this was technically recycling old material.
They argued that many current podcast listeners had either forgotten it or never heard it at all.
For Scott and Chris, reopening the archive was also a chance to remember features they had once done every day and then completely abandoned.
Real or No Real returned
One of those games was Real or No Real.
A fact was read out.
The players had to decide whether it was genuine.
The archive included Alice Levine, still regularly called Barbara Windsor by the show, joining the game.
One fact claimed the human nose could distinguish between a trillion smells.
The old feature had been simple enough to run constantly.
Scott wondered whether it might still work now.
Chris was less sure whether every old game needed resurrecting.
Archive voices returned too
The Friday show also played a collection of clips which had become familiar to listeners in 2014.
Old announcements, odd pronunciations and tiny pieces of audio which meant almost nothing outside the show returned with their original jingles.
Scott liked how quickly a five-year-old sound could reopen the memory of an entire era of the programme.
The Sack O’ Shame was Bluetooth humiliation
Then came one of Chris’s favourite old inventions.
The Sack O’ Shame.
Scott had to wear a backpack containing a Bluetooth speaker.
Chris controlled the speaker remotely from his phone.
Scott did not know what the bag would say next.
The location made it worse.
He rode the large glass lifts inside the BBC while staff, newsreaders, celebrities and other people could get in at any floor.
Chris typed messages into the phone and made the bag announce them in a synthetic voice.
One example loudly claimed Scott was not wearing any pants.
Scott could do nothing except stand there and absorb the embarrassment.
The BBC lifts made the feature
Chris’s real joy came from the behaviour of the other people in the lift.
Some clearly understood something stupid was happening but tried not to react.
Others stared at Scott as though the bag had developed its own personality.
Because the glass lifts were visible around Broadcasting House, Scott could not even hide in a corner.
Years later, he remembered the helplessness immediately.
The Friday Extra Show had spent April proving that old Scott Mills ideas could still work as podcasts.
The Sack O’ Shame was one Chris was especially pleased to rediscover.
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