Jackie the pet psychic returned
Monday’s Ask Me Anything with pet psychic Jackie had generated enough listener interest for the show to bring her back almost immediately.
People wanted explanations for the strange things their animals did.
Listener Natasha had a particularly persistent problem involving her cat Clive.
Clive liked watching her in the shower.
Natasha had even taken a photograph from inside the shower as evidence.
Scott and Chris immediately renamed him Creepy Clive.
Could Clive explain himself?
Jackie was given Clive’s picture and asked what the cat might be communicating.
The show treated the whole thing seriously enough to let the answer unfold while still enjoying the absurdity of a national radio programme trying to discover why one cat liked staring through bathroom glass.
Natasha wanted reassurance that Clive was not simply being weird.
Jackie offered an interpretation based on the cat’s curiosity and attachment to what Natasha was doing.
Scott remained stuck on the image of Clive silently monitoring the shower.
Whatever the explanation, the nickname was permanent.
Polyphonic ringtones came back
The programme then fell into a deep piece of mobile-phone nostalgia.
Listeners remembered the era of polyphonic ringtones, when getting a song onto a phone could involve seeing a code in a magazine, sending a premium-rate text and paying several pounds for a tiny recreation of a pop song.
The choices were not necessarily fashionable.
People remembered ringtones based on Zombie Nation, “Baby Cakes”, PPK’s “ResuRection” and other early-2000s tracks.
Screen savers and wallpapers had been sold through similar systems.
Scott and Chris compared the process with simply opening a streaming app now.
A generation had once paid around £3 for something which barely resembled the original record.
More polyphonic nostalgia would follow on Wednesday.
Sam’s fake-girlfriend plan became a double bluff
The show also returned to Sam, whose nan Patricia repeatedly asked why he did not have a girlfriend.
Radio 1 had auditioned women willing to pretend they were dating him.
Izzy had survived Chris playing an exaggerated, suspicious version of Patricia during rehearsals.
Now she was ready to speak to the real grandmother.
Except Patricia was already in on the joke.
The programme had secretly coached her to behave exactly like Chris’s nightmare version.
Izzy did not know.
Patricia interrogated Izzy perfectly
Patricia asked the kinds of questions Izzy had been warned to expect.
Was she serious about Sam?
What were her intentions?
Could she look after him?
Izzy handled the conversation impressively and continued pretending the relationship was genuine.
Then Scott and Chris revealed the second layer.
Patricia had known the truth all along.
What began as a plan to fool Sam’s nan had ended with the nan and Radio 1 fooling the fake girlfriend instead.
Scott was delighted by how unnecessarily complicated the whole operation had become.
Middlesbrough management had almost no support
The programme also checked the petition encouraging Middlesbrough Football Club to appoint Chris as manager with Scott as assistant.
The concept had sounded much stronger on Monday.
The actual petition had barely moved.
At one stage it appeared to have essentially one signature, belonging to the person who started it.
Scott’s football-management career had stalled before the interview stage.
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