Radio 1 went back to premium-rate ringtone culture
Tuesday’s ringtone discussion had clearly unlocked something.
Listeners kept sending memories of the songs they had paid to download onto old phones.
The process felt absurd in 2019.
A magazine or television advert displayed a code.
The customer sent a text.
Several pounds disappeared from the phone bill.
Eventually a tiny electronic approximation of the song arrived.
Scott and Chris remembered how proud people had been to personalise a handset with something barely recognisable.
Poly-bangers returned
The programme turned the nostalgia into Poly-Bangers.
Listeners requested songs which had once existed as polyphonic ringtones and the show recreated the atmosphere of an early-2000s mobile-phone advert.
The old tones included dance records, chart hits and sounds people had not consciously thought about for years.
The discussion also revived the era of paid wallpapers and screen savers.
A phone with a tiny colour display could still become a surprisingly expensive hobby.
Bamboleo became polyphonic too
Because it was Wednesday, the ringtone theme had to reach Bamboleo.
The famous instrumental gap was given a polyphonic treatment alongside the listener-selected archive clips.
Old show audio, a Gipsy Kings record and primitive mobile-phone sounds all collided in one feature.
Scott enjoyed how completely unnecessary it was.
Listeners understood immediately.
That was enough.
Ryan could see his boss’s private messages
Then came a very modern social-media problem.
The show disguised a caller as Ryan.
He had recently started a job where he had access to the company’s Instagram account.
That meant the account appeared on his phone alongside his own social media.
Ryan began seeing message notifications which were clearly not intended for him.
His boss was using the work account to send flirtatious or dirty messages to women.
Ryan could see enough of the conversations to become deeply uncomfortable.
Work the next morning became impossible
The hardest part was not simply seeing the messages.
Ryan then had to go into work and look at his boss while remembering what had appeared on the company account the previous evening.
Scott and Chris questioned whether the boss even realised other employees with login access could see everything.
The situation became a warning about mixing personal and professional social media.
A work account was not a private dating profile.
If several staff had the password, several staff could potentially see the flirting.
Ryan did not particularly want to confront his boss.
He did want the messages to stop appearing on his phone.
Big Weekend was almost here
Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Middlesbrough was only days away.
Greg James was preparing the Big Sheep Dash for Friday.
Scott and Chris were already thinking about festival weather, clothes and the unavoidable last-minute haircut culture around Radio 1.
Thursday would bring another Where Do You Think They Were? before everyone headed north.
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