People called Alexa had lost control of their name
Scott had asked listeners genuinely named Alexa to get in touch.
They did not initially know why.
Radio 1 then called them and treated them exactly like Amazon’s voice assistant.
“Alexa, what’s the weather?”
“Alexa, can you rap?”
“Alexa, who is…?”
The reactions varied from confusion to immediate recognition of the joke.
Every human Alexa said versions of the same thing happened regularly.
Friends and colleagues issued commands.
People made smart-speaker jokes.
Their parents had chosen the name years before Amazon turned it into a household technology brand.
One Alexa had dated Siri
The show then found a story which seemed almost too perfect.
One Alexa had dated somebody whose next girlfriend was called Siri.
Scott and Chris immediately imagined a man whose romantic type was virtual assistants.
Cortana, they joked, might be next.
The caller also described hearing actual Alexa devices respond in the background while she was on phone calls.
Her own name had become something technology could interrupt.
Bamboleo celebrated the middle of the week
Wednesday brought another Bamboleo.
Listeners requested old clips Scott and Chris themselves sometimes struggled to remember.
One involved Chris repeatedly making a “digga digga” noise.
Another returned to old Superfan Steve material and archive mistakes from previous Stark Guides.
Scott enjoyed the fact the audience often remembered the show more precisely than the people making it.
The new intern received her initiation
The programme had a new intern, whose name the automatic transcript renders inconsistently.
Scott and Chris therefore focused on the challenge rather than pretending confidence in the ASR spelling.
She had been at Radio 1 for only around a week and a half when the team asked her to do something several longer-serving staff had avoided.
Go up to complete strangers and behave as though she already knew them.
“You were so drunk last night”
The intern approached people with conversational openings which assumed a shared history.
One version suggested the person had been very drunk the previous evening.
Another referred to a previous conversation about the boss.
The whole experiment tested a familiar social instinct.
Would somebody stop her and say:
“Sorry, who are you?”
Or would they become uncertain enough to play along?
Several people chose politeness over correction.
That made the recordings almost unbearable for Scott and Chris to hear.
Radio 1 staff were targets too
The team realised the same trick could work inside the BBC.
Someone could use the wrong name or refer to a meeting which had never happened and see how long a colleague tolerated it.
The idea would return the following week, when Scott and Chris learned they had been secretly included in the experiment themselves.
The intern had been at the station less than two weeks.
She had already earned the programme’s respect by volunteering for something designed almost entirely around social discomfort.
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