Chris had an urgent problem at exactly the wrong time
The show had barely got going when Chris had to abandon the studio and head for the toilet. Scott refused to let the absence pass quietly and put him on air from there, turning a private stomach problem into the first running story of the afternoon.
Chris blamed a combination of feeling unwell and doing much more exercise than usual. Scott then claimed he knew a physical manoeuvre which could relieve the trapped gas. Chris reluctantly allowed him to try it and, against all expectations, later admitted that he felt better.
Joe Marler had apparently adopted the programme
The team were still delighted by their recent contact with England rugby player Joe Marler. After the Rugby World Cup final, Chris had received a series of late night FaceTime calls from Japan in which Marler seemed mostly interested in shouting excitedly at the screen.
Rather than treating the calls as an interruption, Scott and Chris loved the idea that Marler now felt able to ring whenever he wanted. A guest who had only recently appeared on the programme was already being described as one of the show’s new friends.
A weather warning turned out to be from the wrong moment
Scott had also been convinced that snow was falling in South Wales after seeing a warning associated with television weather presenter Derek Brockway. The problem was that listeners in the area reported sunshine and temperatures around 11 or 12 degrees.
The show called a listener near Llantrisant and asked him to physically put his hand outside. He reported rain rather than snow. The discrepancy became another excuse to spend far too long interrogating a weather forecast which plainly did not match the afternoon around them.
Victoria McLean had filled her house with the Wizarding World
Ask Me Anything introduced Victoria McLean, holder of the Guinness World Records title for the largest Wizarding World collection. Her record had stood at 3,686 Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts items in February, but she estimated that the total was already close to 5,000.
The collection occupied cupboards, drawers, boxes and trunks throughout the house. Her most valuable object was a miniature replica of a cabinet from Dumbledore’s office, decorated with 24 carat gold leaf and valued at about £10,000. She was preparing for her 23rd visit to the Harry Potter studio tour, where her daughter worked, and said even her youngest son was called Harry.
The conversation ended with Scott becoming fascinated by the idea of putting a contactless chip into the end of a wand. For somebody who still enjoyed the novelty of ordinary contactless payments, paying for a drink by tapping a wand sounded close enough to real magic.
A husband’s old dating show created the next investigation
The programme then returned to listener Emily, who had discovered that her husband had appeared on Sing Date before they met. She had never seen the footage and wanted the show to find it, partly so she could embarrass him with evidence of his television dating past.
That opened a much wider question for listeners: what happens when somebody you are dating casually reveals that they once appeared on a questionable reality programme? The search for old television appearances became one of the main threads of the week.
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