Funny Business found exactly the sort of company name it wanted
Chris took on another Funny Business call, where the challenge was to contact a real company with a name that made the studio laugh and then carry out a completely straight conversation. This time he reached Karen from Mycock’s Limited, a plumbing and building company.
Karen explained that her husband Paul Mycock had been running the business for 36 years and that it had operated as a limited company since 2003. The fact that the firm dealt with plumbing gave Chris almost no chance of surviving the call once toilet ballcocks entered the conversation.
The show stressed that there was nothing inherently funny about anybody’s surname. This did very little to help Scott and Chris behave professionally.
Bangers somehow produced an even more difficult name
Later, Bangers introduced caller Paul Hardon. Scott immediately lost control. What should have been the normal choice between two records became a prolonged attempt to ask an entirely reasonable caller about his name without laughing.
Paul took it in good humour and confirmed that he did not normally change the pronunciation to make life easier. The combination of Mycock’s Limited and Paul Hardon on the same programme left Scott visibly and audibly exhausted by his own laughter.
The murky TV past search kept producing confessions
Listeners continued to reveal old appearances by partners and exes. One story involved recognising somebody connected to an episode of The Inbetweeners, while another caller remembered discovering that an ex had appeared on television before the relationship ended badly.
The most useful lead came from Harriet. Her current boyfriend James had been on Dinner Date years earlier but had always refused to let her watch the episode. His friends had seen it and remembered him becoming increasingly drunk during filming.
Harriet knew some of the details already. James had worked in a bar and tried cocktail tricks on camera, then made a jam roly poly and apparently abandoned the spoon in favour of putting the jam in with his fingers. The team immediately made finding the episode their next mission.
Scott briefly became a garage MC
Among the more structured features, Scott also found himself slipping into an impromptu garage MC persona. It was exactly the sort of diversion the programme could sustain when the main stories already involved a plumbing company, an extraordinary Bangers caller and the hunt for embarrassing reality television footage.
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