Radio 1 had found Dickie by accident
Twenty-four hours earlier, Funny Business had called Dickie’s Dribble because the cider company had a name Scott and Chris thought would make them laugh.
Instead, Dickie himself became the memorable part.
His laugh was immediate, warm and almost impossible not to copy.
Listeners had messaged in huge numbers asking for him to return.
Scott and Chris did not need a complicated idea.
They simply wanted to make Dickie laugh again.
Tickle Dickie was born
Listeners called with jokes.
Dickie often started laughing before the punchline had even arrived.
That made judging the material almost impossible.
Scott did not care.
The goal was not finding Britain’s best joke.
It was hearing Dickie become delighted by almost anything.
One joke involved wordplay about a spy selling apples.
Another caller attempted gardening humour.
The transcript mangles several punchlines, so the archive does not pretend to reconstruct wording the source cannot support confidently.
What is completely clear is the reaction.
Dickie laughed.
Then everybody else laughed because Dickie was laughing.
Wednesday had found its cure
Scott suggested listeners with a difficult appointment, boring meeting or generally miserable Wednesday should borrow a few minutes of Dickie.
The feature functioned almost like a laughter hotline.
It was one of those Scott Mills ideas which could not have been planned in advance.
A routine Funny Business call created a character.
The audience immediately decided they wanted more of him.
Radio 1 simply followed.
Valentine’s Day was becoming complicated
Scott and Chris were also preparing their own Valentine’s experiment.
Rather than stitch each other up, as they had sometimes done with family Christmas presents, each presenter had bought a genuine gift for the other’s partner.
Scott sent something to Chris’s wife.
Chris sent something to Scott’s boyfriend.
The gifts would arrive on Valentine’s Day.
Both insisted there was no hidden joke.
That claim alone made the whole arrangement sound suspicious.
Tom was going to meet the parents
Listener Tom had an even larger Valentine’s plan.
He had been seeing his girlfriend only a relatively short time.
Her mum was due to collect her from a station.
Tom secretly found the mum on Facebook and arranged to appear instead as a surprise.
That meant he would also be entering the girlfriend’s family world much earlier and more dramatically than usual.
Scott and Chris encouraged him.
Then they learned the father was a Thai boxer.
The first meeting suddenly felt more intimidating.
Tom would later report back that it went well, including a family meal involving heart-shaped chicken nuggets.
Radio 1 had turned Valentine’s week into parents, presents and Dickie laughing down the phone.
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