Chris had left the BRITs outfit until the night before
The BRIT Awards were happening that evening.
Predictably, Chris had not sorted his clothes in good time.
At around 9.30pm the previous night he had sent messages explaining that the clothes he ordered were not arriving until Wednesday.
The BRITs were Tuesday.
He expected to spend the morning rushing around shops and possibly arrive late for another meeting.
Scott pointed out that this happened almost every year.
Chris agreed.
He had no explanation.
Then the internet changed his life
Scott suggested checking faster delivery options.
At around 10pm, Chris discovered a retailer could let him order clothes online and collect them before midday the next day.
He reacted as though e-commerce had just been invented.
The messages became increasingly excited.
Everything could be ordered from bed.
Several options could arrive.
The unwanted ones could simply be returned.
Scott’s boyfriend even messaged Chris asking how he had only just discovered next-day delivery.
Chris then learned about the prepaid returns label too.
Another mind-blown emoji followed.
Radio 1 became his glam squad
By Tuesday afternoon, several clothing options were hanging around the studio.
People held jackets against Chris and tried to decide what worked.
Chris compared the scene with having a professional glam squad.
Scott thought “remember to buy clothes before the ceremony” would have been simpler.
There was another appearance problem anyway.
Chris had a black eye from a football injury.
The team experimented with make-up and other ways to disguise it.
One attempt merely made the other eye look strange too.
The programme briefly considered the obviously terrible solution of making both eyes match.
Chris had also booked Scott a surprise
Scott disliked not knowing who was coming into his own show.
Chris knew that.
He had still secretly booked two people Scott genuinely loved.
When the guests walked in, Scott’s reaction was immediate.
Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, creators and stars of *This Country*.
The automatic transcript mangles their character names, but the identity of the guests is clear.
Scott was a huge fan.
He had even spotted Charlie at a Streets gig and remembered him throwing himself around near the front.
This Country had become much bigger than its village
Daisy and Charlie talked about the strange scale of the programme’s success.
They had created something deeply specific to their own part of the Cotswolds.
Then viewers in other countries and completely different small towns began saying the characters reminded them of people where they lived.
Scott wondered whether an American version would inevitably appear.
The Coopers joked about the idea rather than sounding desperate to export it.
The specificity was what made the original work.
The work-email saga reached CCTV
The programme also continued sharing absurd all-staff messages.
One workplace had become so frustrated by behaviour in the communal kitchen that management installed a CCTV camera.
The email reassured employees that although the equipment appeared capable of recording sound, conversations would not be monitored.
Scott and Chris were not convinced that wording sounded especially reassuring.
Another old workplace message involved breast milk disappearing from a fridge.
The all-staff email had become a genre of its own.
The BRITs were about to create a much bigger story
At this point the day’s problems were still clothes, make-up and award-show preparation.
Scott and Chris did not yet know that Greg James’s night at the BRITs would become the centre of Radio 1 for the next two days.
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