Greg had not turned up for Breakfast
The morning after the BRIT Awards, Greg James was missing from his own Radio 1 Breakfast Show.
This was not simply a presenter oversleeping after an awards party.
A station-wide mystery had begun.
By the time Scott and Chris came on in the afternoon, listeners had already spent hours collecting clues.
Then Greg himself finally communicated from wherever he had been taken.
Scott had last seen him at the BRITs
Greg remembered being with Scott at a BRITs after-party.
Scott went to the toilet.
Greg did not see him again.
At some point afterwards, Greg had been removed from the party by people involved in the game.
He said he had been blindfolded with a red scarf, bundled into a vehicle and driven for a significant period.
Headphones played bland music so he could not hear useful environmental clues.
He was then put into a wheelchair and moved into a building without being allowed to see where he was going.
The room was deliberately bleak
Greg ended up in a largely white room with a single bed.
He could access a small adjoining toilet and basin through a hatch.
He described giving himself a gentleman’s wash because he was still wearing the clothes he had worn to the BRITs.
The captors did not simply stand around chatting to him.
The room was intended to feel isolated.
Greg compared himself with the troubled detective in a BBC drama who had consumed too many coffees and could not crack the case.
There were two captors
A coded message had been found and decoded.
One important detail emerged.
There were two people behind the kidnapping.
The red scarves worn by various celebrities around the BRITs had apparently been used to distract attention from the genuine captors.
Radio 1 therefore had to investigate both individuals and the reason the pair would work together.
Every BRITs photograph became evidence
The investigation quickly swallowed the entire awards ceremony.
A disposable-camera sound made listeners remember photographs involving Jack Whitehall.
A USB stick contained photographs of dresses with heads removed from the images.
Lizzo and a dry-cleaner clue became part of another theory.
Dermot Kennedy and other artists were questioned and ruled in or out as theories changed.
Scott and Chris realised almost any photograph from a celebrity-packed night could become suspicious if examined for long enough.
Greg could hear the hunt happening
The most unusual part of the feature was that Greg was able to speak while remaining trapped.
He listened to Radio 1 trying to solve his own disappearance and helped assess theories without knowing the answer.
The situation had grown out of the station’s earlier Hide & Seek games but reversed the logic.
Nobody was trying to find where Greg had chosen to hide.
He genuinely did not know where he was.
The first supplied investigation transcript ends with the mystery unresolved.
The net would close on Thursday.
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