Justin Bieber started the pet-name problem
Scott and Chris had heard Justin Bieber explain that wife Hailey called him something sounding like “GooGoo.”
The exact automatic transcript is messy, but the reaction is not.
The presenters found the nickname extremely intimate and slightly ridiculous.
They asked listeners what they called their own partners when nobody else was supposed to hear.
The answers arrived immediately.
Spudge.
Pickle.
Vegetables.
Biscuits.
Names which had evolved so gradually inside relationships that the people using them no longer noticed how strange they sounded.
Pickle had become a legal identity
One member of the show team already had Pickle as an established nickname.
Another listener said the same name had appeared on wedding table settings.
Scott liked the idea that a supposedly private pet name could become so permanent it appeared at formal events.
The show began testing which nicknames sounded affectionate and which sounded actively insulting.
There was no obvious rule.
If both people accepted it, almost anything could work.
Scott offered Chris a personal dry-cleaning service
The pair were attending more awards events.
Chris had a familiar problem.
He owned suits.
He did not always store them in a way Scott considered acceptable.
Scott imagined several outfits crushed together at the back of a cupboard.
He offered to take Chris’s suits to the dry cleaner, have them properly cleaned and returned in cellophane so they could hang neatly.
Chris found the level of organisation slightly intense.
Scott could not understand why anybody would reject free dry cleaning.
The offer became less about clothes and more about the fundamental difference between how the two presenters organised their lives.
Cheltenham got the Stark Guide
Chris also brought back the Stark Guide, this time for Cheltenham.
The feature returned in its established form.
Local history.
Tourism.
Odd internet facts.
And Chris saying everything with documentary confidence regardless of how much it deserved it.
Listeners from Cheltenham immediately became fact-checkers.
Scott liked that every guide generated two programmes at once.
Chris’s version of the town.
Then the actual residents correcting him.
The pet-name story was not finished
By the end of Wednesday, the programme had heard enough relationship nicknames to fill several pages.
Scott and Chris realised the more interesting question might be what people had once called an ex.
Those names could remain in old messages and memories long after the relationship itself became embarrassing.
Thursday would go there.
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