Henry finally landed in Sydney
After spending the previous programme on a fictional long-haul flight, Henry was allowed to arrive in Australia.
Scott now had to become Australian passport control.
He was not confident about the accent.
Chris was delighted about that.
Henry was asked the purpose of his visit, who he was travelling with and the usual arrival questions, only with Scott stretching every Australian expression he knew as far as it would go.
Airport security had somehow followed him
Chris found ways to bring the previous day’s overenthusiastic security routine back into the arrival process.
The programme had committed to the bit so fully that a listener who was actually sitting at home in Birmingham was being processed through imaginary Australian border control over two separate shows.
Eventually he was admitted to the country.
The next logical stop was a bar.
The local spoke almost entirely in Australian slang
Scott introduced Henry to an Australian local whose job appeared to be using as much slang as possible in a single conversation.
He wanted a cold beer and announced that he was as dry as a dead dingo’s donger.
Henry was directed towards the servo and had to decode references to durries, lollies and other expressions while trying to maintain the illusion that this was a useful orientation to Sydney.
The service was not especially quick.
The immersion, however, was complete.
The Stark Guide moved to Manchester
Chris then reopened an older Stark Guide to Manchester.
The guide began with the Roman settlement associated with Mamucium, moved through the Industrial Revolution and the city’s rapid growth, and reached the idea that Manchester had often presented itself as a place which did things first.
There were references to the cotton industry, famous brands and inventions before the feature moved into music and nightlife.
Canal Street and Manchester’s LGBTQ+ district appeared, including the repeatedly vandalised street sign joke familiar to visitors.
The musical roll call took in acts associated with the city including Oasis, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The 1975, Chemical Brothers and Take That.
As with every Stark Guide, genuine civic pride was mixed with recommendations nobody should treat as an official tourist itinerary.
Laura Whitmore had turned the shed into a studio
The home DJ was Laura Whitmore, broadcasting from her garden shed.
The space had become part office, part television studio and part unfinished bar.
Work on it had stopped during lockdown, so Laura was doing her Radio 1 mix surrounded by a project which had not quite reached the glamorous home-bar stage.
That did not stop the music.
She played Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer and Blackstreet’s No Diggity among the tracks in her set.
Laura and Iain were working in separate rooms
Laura explained that she and Iain Stirling were deliberately giving each other space while both worked from home.
They would operate in different rooms and then come back together for lunch or dinner.
The arrangement made lockdown feel more like two working days taking place under one roof rather than spending every waking minute together.
Iain had also lost his live touring work and was missing the immediate reaction of an audience.
Laura joked that this could result in him trying material at home instead.
The Xbox was providing another outlet.
Love Island’s absence was going to feel strange
The cancellation of the summer series of Love Island came up too.
Laura described it as a piece of escapism she would miss, while Scott compared the feeling to major annual events such as Eurovision suddenly disappearing from the calendar.
One of Iain’s occupational hazards remained people shouting “I’ve got a text!” at him in public, a catchphrase which was much more entertaining to fans than to the man who had heard it thousands of times.
Lockdown workouts were becoming another job
Laura had also been doing home exercise sessions online.
Scott admitted he had watched one first thing in the morning and remembered moves including the crab.
Laura thought she might actually be exercising more at home than she normally would.
Chris’s contribution was less athletic: he tended to watch other people’s workouts, which everybody agreed was slightly stranger than joining in.
By the end of the show, Henry had made it to Australia and Laura had made it out of the house only as far as the shed.
For May 2020, that counted as travel.
COMMENTS