A real pitmaster entered Chris’s barbecue era
Chris’s new obsession had now gone far enough for the show to bring in somebody who actually knew what he was doing.
Adam, associated with Dorset Smokery, joined to explain the practical reality of proper low-and-slow barbecue.
This was not lighting a disposable tray at lunchtime.
Adam could begin preparing the fire at around 3am.
The wood needed to be dry and suitable for smoking, and the meat would cook slowly for hours.
Chris listened as though he had finally found his new profession.
Chris needed a pitmaster name
The programme decided that becoming a proper barbecue expert required branding.
Possible names included variations on Chris’s tendency to cremate food and Chris the Whole Hog Stark.
Adam had his own gloriously overconfident event language, including a Friday rib offer called Ribbed for Your Pleasure.
Customers could pre-order smoked ribs prepared with his dry rub.
Asked what made the work satisfying, Adam described seeing the juices from the food running down people’s faces.
He signed off with a suitably ceremonial barbecue blessing about charcoal burning brightly.
Chris had found his people.
Estate agents confirmed Scott’s suspicions about empty houses
The programme then returned to stories from estate agents.
An earlier contributor had admitted that empty properties and perfectly dressed show homes could occasionally be used for activities not listed in the brochure.
Listener Rebecca confirmed that the reputation had some basis.
A flirtation with a colleague moved from messages and work nights out into encounters in empty properties.
For Scott, who was thinking about moving house, the story created a new concern.
Perhaps every surface in a viewing needed disinfecting for reasons which had nothing to do with coronavirus.
Joel Dommett was broadcasting from the loft
The day’s mix came from Joel Dommett.
He had made the attic into his temporary DJ location.
Joel liked being up there because it had become a storage space for the odd objects accumulated through television and comedy work.
Scott was less enthusiastic about lofts in general.
His own felt dark and precarious enough that every visit came with the fear of putting a foot through the ceiling.
Joel’s contained props, carpet, flower pots, a smoke machine and even a confetti cannon.
It was less storage space than backstage cupboard.
Papa Roach opened the loft set
Joel began with Papa Roach – Last Resort.
The choice immediately established that this was not going to be a carefully fashionable DJ set.
It was music he genuinely wanted to hear.
Later he included Chance the Rapper – All Night before deliberately changing the mood with JP Saxe – If the World Was Ending, a song whose title had acquired extra weight during lockdown.
Home Alone with Joel Dommett really was filmed at home
Joel talked about making Home Alone with Joel Dommett, which had required him to turn his own house into a television location.
The domestic setting brought domestic interruptions.
Deliveries could arrive while he was recording, only for the parcel to contain something deeply unglamorous from an online order.
His recent purchases included practical items such as electrical tape, carpet cleaner and dishwasher tablets.
The celebrity home-shopping reveal was not especially luxurious.
The bulk toilet roll was finally running down
Like many people early in the pandemic, Joel had acquired a substantial supply of toilet roll.
By late May, the pile was finally beginning to diminish.
It was another tiny marker of how long everybody had now been living at home.
The emergency purchase which once seemed enormous had become normal household stock.
Radio 4 apparently solved a fox problem
Joel’s strangest lockdown discovery concerned foxes visiting the decking outside.
He had tried ways of discouraging them and found a surprisingly effective solution:
Leave a waterproof radio outside playing Radio 4 quietly.
The theory was that the sound of continuous human speech made the foxes less comfortable approaching.
Scott enjoyed the image of wildlife being repelled not by chemicals or barriers but by a calm spoken-word broadcast.
It also meant Radio 4 had acquired an unexpected new audience measurement.
The foxes were switching off.
May ended in the loft
The final supplied May transcript neatly captured the strange normality of the period.
A comedian was DJing from an attic.
A Radio 1 presenter was seriously researching American-style smoked meat.
People were confessing what happened in empty estate-agent properties.
And the BBC’s speech network had become fox deterrent technology.
By this point the lockdown version of the Scott Mills show had fully learned how to make ordinary homes sound like the entire outside world.
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