Chris had agreed to everything while he was in Bali
With Scott and Chris off for the week, the podcast returned to a 2014 prank built around Chris’s holiday to Bali.
Before Chris went away, listeners had helped choose his out-of-office email. Instead of a normal holiday message, it replied to everybody with:
“Thanks for your email. Sounds like a great idea. Count me in. We can discuss details in the next few days. All the best, Chris.”
Scott secretly made the situation worse by adding Chris’s mobile number to the automatic reply.
That meant anybody emailing him could reasonably assume Chris had both accepted whatever they were proposing and invited a phone call to discuss it.
When Chris returned to the UK, tired and jet-lagged, Scott recruited colleagues to ring him about the jobs he had supposedly agreed to do.
Tony T had a four-hour warm-up set waiting for him
The first caller claimed to be Tony T from a venue called Fandango’s.
Tony spoke as though arrangements were almost complete. Chris was booked for a four-hour DJ set from 9pm until 1am, after which the supposed headline act Joey would take over.
There was one difficulty: Chris was told to avoid all the big records because Joey wanted to play them later.
Chris, still trying to understand how this conversation had begun, asked how Tony had obtained his number. Tony simply pointed to the email Chris had apparently sent accepting the booking.
Even while increasingly suspicious, Chris remained polite enough to discuss parking, promotion and the absurd prospect of finding four hours of music without using any of the hits.
Then Shelley Tinkleton called for Chris Pasty
The second call was even more elaborate.
“Shelley Tinkleton” introduced herself as part of the PR team for a new Sheffield bakery and greeted him as “Chris Pasty”.
According to Shelley, Chris had already agreed by email to open the company’s flagship shop. The promotional plan involved him changing his Twitter name to Chris Pasty, with Ben Shephard supposedly joining the campaign under a similarly pastry-based name.
Chris was told he would be wearing a plastic pasty costume while photographs flooded social media.
The grand finale was to involve Cheryl from accounts lying in a bath of beans, with Chris — still dressed as the pasty — getting into the beans with her.
The costume measurements finally gave the game away
Shelley explained that the bakery now urgently needed Chris’s measurements for the costume, including his waist and neck.
By then Chris knew something was wrong.
He traced the apparent agreement back to the out-of-office reply and began trying to establish exactly what he had sent and who might have altered it.
The prank worked because Scott had not needed to forge a complicated chain of emails: Chris’s own automatic message had cheerfully accepted every imaginary proposal on his behalf.
By the end, “Chris Pasty” had become the perfect summary of the whole scheme — a completely ridiculous booking that nevertheless sounded just plausible enough when presented to an exhausted Chris as an arrangement he had somehow already made.
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