A-Level day came with the university information nobody puts in a prospectus
Results day meant thousands of listeners were thinking about university.
Scott wanted the information official guides leave out.
Listeners supplied campus quirks from across the country.
Sheffield students warned about the hills.
UEA apparently had so many rabbits that falling into rabbit holes after a night out was a genuine possibility.
York students needed to be prepared for aggressive campus geese.
At St Andrews there was the tradition of Raisin Weekend, where academic “families” could send students into the sea or set them ridiculous tasks.
Scott and Chris decided this was the useful university guide: the information that appears nowhere on the glossy website but everybody learns within the first month.
Another Don’t Tell the Bride marriage had ended
The show followed up another old *Don’t Tell the Bride* episode.
Adam had been one of the best men for Alex and Clara.
The groom had created a country-fête-style wedding with a barn, games, coconut shy and rodeo bull.
As part of the experience Clara was given a tattoo of the wedding date in Roman numerals.
Eight years later, the couple were no longer together.
The tattoo, however, remained.
There was still a happy part of the story: they had a daughter.
Adam also explained just how stressful making the programme had been, with a strict budget and very little time to book the entire wedding.
Don’t Look It Up remembered Big Brother
The quiz included a round on old *Big Brother* contestants, along with toilet-roll trivia and musical collaborations.
Scott expected to dominate the reality-TV section and then discovered just how many contestants had disappeared from memory.
It was a reminder of how completely *Big Brother* had once filled British pop culture and how quickly even recognisable housemates could become difficult to name.
Robbie Williams joined from Los Angeles
Robbie Williams provided the guest mix from his Los Angeles home.
Scott immediately returned to one of the most memorable facts about the house:
it apparently had 27 toilets.
Robbie joked that one day he should hold a party where guests flushed all of them simultaneously just to see what happened.
He was looking noticeably leaner on Zoom and talked about the peculiar pointlessness of transforming yourself physically when lockdown meant hardly anybody outside the household could see the result.
Lockdown had made Robbie extraordinarily productive
Boredom was not the issue.
Robbie said he had written around 25 songs in three weeks.
He had also been making art in his garage and planning an exhibition.
On top of that were ideas for television projects.
One deliberately ridiculous tangent involved whether he might ever appear on *Naked Attraction*, while another developed into a meta-version of *Gogglebox* in which famous people would watch the people on *Gogglebox* watching television.
Scott thought there was probably a programme in that somewhere.
Voodoo Ray and Gypsy Woman took the set backwards
Robbie’s records leaned into older dance music.
He opened with A Guy Called Gerald’s *Voodoo Ray* and also chose Crystal Waters’ *Gypsy Woman*.
The selections reflected the sort of club music Robbie had known long before his solo career became stadium-sized.
Scott also returned to the long-running idea that Robbie should represent the UK at Eurovision.
Robbie had genuinely thought about it.
His hesitation was that even a career as established as his could take an unnecessary battering if the public or juries rejected the entry.
Scott remained convinced he could turn the UK’s fortunes around.
Tap End returned to the Pinner Stars
The Golden Moment went back to Chris’s childhood football team, the Pinner Stars.
There were two main teams in the local park: Pinner Stars and Pinner United.
Chris compared the rivalry with *West Side Story* despite admitting he had never actually seen *West Side Story*.
The Stars trained on Saturdays and played Sunday-league matches around north-west London.
They usually lost.
The squad had character, if not always footballing excellence
Chris loved being the underdog.
The team’s two centre-backs were twins who had more than once been sent off for fighting each other.
The captain before Chris could burst into tears when the team started losing.
Their star striker was afraid of heading the ball.
Chris generally played left-back or left midfield and idolised Stuart Pearce, which explained his continuing attachment to the number three shirt.
The team later acquired a sponsor whose name caused endless amusement: Middlesex Machines.
England’s 1998 defeat inspired poetry
Football emotion was not restricted to the Pinner Stars.
When England went out to Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, young Chris was devastated.
He cried and then wrote a poem called The Winning Goal.
The poem used scoring in football as a metaphor for life: success was not only about rewards but about keeping going, helping the team and finding your own winning goal.
Scott was struck by how earnest and unexpectedly philosophical it was.
Chris had apparently been combining Sunday-league football with motivational poetry years before anybody knew him from Radio 1.
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