Scott wanted the word virtual gone
One word had come to represent too much of 2020 for Scott:
virtual.
Virtual festival.
Virtual party.
Virtual pint.
He accepted that remote events were necessary, but objected to everybody pretending the online replacement felt the same as the actual experience.
Radio 1 itself had spent the year creating substitutes for events it could no longer stage normally.
Scott was simply tired of the language around them.
So the word “virtual” went in the bin.
One Direction were being melted down
Madame Tussauds was removing the old waxwork of One Direction together.
Scott understood why.
The group had been apart for years and the display belonged to another era.
He still found the idea of physically melting them oddly brutal.
If the spare wax was available, he proposed buying a One Direction candle.
Harry Styles was naturally claimed first.
Great attractions received one-star honesty
After several days of students reviewing their parents’ homes, the show expanded the TripAdvisor idea to places everybody is told they must visit.
The Mona Lisa was criticised for being tiny and almost impossible to get close to.
The Grand Canyon was dismissed as a very hot, extremely large hole in the ground.
Then came Stonehenge.
One listener had travelled for hours in winter and was unimpressed by barriers, cold weather and a collection of stones whose exact purpose remains uncertain.
Scott admitted he had largely experienced Stonehenge through the most efficient method available:
driving past it on the A303.
Times Square felt like a knock-off theme park
Listener Nick reviewed Times Square.
He had expected the cinematic version: lights, energy and the sense of arriving somewhere genuinely extraordinary.
Instead he found crowds, shops and costumed characters trying to charge tourists for photographs.
His review compared it with an off-brand theme park.
Scott understood the feeling.
Some places become so famous through films and photographs that the real location has almost no chance of matching the version already built in people’s heads.
Where Do You Think They Were? became extremely explicit
The show also returned to the feature in which a listener and parent reconstructed exactly where and how the listener had been conceived.
Twenty-year-old Oli had to sit through his mum Jill supplying the family history in considerably more detail than most people would ever request.
Scott and Chris encouraged listeners brave enough to endure the same experience to volunteer themselves and one parent.
Don’t Look It Up brought in bagpipes
The day’s quiz included celebrity fragrances before moving to bagpipe covers of pop songs.
Carly Rae Jepsen’s *Call Me Maybe*, Avicii’s *Wake Me Up* and Pharrell’s *Happy* were among the songs transformed by pipers.
It was exactly the sort of round that made a simple melody suddenly much harder to recognise.
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