Dev took over Scott’s side of the studio
Scott was away, so Dev Griffin joined Chris for the week.
Dev made the presenter change very clear at the beginning of the podcast: he was not Scott, even if the usual Scott-and-Chris features were still around him.
The timing also felt strange because late September would normally have meant travelling around the country for Freshers’ Week events and DJ sets. Facebook and Timehop memories were now resurfacing photographs of crowded nights out from previous years at exactly the moment none of that could happen normally.
That led Dev into a new subject.
Even the worst holiday memory suddenly looked attractive when the alternative was no holiday at all.
Dev’s Ibiza party bus went catastrophically wrong
Dev remembered leaving Amnesia in Ibiza at around six in the morning and getting onto a packed party bus back towards San Antonio.
He desperately needed the toilet.
The bus was not stopping.
A group of women nearby offered him a small water bottle and suggested he use that.
In theory, this solved the problem.
In practice, trying to aim into a small bottle while standing on a packed moving bus after a night at Amnesia required rather more precision than Dev possessed.
He began and then looked down.
Almost none of it was going into the bottle.
The woman who had helped him looked up and informed him that it was going all over her legs.
People behind Dev realised what was happening and started hitting him and telling him to stop.
By then, as Dev explained, stopping was not especially straightforward.
He spent the following couple of days anxiously refreshing social media in case somebody on the bus had filmed the whole thing.
Nobody appeared to have done so.
And yet, in September 2020, Dev admitted he would happily relive even that humiliation if it meant being able to go back to Ibiza.
Bad holidays suddenly looked like luxury
Chris understood the argument.
He remembered a lads’ trip to Faliraki where the group had deliberately chosen one of the worst-reviewed hotels they could find because they thought a rougher hotel would contain more young people.
It was genuinely horrible.
He would still have taken it again.
Listeners were invited to send in the holiday moments which had once ruined a trip but which, after months of restrictions, now seemed strangely desirable.
Dave was extremely polite to his Sky Q remote
The biggest feature came from listener Lewis and his 79-year-old grandad Dave.
Dave had acquired a Sky Q box with voice control.
Lewis explained that all his grandad needed to do was hold down the button on the remote and say what he wanted to watch.
Dave approached the technology as though another person were living inside it.
He began with a polite hello.
Then he carefully asked to watch *Celebrity Antiques Road Trip*.
The television repeatedly failed to understand.
Dave remained patient and simply tried again, continuing to address the remote in complete sentences rather than barking the title at it.
Dev and Chris loved the combination of total politeness and total technological confusion.
They decided Grandparents vs Technology could easily be a television series.
Other grandparents had even better misunderstandings
Listeners immediately supplied more examples.
One grandmother refused to use the pause and rewind feature on Sky because she believed pressing pause would stop the programme for everybody in the country.
Another returned her supposedly broken phone to the shop.
It simply needed charging.
One listener’s nan had accidentally changed the language on her MP3 player to Mandarin. Nobody could work out how to change it back, so the device was effectively abandoned.
Another grandmother thought Netflix contained only the single row of programmes visible when it first opened because she did not realise the screen could scroll up and down.
Chris also offered family examples.
His Nanny Joyce had become comfortable with WhatsApp but was less convinced by a video doorbell.
His mum still sometimes interpreted the crying-with-laughter emoji as genuine tears, creating the risk of sending what looked like a delighted reaction to genuinely bad news.
The Who Game returned under new management
Dev also joined Chris for The Who Game, where presenters and listeners nominate things from the recent past which trigger an immediate nostalgic “Whooo!”
Dev opened with MTV’s *Punk’d*, remembering Ashton Kutcher’s celebrity pranks.
Chris offered pub lock-ins.
Listeners supplied Tumblr, Kylie Jenner’s viral *Rise and Shine*, Follow Friday and the old trend for fake moustaches.
Other nominations included No Fear clothing, Tractor Boy Racer, Robot Wars and solar eclipses.
Chris used Robot Wars as another excuse to explain why he still regarded one trophy from the show as genuinely his rather than Scott’s.
It was an unusually seamless start to Dev’s week: one afternoon had already produced public urination, confused grandparents and enough forgotten internet culture for two rounds of The Who Game.
COMMENTS