The show wanted to lift people before Christmas
The final days before Christmas were not unfolding as anybody had planned.
Listener Roove wrote to say the programme had helped during a dark few months and that a run the previous night had left them feeling more hopeful.
Scott and Chris said they wanted to do as much cheering-up as possible.
That meant leaning hard into the show’s strangest festive traditions.
There would be Granny Tinder.
There would be the Who-Vent Calendar.
And there would be one final Bamboleo Wednesday for 2020.
The Who-Vent Calendar opened Last Christmas
Door 23 brought back a gloriously rough celebrity attempt at *Last Christmas*.
The point of the calendar had never been careful historical importance.
It was the pieces of audio which made regular listeners immediately remember a whole era, television appearance or joke.
With only one door left after this, the Who-Vent Calendar had become a month-long archive of the show’s shared memory.
Lynette was approaching a milestone birthday
Granny Tinder returned for a Christmas special.
Lynette revealed she would turn 80 in January.
A previous wellness assessment had apparently given her a physical age considerably younger than that, which Scott and Chris interpreted as evidence that Zofia had inherited excellent genes.
More importantly, Lynette wanted the COVID vaccine as soon as she became eligible.
The show jokingly asked whether she would receive it live on Radio 1.
Lynette was willing.
Scott immediately began imagining Granny Tinder becoming a vaccination correspondent.
A postman made the nice list
The dating profiles had all been given festive jobs.
First was Tim, 23, a postman.
His bio turned Santa’s “making a list, checking it twice” into a postal joke and promised that “Tim the postman is coming to town”.
Lynette initially worried the job might not sound ambitious enough for Zofia.
Scott and Chris defended it.
A postman had been working through the pandemic, stayed active and had a clear career.
The possibility of becoming “head postmaster” was raised even if nobody was entirely certain that remained an actual title.
Tim received a right swipe.
The turkey farmer sounded too wholesome
Tom, 28, worked with turkeys.
His profile joked about spending December stuffing and plucking gobblers.
His interests included baking, frosty mornings and open fires.
Scott thought it sounded like a perfect Christmas film.
Lynette found it boring.
The turkey farmer was gone.
A Christmas-tree salesman brought an axe and battle reenactments
Craig, 25, sold Christmas trees.
He described himself as a man of the wood with big arms and a big axe.
In his spare time he enjoyed battle reenactments.
This interested Lynette much more.
She had attended reenactments herself.
Scott made the mistake of briefly asking which historical battles she had enjoyed as though she might have witnessed the originals.
Lynette reminded him she was not *that* old.
Craig received a right swipe.
The ice skater confused everybody
Noel, 27, worked as an ice skater.
His bio said he spent a lot of time on ice and was looking for “the first Noel”.
Scott and Chris became distracted trying to work out whether the wording suggested he was looking for a man rather than Zofia.
Lynette already disliked the limited career lifespan of an ice skater.
Between the ambiguity and the job, Noel was swiped left.
Granny Tinder’s Christmas shopping for a boyfriend had produced a couple of possibilities but no obvious present to put under Zofia’s tree.
The last Bamboleo became deliberately enormous
Wednesday also meant the final Bamboleo of 2020.
Scott and Chris encouraged everybody to make the gap as big as possible.
Twenty-five minutes was suggested.
The normal collection of listener names, workplaces and locations turned into an end-of-year roll call.
For a feature built around nothing more complicated than shouting names over the Gipsy Kings, it had become one of the programme’s most reliable pieces of shared silliness during lockdown.
That made the final 2020 edition feel surprisingly significant.
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