The show’s own Christmas single finally came out
It was the final programme before Christmas.
Listeners demanded the return of a song Scott and the team had created years earlier.
The brief had been somewhere between *Glee* and the Coca-Cola “Holidays Are Coming” advert.
Scott was embarrassed by parts of it, particularly a lyric involving “trimming someone’s bush”.
Listeners did not care.
It was Christmas Eve.
The song had become old enough that quality was no longer the relevant test.
As one caller pointed out, Christmas music gets away with material that would sound ridiculous at any other time of year.
Scott finally played it.
Petrol Station Presents replaced the normal mum-gift tradition
In previous years, Scott and Chris had bought inappropriate presents for each other’s mothers and allowed the mums to believe the gifts had come from their sons.
2020 made the logistics difficult.
Deliveries were unreliable.
Non-essential shops were closed in many places.
The feature therefore became Petrol Station Presents.
The rule was simple:
find a gift somewhere you would not normally do Christmas shopping.
Scott genuinely went to a petrol station.
Chris bent the rule slightly and used businesses which happened to be open while he was already passing.
Chris bought an extraordinary amount of salami
Chris had been visiting a small deli throughout the year.
The owner told him food would go to waste over the closed Christmas period.
Chris responded by buying enormous salamis for Scott and producer Will.
The gifts were absurdly large.
But there was a genuinely nice reason underneath the joke.
The deli had provided Chris with lunches throughout a difficult year and buying surplus stock helped a local business rather than letting the food be thrown away.
Producer Will described it as one of the best sausages he had ever received.
Scott put his enormous salami on the desk and accepted that this was probably not a sentence he had expected to say on Christmas Eve.
Scott solved Chris’s cold-coffee problem
Scott’s petrol-station present for Chris was unexpectedly practical.
A coffee warmer.
Chris regularly complained that the drinks Scott made him went cold before he got around to drinking them.
The device looked like a wireless charging pad but heated the cup from underneath.
Chris had expected a novelty present.
Instead he thought he might genuinely use it.
Scott’s bike received a dangling brake light
Chris had another present for Scott.
Scott had recently moved somewhere more suitable for cycling and had bought a bike.
Chris produced a safety light designed to hang below the saddle.
The shape was unmistakable.
It looked like a pair of glowing testicles.
The point was technically road safety.
The visual joke was clearly the reason Chris had bought it.
Scott was delighted.
Tap End returned for a Christmas special
The final major feature was a festive chapter of 24 Years at the Tap End.
Chris returned to his third year at university.
The student house already had its normal problems, including a large rat and a letting agent increasingly difficult to contact.
But Christmas was approaching.
The housemates decided to organise a proper dinner before everybody left for the holidays.
For once they dressed smartly.
Chris dug out the one suit he used for virtually every formal occasion and attempted to flatten the creases by hand.
Seeing housemates who normally lived in hoodies and student clothes suddenly dressed up felt surprisingly emotional.
They even gave little speeches.
Snog, Marry, Avoid immediately damaged the goodwill
After dinner they played games.
One was Snog, Marry, Avoid using members of the house.
The problem with playing honestly is that somebody has to be the person you would avoid.
Chris made his choice.
The chosen housemate was not amused.
He spent a while explaining that it was only a game and that saying he would “marry” somebody else did not mean he actually wanted to marry her.
Eventually peace was restored.
That mattered because a large group of Chris’s friends from home were arriving for a Southampton night out.
Chango the Beast vanished
Dosa, Chango the Beast, John O, Webbo, Hinton and the wider group arrived.
The night progressed in the usual way.
Drinks.
Club.
Christmas songs.
Everybody on the dancefloor.
Then the group realised Chango had disappeared.
He was not answering his phone.
Nobody could remember seeing him during the final part of the night.
Because Chango knew where the student house was, everyone hoped he would eventually make his own way back.
He did not.
The Beast had been thrown out while looking for a phone
The following morning, the story emerged.
Chango had apparently entered the ladies’ toilets searching for his lost phone and been removed from the club.
He then started walking in the wrong direction along Portswood Road.
Unable to remember where the house was, he tried several hotels.
Everywhere was full.
It was Christmas.
Nobody had a room.
Eventually Chango reached an area near the docks and found shelter beside piles of boxes near a Staples car park.
That was where the Beast spent the night.
Everyone else made it home in varying states
Back at the student house, the rest of the group had returned with late-night food.
Chris chose a foot-long meatball sub with quadruple cheese because it was Christmas.
One friend was asleep on the sofa.
Another lay on the floor still holding part of a sandwich.
John O was being sick.
The student house was chaotic.
Chris looked around and realised these ridiculous nights with the same group of friends were moments he would remember for the rest of his life.
Somewhere else in Southampton, Chango slept under the stars beside Staples boxes.
It was hardly a conventional Christmas story.
For *24 Years at the Tap End*, it was perfect.
The year ended with the exact mixture the show had lived through
The final December source episode combined almost everything that had defined the programme’s year.
Listener traditions.
Old archive features.
Absurd gifts.
Local businesses trying to survive.
A Christmas song Scott was embarrassed by.
And a nostalgic story about friends being together in a way 2020 had made almost impossible.
The archive for the year closed on Christmas Eve with Scott and Chris doing what they had done through the strangest year of their Radio 1 careers:
finding something ridiculous to laugh about.
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