Rachel should have been in Rome
Listener Rachel had a trip to Rome booked.
The pandemic meant it was not happening.
Scott and Chris had already spent much of lockdown trying to recreate cancelled holidays on air.
Rome was next.
They layered in traffic noise, imaginary Roman breezes and aggressively stereotypical Italian accents.
Cars honked.
Scott repeatedly said Roma as though changing the pronunciation made the whole thing more authentic.
Rachel was expected to behave as if she had actually arrived.
Radio 1 rebuilt the holiday badly but enthusiastically
The show talked through the kind of experiences Rachel should have been having.
Food.
Streets.
Famous sights.
All of it existed entirely in sound and imagination.
The feature never really tried to convince anybody it was a substitute for travel.
The joke was the effort being spent to create the cheapest possible version of an international break using sound effects and people in a radio studio.
Jack Whitehall rediscovered Where Do You Think They Were?
The Golden Moment returned to Where Do You Think They Were?, the feature in which somebody hears the story of exactly where and how they were conceived.
This time the archive involved Jack Whitehall and his father Michael.
Scott loved Michael’s willingness to provide much more detail than Jack appeared to want.
The dynamic made the feature even better than usual.
Jack was a professional comedian.
His dad still managed to create a conversation he could not comfortably control.
Scott immediately decided more celebrities should be put through the same experience.
Pitbull or Shakespeare returned
Don’t Look It Up brought back Pitbull or Shakespeare.
The format remained beautifully simple.
Hear a quotation.
Decide whether the words came from the works of William Shakespeare or Mr Worldwide.
Removing the beat from Pitbull made his lyrics sound unexpectedly grand.
Removing the Elizabethan context from Shakespeare occasionally made him sound like somebody preparing to shout a club slogan.
The quiz remained far harder than it had any right to be.
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