Watford had done it
Chris had spent the previous week preparing for the possibility.
Now Watford were promoted.
The result gave him a genuinely huge weekend.
He had been lucky enough to be at the stadium doing some filming and experienced the promotion from inside an otherwise largely fan-free ground.
The strange part was celebrating one of the biggest club moments of the season without the usual packed crowd.
Scott was also slightly concerned by the combination of alcohol, excitement and the moon boot Chris was still wearing for his football injury.
Chris reported that everything had survived.
Scotland and Wales finally got their turn
The bigger national reopening story belonged to pubs.
England had already been serving people outdoors for a couple of weeks.
Now Scotland and Wales could join in.
Radio 1 treated the moment almost like New Year’s Eve.
Scott and Chris arranged to hear first pints being pulled live around the nations.
Listeners had booked tables.
Some had been queuing.
Groups of friends who had not sat together in a pub for months were finally meeting again.
The familiar Paul McCartney line — “someone’s knocking at the door, somebody’s ringing the bell” — returned as the show’s unofficial reopening music.
Four pubs pulled together
The programme linked up with pubs in Scotland and Wales at roughly the same moment.
The point was not that pulling a pint is normally interesting radio.
It was that something completely ordinary had stopped being ordinary.
The sound of liquid filling a glass had acquired emotional weight after months of closures.
Scott and Chris allowed themselves to make it as ceremonial as possible.
Northern Ireland’s turn, they noted, was still to come.
Swimming badges brought back childhood achievement
Listeners also began remembering the badges children used to earn at swimming lessons.
Some were sewn onto towels.
Others went onto costumes.
The badges represented distances or skills which felt enormously important at the time.
Scott and Chris compared who had achieved what and how proudly the badges had been displayed.
Like much of the show in 2021, an ordinary reopening conversation had quickly turned into childhood nostalgia.
Champagne birthdays confused almost everybody
The show also discovered the idea of a champagne birthday.
The basic concept is that somebody turns the age matching the date of the month on which they were born.
A person born on the 26th, for example, has their champagne birthday when they turn 26.
Scott and Chris had either never heard the phrase or had not retained it.
Listeners began explaining variations and equivalent names.
Another apparently ordinary piece of birthday culture had turned into an afternoon’s worth of radio.
Foreign-language covers closed the quiz
Don’t Look It Up transformed familiar hits through other languages.
Removing the expected English lyrics made songs Scott and Chris knew extremely well much harder to identify.
It was a suitably international round for a day already travelling between Wales and Scotland.
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