Chris made a late-night pilgrimage to Scott’s bridge
Chris had been travelling home after a DJ booking and stopped at Fleet Services in the early hours.
That gave him a chance to visit one of the strangest pieces of Scott Mills history.
The footbridge linking the two sides of the services had been named after Scott several years earlier.
The transcript repeatedly mishears the name as the “Danny Howard Bridge”, but the context is clearly the Scott Mills Bridge.
Chris expected a proud piece of Radio 1 heritage.
What he found felt rather less ceremonial.
The bridge had seen better days
Chris said the bridge looked tired and uncared for.
More alarmingly, he could not find the commemorative plaque which had marked Scott’s association with it.
Scott took this personally.
A bridge bearing his name was not exactly Buckingham Palace, but it was still part of his broadcasting legacy.
Had the services quietly removed him?
Had the plaque been stolen?
Had somebody simply forgotten to put it back after work on the building?
The disappearance immediately became a mystery.
The original opening ceremony returned
The programme went back into the archive.
Scott remembered the bridge’s official opening, complete with the sort of ceremony nobody expects at a motorway service station.
There had been plaques.
There had been curtains.
Chris had been involved.
The whole thing had been treated with exactly the level of pomp Scott felt appropriate for a footbridge across the M3.
Hearing the old audio made the missing plaque feel even more suspicious.
Radio 1’s lifts had become another logistical problem
Back at Broadcasting House, the team were also dealing with the slow return of people to the building.
During strict social distancing, lifts had often been limited to one person.
The rules had eased, but queues remained.
Scott and Chris sometimes needed to get back to the studio quickly before a song ended.
They began testing how confidently somebody could announce they were on live radio and needed to skip the queue.
The whole thing risked sounding horribly self-important.
That was precisely why Scott found it funny.
The Who Game and dodgy lyrics rounded out Monday
The Who Game returned with more things nobody realised they had forgotten.
Don’t Look It Up later played with misheard or questionable lyrics.
The main mystery, though, remained at Fleet Services.
Somewhere between refurbishment and the present day, the Scott Mills Bridge had apparently lost the very thing proving it was the Scott Mills Bridge.
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