The giant M promised food
Chris had been DJing on Saturday night and stopped at a motorway service station afterwards.
It was late.
He was hungry.
Then he saw the sight every tired driver recognises:
the giant illuminated M.
Chris immediately began planning the order in his head.
The sign was lit.
Surely the restaurant was open.
He parked.
Walked in.
It was closed.
Chris wanted the lights turned off if the restaurant was shut
The disappointment became a campaign.
If a motorway McDonald’s is closed, Chris argued, the illuminated sign should not be allowed to remain on.
The glowing M is not decoration.
It is a promise.
Listeners strongly agreed.
Drivers who spend hours on the road said the same thing had happened to them repeatedly.
Scott joked that Chris could run for government on the issue alone.
Everything else could sort itself out later.
First:
turn off the M.
The McStark Act 2021 was drafted on air
Chris gave the policy an official name:
The McStark Act 2021.
One listener proposed an even more detailed system.
Different sections of the golden arches could light up depending on what was available.
No milkshake?
Dim one side.
Restaurant completely shut?
Turn the whole thing off.
The show’s resident motorway-services enthusiast, Rich, complicated the debate by saying the illuminated sign could still serve the useful purpose of tempting drivers into the service area.
He also passed on alleged insider knowledge that when staff say the milkshake machine is broken, it may simply mean the ice-cream mix has run out.
Chris’s one-issue political platform was already facing lobbying.
The Who Game was asked to predict the future
Scott then used Squid Game as an example of something which would probably enter the Who Game eventually.
In October 2021, everybody was talking about it.
Give it time and hearing the title might itself produce a nostalgic Whooo.
The actual round brought back SlimFast shakes, old Biffy Clyro phrases, BBM PINs, key changes in pop music and other fragments of recent culture which had quietly stopped being everyday language.
The quiz asked whether strange names belonged to real people
Don’t Look It Up also tested names which sounded too odd to exist.
Scott and Chris had to decide whether people with extraordinary-sounding names were genuine or inventions.
After spending the day proposing legislation about a motorway McDonald’s sign, the bar for what counted as implausible was already fairly high.
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