Mariah Carey had officially defrosted
Halloween was barely over before Mariah Carey appeared online destroying pumpkins and declaring the beginning of the Christmas season.
Scott and Chris had seen the annual transition before.
Every year, Mariah effectively waits for midnight on 1 November and then resumes the festive campaign which has become almost as famous as *All I Want for Christmas Is You* itself.
Scott admired the commitment.
No respect for Bonfire Night.
No gradual easing into December.
Halloween finishes.
Mariah starts Christmas.
Ben in Wisconsin had adopted Watford
The main listener story came from Ben, joining from Wisconsin in the United States.
Scott and Chris often say:
your obsession becomes our obsession.
Ben had managed to reverse the process.
He listened regularly to Radio 1 and knew how much Chris loved Watford FC.
As English football became more popular in America, Ben decided he needed a Premier League club.
He did not want simply to choose one of the biggest teams.
He wanted somewhere smaller, passionate and distinctive.
Watford fitted.
There was also a local connection through former Watford player Jay DeMerit.
Before long, Ben had become a proper supporter.
Chris was delighted that years of talking about Watford on Radio 1 had accidentally created a fan in Wisconsin.
American football chants sounded completely wrong
The transatlantic football conversation led to clips of American supporter chants.
Scott and Chris were used to British terrace songs.
The American alternatives sounded very different.
“I believe that we will win.”
And the spectacularly earnest:
“Fight and win!”
Chris could not imagine either surviving for long at Vicarage Road.
Ben’s decision to follow English football suddenly made even more sense.
The Who Game was travelling abroad too
The show also heard from international listeners who had started picking up British phrases, references and old Radio 1 features simply through listening.
Things Scott and Chris considered completely ordinary were being absorbed into people’s everyday language thousands of miles away.
The Who Game itself had become part of that.
A feature largely built around forgotten bits of British culture was now being played by people who had never lived in Britain.
Does This Animal Poop became legitimate science
Don’t Look It Up introduced Does This Animal Poop?
The questions sounded childish.
The answers were unexpectedly educational.
Butterflies were discussed.
Other animals turned out to have specialised toilet habits.
Then came jellyfish.
Scott already disliked them after being stung on holiday.
Chris learned that jellyfish do not use a conventional digestive setup in quite the way humans imagine.
The biological explanation immediately produced the sort of terminology the show was never going to handle maturely.
Monday had begun with American Watford fans and Mariah Carey.
It ended with marine digestion.
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