December began with a riddle Scott immediately regretted
A listener sent in a Christmas-cracker-style brain teaser.
If six people took nine hours to build a barn, how long would 12 people take?
Scott immediately began trying to calculate it.
The actual answer was much more annoying:
no time at all, because the barn had already been built.
Scott decided this was exactly why he disliked maths riddles on the radio.
Chris naturally suggested making them a weekly feature.
The Who-Vent Calendar reopened
December meant the return of one of the show’s most self-referential Christmas traditions:
the Who-Vent Calendar.
Each day, Scott and Chris would open a new door containing something which had once been everywhere and could now produce a nostalgic:
“Whooo!”
The first door returned to Joey Essex and the word reem.
For a period around *The Only Way Is Essex*, Joey’s vocabulary had become part of British pop culture.
There had even been an attempt to turn *Reem* into a song.
Scott and Chris wondered why the record had never received the full Radio 1 Live Lounge treatment.
The Who-Vent Calendar was officially back.
Durdle Door divided a couple
The programme had recently been discussing tourist attractions which are perfectly nice but slightly underwhelming in person.
Listener Charlie and fiancé Connor had just visited Durdle Door.
Charlie thought the trip was romantic and worthwhile.
Connor’s assessment was much shorter.
It was essentially:
a hole in some rocks.
He would not necessarily rush back.
Scott liked how the same place could produce two completely different reviews from people standing beside each other.
Amy nominated the Eiffel Tower
Producer Amy had cycled from London to Paris in around 30°C heat.
After all that effort, she expected arriving at the Eiffel Tower to feel overwhelming.
Instead she found the monument itself slightly underwhelming once the crowds and surrounding chaos were taken into account.
Chris’s own earlier disappointment at the Fairy Bridge on the Isle of Man returned too.
Nobody was arguing that the landmarks were bad.
The question was whether the image people build in their head can become impossible for the real thing to match.
Radio 1 had entered one-Christmas-song-a-show territory
Scott also noted that the station’s festive music policy had shifted.
One Christmas song per programme was beginning to appear.
That created what he called Radio 1 whiplash.
A classic seasonal record could be followed immediately by a current chart track such as Lil Nas X.
Scott began informally ranking Christmas songs into tiers.
Some records could appear early.
Others needed December to be properly under way.
Mariah Carey had already forced herself into the schedule weeks earlier.
Bamboleo Wednesday continued as if December changed nothing
The first Wednesday of the month still required Bamboleo.
Listener shout-outs, old clips and the Gipsy Kings returned on schedule.
The Christmas calendar had changed.
The weekly calendar had not.
Teen Hero Jake turned Christmas lights into fundraising
The programme also celebrated Jake, 14.
After his sister died on Christmas Day and the family later lost his grandmother, Jake turned an annual Christmas-light switch-on into a fundraiser.
The events had raised more than £10,000 for Macmillan.
His younger brother helped Radio 1 surprise him.
Scott and Chris loved that something so tied to a painful time of year had been turned into a tradition which helped other families.
Don’t Look It Up went into Scott and Chris’s own internet past
The quiz asked whether old Chris Stark tweets were genuine.
One from his 23rd birthday was real.
Other supposed early-show messages were inventions.
Then Christmas records were mangled into dubstep covers, including versions of *Last Christmas*, *All I Want for Christmas Is You* and *Fairytale of New York*.
The first December show had managed to combine old TOWIE language, landmarks, charity Christmas lights and aggressively remixed festive music.
The Who-Vent Calendar had opened exactly as intended.
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