The Who-Vent Calendar went back to pre-app dating
Door nine reopened an old advert for a gay telephone chat service.
The clip promised the chance to speak to other gay men in your area for a per-minute charge.
Scott and Chris were fascinated by how much dating technology had changed.
Before Tinder, Grindr and endless direct messaging, a premium-rate telephone service could genuinely be marketed as a route to meeting somebody.
The ad sounded impossibly old-fashioned in 2021.
That made it perfect Who-Vent material.
Racehorse or Racing Novel inspired a much worse idea
The show had been enjoying Racehorse or Racing Novel, partly because real romantic-fiction titles could sound more absurd than anything Scott and Chris invented.
So they removed the racehorses.
The new plan was simple.
Create fake erotic-romance titles.
Mix them with genuine books.
Phone actual bookshops and ask whether they were available.
The booksellers would have to search with complete professional seriousness.
Chris went first.
Taken by a Dragon was real
One title was Taken by a Dragon.
It sounded exactly like something the show would have made up.
It was genuine.
The bookseller found it and offered to order it.
That made the invented titles much easier to disguise.
Chris then asked for The Lump in My Pants Means I Love You.
Fake.
Another creation was Pull My Finger, complete with a deliberately terrible romantic synopsis involving Karen and Johnny.
Also fake.
The shop assistant continued searching.
Scott was in pieces.
One in the Bun became Scott’s masterpiece
Scott called another shop.
His invented title:
One in the Bun.
The synopsis involved an aspiring baker falling for a judge in a baking competition.
The promotional line was roughly:
the dough will not be the only thing rising.
Scott had committed enough detail that it almost sounded like a genuine cheap paperback.
Then came Ball or Nothing, supposedly about a frustrated football manager and an out-of-favour player discovering a new kind of performance off the pitch.
Again:
completely invented.
The real titles were barely less ridiculous
Scott also asked about genuine books including Miss Velveteen and Savage Urges.
The bookseller could find them.
That was the central joke.
Scott and Chris did not actually need to write especially outrageous fake titles.
The romance market had already done much of the work for them.
The feature ended with both presenters agreeing there was probably no title too strange to exist somewhere.
Dial-A-Carol returned with Monica
The archive revisited Dial-A-Carol and American student Monica.
Scott asked for *Walking in the Air*.
Monica had never heard it.
Rather than refusing, she found the song online and tried to learn enough of the melody to perform it.
She then moved onto *Feliz Navidad*.
For percussion, she had two plastic cups containing rice.
The homemade maracas were almost as important as the singing.
Scott loved the feature because professional skill was irrelevant.
Enthusiasm did all the work.
Bangers and dance names completed the day
The show also played Bangers and a Don’t Look It Up round involving real and fake dance-act names.
By then, the standard for plausibility had been completely destroyed.
If *Taken by a Dragon* was real, almost anything could be.
COMMENTS