A Michelin-starred meal contained one item nobody should eat
Scott and Chris began with a restaurant story involving actress Tracy-Ann Oberman and her husband Rob.
At a Michelin-starred restaurant, something arrived which looked enough like part of the meal for Rob to begin eating it.
Unfortunately, it was not a carefully constructed course.
It was a napkin.
Scott understood the mistake more than he wanted to admit.
High-end restaurants sometimes present food in deliberately surprising ways.
If something arrives at the table looking unfamiliar, there is always a brief moment where a diner has to work out whether it is edible, decorative or intended for cleaning.
Rob chose incorrectly.
Scott had once eaten the hot towel
The story made Scott confess to an even more basic error.
At a Chinese restaurant, he had been given one of the hot lemon-scented towels designed for cleaning your hands.
It was warm.
It smelled of lemon.
It arrived at the table in a way which briefly made it look like something edible.
Scott bit it.
He realised the mistake very quickly.
That did not undo the fact he had attempted to eat a steaming cloth.
Listeners began sending their own examples of food-like objects being mistaken for actual food.
The programme had found another category of embarrassment built entirely from acting confidently before asking a simple question.
North Korea supposedly invented the burrito
Then came a much stranger claim from international news.
North Korean state media had credited former leader Kim Jong-il with inventing something resembling the burrito around a decade earlier.
Scott and Chris were not particularly interested in challenging North Korea’s version of culinary history on air.
They were interested in the idea of people claiming ownership over things everybody else thought already existed.
That led to a new listener appeal:
what word, phrase or trend do you insist you invented?
Everyone wanted credit for pandemic language
The answers became very 2020–21.
One listener claimed Primarni for Primark.
Another claimed an early use of “the Rona”.
Then came “pingdemic”, the word used when huge numbers of people were receiving NHS COVID-app isolation alerts.
One caller said she had used it online before it became widespread and had even argued with BBC political correspondent Chris Mason over who deserved credit.
Scott liked how impossible the disputes were to settle.
Language often appears in several places at once.
That does not stop people feeling fiercely protective when they believe a phrase began with them.
The Apprentice candidates were already delivering
The new series of The Apprentice was also approaching.
Scott and Chris went through some of the candidate introduction clips.
One contestant rapped.
Another described himself in extravagantly confident terms.
A candidate explained, with refreshing directness, that the whole point of the process was financial gain.
Scott appreciated the lack of pretence.
The show had not even begun and the candidates were already speaking in the kind of lines which would be replayed for weeks.
January breakfast was beginning to feel much more normal.
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