Greg James thought he was presenting breakfast
The morning began with Greg James broadcasting from Brighton as part of Radio 1’s summer games.
He knew something was going to happen.
He did not know what.
Shortly after 8am, a formal Radio 1 statement interrupted the programme.
Greg had been removed from the Radio 1 Breakfast Show with immediate effect.
Two security guards physically escorted him out of his temporary studio.
A new presenting team was already waiting at Broadcasting House in London.
Scott and Chris had finally got breakfast
The new hosts were Scott Mills and Chris Stark.
After years of Scott joking about never receiving the call for Radio 1 Breakfast, it had arrived with barely a month of his Radio 1 career remaining.
They were delighted.
Scott described himself and Chris as the only contenders left to lead the nation in the morning.
Greg could still be heard from Brighton, protesting that after everything they had been through they had stabbed him in the back.
His microphone was eventually turned off.
It was their show now.
Greg could win it back with a giant jigsaw
Another official statement explained the challenge.
A huge Radio 1 logo had been broken into 20 giant jigsaw pieces and hidden around the United Kingdom.
Listeners might encounter one anywhere.
Each piece carried instructions and a phone number.
Greg’s job was to make sure all 20 were found, organise the logistics required to move them to Brighton and then assemble the completed puzzle in a frame floating on the lagoon beside him.
Only after the final piece was in place would he get Breakfast back.
Scott and Chris were in no hurry.
They were perfectly happy to keep the programme for a month if necessary.
The first piece appeared in Wrexham
The puzzle phone rang.
Michael had found a large white jigsaw piece in a record shop in Wrexham.
The discovery immediately exposed the difficult half of the challenge.
Finding a one-metre-wide puzzle piece was only the beginning.
Somebody then had to physically get it to Brighton.
Listeners began offering cars, vans and journey legs to relay the piece south.
Another piece was at John O’Groats
Then Adam called from John O’Groats.
A second piece had been attached near the famous signpost.
This was significantly less convenient.
Adam was travelling south as far as Inverness and then Newcastle, meaning the programme needed to build an improvised transport chain from the far north of Scotland to the south coast of England.
Truckers and logistics workers started messaging with offers of help.
One caller who worked in transport confidently told Greg he had the operation covered.
The listeners became the delivery network
The challenge rapidly stopped being a simple treasure hunt and turned into a nationwide logistics exercise.
Pieces could be found anywhere.
The finder might not be travelling south.
Somebody else would have to collect it.
Then somebody might need to take it on another leg.
All of this was being coordinated live while Scott and Chris sat comfortably in the Breakfast studio they had just stolen.
Radio 1 had created another enormous piece of nonsense
The genius of the challenge was that there was no real point to any of it.
Greg had lost his show because Radio 1 said so.
Twenty pieces of plastic now had to travel across the country because Radio 1 said so.
And until that happened, Scott and Chris were breakfast presenters.
For two people preparing to leave the station, briefly becoming the usurpers of its biggest daily show was an unexpectedly perfect final-month detour.
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