The final week began with the numbers
The last Monday opened with a person who had quietly been keeping one of the most important records in the show’s history.
Keon, the unofficial Bangers statistician, had tracked the feature since it began on 9 February 2016.
Scott and Chris had played it 1,192 times.
That was finally enough data to settle the question of who had really been better at choosing the next song.
Chris had won Bangers
The result was clear.
Chris: 634 wins.
Scott: 558 wins.
Chris therefore finished 76 victories ahead.
Keon calculated that Scott would have needed to stay on Radio 1 until around Christmas and win practically every remaining game to catch him.
Scott tried to argue that the percentage gap did not sound enormous.
Nobody allowed him to turn it into a moral victory.
The stats revealed their favourite weapons
Keon also looked at the songs each presenter repeatedly used.
Chris’s successful choices included My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade”, Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch” and Angelo Badalamenti’s “Laura Palmer’s Theme”.
Some had perfect records when selected.
Scott complained that Chris’s statistics partly proved he had simply kept returning to the same reliable songs.
Chris considered that good strategy rather than lack of imagination.
Old games resurfaced for the final week
Monday also brought back one of the programme’s much earlier games and tested whether Scott still had the vocal range and memory to perform material he had not used for years.
The final week was now openly functioning like a retrospective.
Every day contained something which could only really happen after a long-running show had accumulated enough history to make its own archive funny.
The Who Game got its final outing
The Who Game then reached its last edition.
The feature had always depended on fragments of half-remembered culture, names and references which everybody recognised once somebody else said them.
That made it particularly appropriate for the final Monday.
A week which began with six years of Bangers statistics ended by testing exactly the kind of useless shared memory Scott and Chris had spent years building with listeners.
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