Nick Knowles warns Scott about the Kenyan desert
Nick Knowles dropped into Scott’s Friday show with a practical aim: he wanted tickets for the Brit Awards. Scott greeted him as if he were an overlooked Best Male nominee, placing him alongside the real contenders and inviting listeners to help. Nick happily played up the idea that the awards had somehow failed to recognise his musical talent, while also promoting his Saturday-night quiz show, Secret Fortune.
The Brit Awards talk soon gave way to Scott’s Comic Relief Red Nose Desert Trek. Nick knew the region in northern Kenya and was unnervingly well placed to intensify Scott’s fear of the trip. He told him about bandit territory, elephants that might charge before asking questions, the heat, sand in boots and the realities of sleeping on the ground in an area with formidable wildlife.
Nick was particularly vivid on spiders. His advice was not to roll over in the night, because a spider might settle close to a person for warmth and bite if disturbed. Scott, already worried about snakes and the desert’s temperatures, was not reassured. Nick added that trekkers could need around eight litres of water a day, making the challenge sound considerably more serious than the public image of celebrities going for a walk in the sun.
The visit stayed characteristically silly despite the warnings. Nick had brought Scott a collection of mock survival gifts, including a blue bag, an air freshener for a tent Scott would not have, earplugs, a tape measure and a sign reading “No free newspapers or junk mail”. Scott loved the absurdity of trying to prepare for Kenya with items that would be more useful in a car or at home.
The programme also returned to the recent Lady Gaga experiment. Scott and Beccy had each written a version of Born This Way from the published lyrics before the real song had been heard. Now that Gaga’s track was out, Beccy’s prediction was revealed to have been strikingly closer than Scott’s folk-rock attempt, a result Scott had to accept as the show headed into the weekend.
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