Scott discovers Brian Butterfield’s impossible diet plan
Scott had spent the previous evening recording an edition of Shooting Stars, an experience he found exciting and completely surreal. He was on Ulrika Jonsson’s team, met Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer and Angelos Epithemiou, and was delighted to have been allowed to call “Dove from Above”. He said the show’s lack of explanation was part of its charm: strange props and performers simply appeared, and everyone had to accept that this was normal.
One guest on his team was comedian Peter Serafinowicz in the character of Brian Butterfield. Scott had only just discovered Butterfield’s fake diet-plan film on YouTube and could not stop quoting it. The supposed weekday menu included a toasted cornflake, a peeled raw potato, a lettuce leaf, a square of low-fat turkey and a single baked bean.
The reward was a wildly excessive Saturday, during which the diet apparently allowed anything from “pints of cream” and “pork cylinders” to “pasta pillows”, “chocolate quail eggs” and a “20 cheese omelette”. Scott and Beccy recognised it as exactly the sort of diet they would enthusiastically begin and immediately fail. Listeners joined in, with one student admitting he had used the routine for an advertising project and received a poor mark for it.
Dear Scott supplied more useful nonsense. One listener asked whether a man who stripped to his boxer shorts after a failed canal rescue had merely seized an excuse to remain half-dressed for five hours. Another woman feared that, after being encouraged as a child to think of Ronan Keating whenever she was hurt, she would picture him while giving birth. Scott suggested that actually arranging a Ronan appearance might be more alarming than helpful.
The programme’s other running joke was Scott’s insistence that he had found something revolutionary in a comedy clip everyone else already knew. Beccy and Chris were happy to puncture that discovery, but Scott’s delight in the absurd vocabulary made the segment infectious. It was a Friday show driven by an almost unusable diet plan, increasingly strange correspondence and Scott’s determination to share his newest online find.
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