Maximus Aurelius returns to the orchestra
A listener used an app to create a picture of the imaginary child Chris and Beccy had acquired during the week’s school-orchestra sketches. Maximus Aurelius Huxtable-Stark appeared to have Beccy’s features but little obvious resemblance to Chris, who immediately questioned whether he was really the father.
Beccy joined the next recital after missing the previous day, although she disliked Scott calling her “Mum” and Chris calling her “wifey”. The supposed couple tried to watch Maximus and his classmates perform the James Bond theme without laughing, but the sad, off-key playing again defeated them. Chris nevertheless shouted encouragement and insisted their expensive music lessons had been worthwhile.
Scott talks to men in the toilet again
Chris returned to the same pub cubicle to discover what men said without their friends present. He again lowered his trousers for authenticity and used a cough as the studio’s signal that somebody had arrived. This time Beccy wanted a man to explain football’s offside rule, while Scott also suggested asking for a favourite romantic comedy.
The first visitor supplied toilet paper, then startled Chris by asking whether he was “the bloke from last time”. He had heard the earlier feature on Radio 1. Another man joined the conversation and named Gavin & Stacey as his favourite romantic comedy, after Chris admitted his own choice was Along Came Polly.
What was intended to be an anonymous psychological experiment had turned into listeners trying to locate Chris in pub toilets. He stayed hidden until the men had gone, pulled his trousers back up and carefully revealed himself before leaving with the feature’s growing reputation intact.
Stupid Street’s walks of shame
For Oh! What’s Occurring?, seven people on Stupid Street were asked when they had last done the walk of shame. The studio discussion first became awkward when Beccy said hers had been the previous Tuesday and Chris tried much too hard to make clear it had not involved him.
On the street, one man had been thrown out at 4am after an argument, another said every day of his life was a walk of shame and a woman admitted kicking somebody out at 3am before spotting him lost on a roundabout. A man remembered a particularly enjoyable encounter on a beach, ranking the sandy journey home among his top five.
Others did not understand the phrase. One woman said it might involve femininity, masculinity or both, while a man continued questioning a young woman even after discovering she was standing with her mother. As usual, the answers offered far more than the simple total Scott had originally requested.
Lindy ends up in Colleen Nolan’s cupboard
Show introducer Lindy had attended the 19th birthday party of Colleen Nolan’s son because her then-boyfriend knew him. Nervous about visiting a celebrity home, she wore a cocktail-style dress and discovered everybody else had arrived in jeans, T-shirts and shorts.
When guests were told to help themselves to drinks from a cupboard, Lindy expected an ordinary kitchen unit. It was actually a walk-in pantry filled with alcohol, and she found herself standing alone inside it without knowing what to select.
The rest of the house was equally memorable. Much of it was pink, including the baize on the pool table and pieces of gym equipment. There was also a cinema with a Looney Tunes-style mural incorporating family caricatures and a music studio, which Lindy linked to Nolan’s guitarist husband. She resisted the temptation to inspect the bedrooms, despite Scott’s conviction that this was where any nude family portrait would have been displayed.
Misconnections
Beccy’s latest online missed connections began with somebody who had opened an unlocked unisex toilet and seen a stranger on the lavatory. The writer believed they had shared a special moment before the door closed and asked for a reply identifying what had been visible. It prompted Scott to remember accidentally walking in on Trevor Nelson and Jamie Theakston on separate occasions.
A blood donor regretted being too dizzy and shy to approach somebody in the waiting area, using the line “You might be my type. Blood type.” Scott admitted that staff at his donor centre had recognised him as the person who had praised its biscuits on air. Other messages admired a man shaving on a bus, defended selecting the largest cucumber when each cost the same and praised a muscular refuse collector whose admirer deliberately made bags heavier and left perfumed underwear on top.
Real or No Real
Gary Lineker had not been born without a belly button and red-haired people were not twice as likely to win the lottery as people with beards. The Italian phrase meaning “into the wolf’s mouth” genuinely wished somebody good luck, while about four seconds of silence could become awkward. The programme tested the latter claim on air and found the discomfort arrived almost immediately.
The stated total of 64,699,952 black spots drawn for One Hundred and One Dalmatians was accepted as real. Bronze Age Europeans had not trained badgers to herd sheep before the arrival of sheepdogs. Beccy won the round by 40 points to Chris’s 20.
Chris reviews The Shawshank Redemption and Love Actually
Chris awarded The Shawshank Redemption five Starks, calling Morgan Freeman “the man” and saying anybody who had not watched it was a plum. In explaining that it concerned a wrongly imprisoned man who escaped, he immediately disclosed more of the plot than Scott thought a reviewer should. Chris revised the description to “it’s about a bloke” and advised listeners simply to watch it.
He also gave Love Actually five Starks. Chris described its interconnected stories as proof that love was everywhere, although his favourite concerned the two stand-ins filming an adult scene. Rather than naming the cast, he identified Martin Freeman as Tim from The Office, Joanna Page as Stacey from Gavin & Stacey and Kris Marshall as the man from the telephone adverts.
The latter character’s success in an American bar convinced Chris that a British accent could attract women abroad. He found the film warm, reassuring and much more comfortable than Brokeback Mountain, and recommended it to families so long as the children were over 12 and the parents were not “really old”. Scott decided the reviews should become a Friday fixture, while assuring Radio 1’s regular film critic Rhianna Dhillon that her position was safe.
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