Radio 1 creates four themes for Skyfall
The release of Adele’s “Skyfall” allowed Scott, Beccy, Chris and Dev to unveil the Bond themes they had written during the week. Each track accompanied an unofficial trailer filmed by Scott and Chris, complete with homemade stunts, action scenes, champagne and a deliberately seductive Bond performance.
Adele’s real song went first and gave the low-budget footage an unexpectedly serious atmosphere. Chris then offered a radically different composition which opened with Bond greeting Pussy Galore and continued through a list of rhymes including “wailing wall”, “croquet ball”, “coffee stall”, “Mrs Hall”, “recoil” and “urban sprawl”. Its rough music-hall sound reminded the team of Chas & Dave but fitted the trailer surprisingly well.
Dev had asked listeners to his early breakfast show for a genre and received dubstep. He spent hours in his studio trying to make it work, gradually becoming stressed and deciding late at night that the result would have to do. Its repeated sample of “Skyfall” sounded more like “trifle”, but the modern, moody production worked well with the trailer’s black-and-white shots.
Scott and Beccy’s collaboration referred to Goldfinger, thunderballs, Pussy Galore, fluency in Japanese and the possibility of having chlamydia. It ended with Beccy singing in the style of Sean Paul. The pair enjoyed their work but realised that playing it last had been a tactical error.
Listeners overwhelmingly preferred Chris or Dev. Adele attracted almost no votes and Scott and Beccy struggled to find a single supportive message. Chris was declared the winner and his “Skyfall” received an encore, leaving everyone to wonder why his former music teacher Mrs Hall had appeared among the rhymes.
Dev’s piano challenge grows
Dev’s appearance also provided an update on his six-week attempt to learn the piano. He would perform at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales on 29 October, with the gala shown on BBC Three for Children in Need.
Scott and Beccy believed Dev was naturally capable and would succeed, but he remained conscious that the orchestra contained musicians with years of experience. He had fitted the Bond composition around university work and piano practice, making the additional challenge much more demanding than it first appeared.
Beccy’s Missed Connections
Beccy read genuine online advertisements from people trying to find strangers they had briefly encountered. One person wanted Kevin, who had admired a Bernese mountain dog outside the place where the writer worked. The team initially struggled with the breed’s name before discovering photographs of a large, proud and appealing dog.
A man with no front teeth and a bleeding lip wanted the pink-haired woman with whom he had moshed at a hardcore gig. His need to change shirts three times suggested an especially intense performance. This led to the revelation that the screaming at the previous year’s Teen Awards had been loud enough to make a member of staff physically sick.
Another notice sought Maggie, remembered chiefly for being good at multiplication tables. A Japanese-speaking woman browsing chicken-shaped oven timers with her grandparents was sought by a short-haired man in a washed-out brown shirt and grey “pants”, which prompted confusion over whether he had visited the homeware department in his underwear.
The final writer wanted Robert from swimming lessons several years earlier, having once told him that he looked like Elvis when he emerged from the water. The team debated whether this meant the young, glamorous Elvis or the older version, and whether Robert’s wet hair had simply formed the appropriate quiff.
Chris reviews Speed, Father Ted and Grease
Chris continued reviewing famous films he had somehow never seen. His account of Speed described a lively episode of Coach Trip and an angry milkman placing a bomb on a bus. He praised the clever use of a brick at the end, at which point Scott realised Chris had watched the Father Ted episode inspired by Speed, not the Keanu Reeves film itself. The entire review had to be abandoned.
His assessment of Grease began more accurately. Chris described it as the story of a young mechanic balancing studies, relationships and life in 1960s America. He understood Danny’s difficulty when a holiday romance unexpectedly appeared at his school, but thought the plot’s regular interruption by songs was tedious and argued that theatre and film should not be mixed.
Chris was more interested in the vehicles than the cast, praising the transformed 1948 Ford known as Greased Lightning and the rival gang’s 1949 Mercury Custom. He also noticed Frankie Avalon because of The Vaccines’ song “Teenage Icon”.
When Sandy transformed at the end, Chris paused the film to look up Olivia Newton-John’s present age. He still found her attractive but said the discovery changed how he viewed the scene. Despite objecting to the entire musical form, he awarded Grease three and a half stars.
The Answers Game
Scott introduced a game built around answers posted on a well-known questions website. The team heard replies first and had to reconstruct the original query. References to a magic Pegasus, Barack Obama and a drunk pilot taking the scenic route came from somebody asking how long it took to fly from London to New York.
Comments about shaving legs, a husband wearing them for 30 years and something flopping between the legs were answers to “Why can’t men wear tights?” Scott guessed leather trousers, while Chris proposed and attempted to copyright Velcro trousers.
The final answers advised practice, suggested rubbing petrol through cracks and recorded a time of 0.32. Scott and Chris thought somebody was trying to remove a stuck object, but the question was how to solve a Rubik’s Cube faster. Neither found the contributors especially helpful, but the site’s strange responses made the format worth continuing.
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