Scott’s weekend with Susan Boyle
Scott returned from presenting the National Lottery with what he described as one of his best anecdotes. Katy Perry had been the programme’s musical guest, but the story that occupied the show concerned Susan Boyle, whom the team continued to call SuBo. It followed the competition on Chris Moyles’s breakfast show which invited listeners to recreate a scene from Twilight for the chance to meet Robert Pattinson.
Scott did not particularly want the prize, but thought Susan could make his entry memorable. His first idea was the scene in which Bella was chased by wolves and jumped from a tree. He briefly considered finding a suitable tree outside the lottery studios and asking Susan to leap from it, before recognising that the request was unlikely to succeed.
Plan B was the moment in which Bella looked into a mirror, studied her stomach and said she was late, fearing she might be carrying a vampire baby. Scott would play Robert Pattinson’s character and Susan would become Bella. He checked that her dressing room contained a mirror and arranged for a make-up artist to wait outside with white face paint, ready to transform her if she agreed.
The preparation came to nothing when Susan opened the door. After somebody introduced Scott as the lottery presenter, she gave him the stern expression he had encountered before and said hello. Scott immediately decided that she would not appreciate either the request or an unexpected layer of white make-up. He quietly told the make-up artist it was not happening and fled. After building the story across almost the whole programme, he had to admit that his recreation contained no actual recreation at all.
Chris and Scott’s flying visit to Zante
In 24 Years at the Tap End, Chris revisited the summer in which Danny Howard had a Saturday residency in Zante and Scott travelled out to DJ. With no direct Saturday flight, they went through Vienna, where Scott knew the airport well enough to lead Chris straight to a sausage bar and an adult shop. Chris followed Scott’s instruction not to arrive in a matching holiday shirt, although he still felt underdressed among the hen parties in slogan tops.
Their onward flight delivered its safety briefing in German, leaving Chris to test the few phrases he knew. On arrival they were collected by Jake, the local fixer whom Chris remembered greeting them with an enthusiastic “Hello, boys”. At the hotel, Chris became the unofficial photographer for people waiting to meet Scott by the pool. That inspired a plan to collect the short, awkward videos created when somebody poses for a photograph without realising the phone is recording.
The pair bought imitation sunglasses and headed to Plus Club, where an enormous picture of Scott covered the front of the building and made his trainers look disproportionately large. Chris said the venue was packed and the crowd greeted Scott as if he were Michael Bublé. During the night Chris swung his shirt over his head and lost it, then returned to the hotel to discover that the trick for keeping the room’s electricity and air conditioning running had failed.
Unable to sleep in the heat, Chris walked back into town alone, changed £50 at a disastrous exchange rate and stayed in Cherry Bay until daylight. He watched the sun rise from the beach and wondered whether he was the last of his friends still interested in resort holidays. The weekend ended with the severe bout of “Zante flu” which had threatened to derail an Innuendo Bingo game with an unidentified pop star shortly after his return.
Loving the Trolls
The computer voice Lawrence returned to remove the sting from hostile messages. One critic described Innuendo Bingo as two people spitting at each other and insulted anybody who found it funny. Another dismissed Scott as a “talentless twerp”, while somebody else predicted that 24 Years at the Tap End would send listeners away in groups and Scott to Radio 2.
The team were particularly taken with an excessively detailed listener who would apparently rather remove their eyes with rusty spoons, replace them with pickled onions rolled in salt and listen to Fearne Cotton repeatedly than hear the programme. The combination of Lawrence’s measured delivery and the disproportionate imagery turned the abuse into the joke, exactly as the feature intended.
Real or No Real
Chris correctly rejected the claim that spiral staircases turned in opposite directions in the southern hemisphere, but learned that hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia really was the fear of long words. Cheerleading genuinely accounted for a large number of athletic injuries, while Chesney Hawkes had not performed “The One and Only” precisely 23,582 times.
Around 1,400 species of bacteria could live in a belly button, but Milton Keynes did not contain more roundabouts than the whole of Russia. Chris finished with 40 points, having resisted several of the more tempting invented facts.
—
COMMENTS