Mother’s Day on the road
Scott and Chris compared their efforts for Mother’s Day. Chris had left buying a card so late that the proper ones had sold out and he had to give his mother one saying “Well done”. He hoped the message could be interpreted as congratulations for producing him.
Scott took his mother for breakfast and offered to drive her to shops only four miles from his house. A road closure and heavy traffic turned the outing into four and a half hours in the car, and they never reached the shops. The highlight was a garage stop where she had Mini Cheddars and a Creme Egg. Scott had intended to make her feel special but instead delivered an unusually long tour of local traffic.
He had also attended Olly Murs’s Wembley show and was relieved to see Olly negotiate the stage’s many stairs without falling. Justin Bieber had now left London after the strange events surrounding his concerts. Scott denied stalking him, but admitted it was a relief to stop monitoring the singer and return to normal.
The penultimate Tap End
With series two of 24 Years at the Tap End reaching its end, Chris took the feature into his 25th year and dedicated the chapter to Mila Kunis. He reviewed the scale of the series, which had produced about 40 episodes and more than eight hours of stories involving his friends, dates, holidays and teenage disasters.
The latest chapter recorded the week which had overtaken all of them. Chris remembered arriving at the expensive hotel feeling that he did not belong, awkwardly exchanging cheek kisses with people from the film industry and then being placed in front of Mila. When the video reached 100,000 views that evening, the team considered it an extraordinary success. American audiences then woke up and sent it far beyond anything they had imagined.
Chris described being placed in front of cameras with an earpiece for interviews around the world. He had wanted to perform lines from Anchorman but was warned not to, and he tried to place a Watford shirt in shot whenever possible. Billy Bush became his favourite interviewer despite Chris not knowing at the time that he was a major American television personality and a relative of George W Bush.
One week after publication, the video passed ten million views. Chris’s friends had become part of an international story, with S-Dosser’s Myspace page receiving renewed attention and Chango the Beast being discussed in Australia. The Convict was less comfortable and asked Chris to stop talking about him. Chris’s final lessons were to keep a Watford shirt nearby, remember that Americans loved Ron Burgundy and never ruin an A-list photograph with two thumbs up.
The Keen Line
The programme launched a telephone line for listeners who thought of a new answer to the question, “How keen are you?” The recurring Tap End wordplay had become difficult to produce on demand, but good examples often arrived in the middle of the night or during conversations with friends.
Listeners could now leave those ideas on an answerphone at any hour, provided they did not treat it as an emergency number. The phone had previously served as the programme’s rant line, so the team expected to find old complaints mixed among the new messages. The invitation generated an immediate response from people preparing to call from nights out with increasingly elaborate puns.
Loving the Trolls goes international
The Mila video had generated enough hostile comments for a complete edition of Loving the Trolls. Lawrence read British complaints which called Chris an unprofessional buffoon, claimed he was out of his depth and said the interview was uncomfortable. Chris accepted that several criticisms were technically fair, but pointed out that the supposed failure had attracted ten million views.
American comments were handed to Lawrence’s newly introduced cousin, Dale. They called Chris a chump, a dork, an annoying goofball and an awkward man in his twenties who wished he were cool. One person declared “ladbombs” the worst drink name ever, while another said millions would pay to date Mila but nobody would date Chris even if they were paid.
The computerised delivery turned the insults into another collection of phrases for the show. “Goofball” became the favourite, and Chris remained more interested in the unfamiliar American language than hurt by what had been written.
Olly Murs has Mila beef
Nina Nesbitt’s “Stay Out” became Scott’s Big Thing after support from other Radio 1 presenters. The 18-year-old Edinburgh singer-songwriter was preparing for a tour, and listeners quickly adopted “Nezbions” as a name for her supporters.
The Mila story had also created unlikely tension with Olly Murs. Before Chris’s interview, Olly had enjoyed being linked with Mila after her appearance on The Graham Norton Show, and the programme had begun calling her “Mila Murs”. At his Wembley concert, Olly told Scott that Chris had stolen her from him. Chris was delighted to learn he had been trolled by Olly Murs.
Dan and Phil’s internet survival guide
Dan and Phil had made a video teaching the newly famous Chris how to survive the internet. Their advice covered fan fiction and the possibility that viewers might invent stories about him, Mila and even a burrito. Chris felt he had joined their strange online world after spending the previous week as an international viral star.
In Real or No Real, there were not more checked shirts in Britain than people, despite Phil owning about 16 himself. It really would take an average person 76 working days to read all the terms and conditions accepted during a year. A car number plate, cigarettes and a complete suit of armour really had been found inside sharks, while the Cheeky Girls genuinely appeared on Andrew Neil’s political programme to discuss migration from Romania and Bulgaria.
Dan, Phil and Chris each finished on ten points. Scott would be away the following day, leaving Matt Edmondson to host the programme and take charge of Innuendo Bingo.
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