Chris delivers the early headlines
Scott and Chris began their run covering Radio 1’s breakfast show, with Chris placed in charge of the news people might have missed overnight. Louis Walsh had posted a stream of late-night, emotional tweets about everybody needing a visible sign that they were loved, reminding Scott of his own 2am attempt to invite Australian prime minister Julia Gillard onto Innuendo Bingo.
Coachella was approaching, with celebrities travelling to the Californian festival and Lindsay Lohan reportedly planning to attend before entering rehabilitation. Chris had also obtained One Direction’s Nando’s order: almost everybody chose medium spice, while Harry Styles selected mango and lime. Scott treated this as exactly the choice he would have expected from Harry.
A sleepy Real or No Real
Rhiannon, a nursery nurse and part-time student in Wales, played a sleep-themed Real or No Real from her car before work. Losing two hours of sleep each night for a week did not have the same effect as drinking two bottles of white wine, although both agreed that drinking the wine sounded considerably more enjoyable.
Scientists really had reported resetting the human body clock by shining bright light at the back of the knee. Scott immediately tried the light from his phone, while listeners followed with torches and reported no instant transformation. Further messages suggested that exposure to bright light mattered more than the precise body part and that the effect was not supposed to produce an immediate burst of energy.
People who grew up with black-and-white television really were more likely to dream in black and white, while those from the eras before and after it tended to dream in colour. Sara Cox had not once collected a cat from the vet instead of her dog Snoop, although Scott remembered her leaving Snoop behind at a pub during a Big Weekend and returning ten minutes later. Rhiannon won 30–10.
Hidden television: Storage Hunters
Scott began recommending television programmes which listeners might have overlooked. His first selection was Storage Hunters, in which abandoned American storage units were auctioned without bidders being allowed to inspect everything inside. A unit might contain valuable foreign currency or nothing more than old church wrapping paper.
He particularly enjoyed auctioneer Sean’s rapid-fire calls and Cameron dramatically cutting the locks, while regular bidders Brandon and Lori treated each lot as serious business. Listener Hannah watched at Scott’s request and described the programme as a mixture of Bargain Hunt, Mila Kunis and Miss Marple: an auction, heated confrontations and detective work about the former owner.
Hannah gave it six out of ten. She had laughed while watching alone and would return if nothing better was available, but would still choose The Voice over a Storage Hunters marathon. Scott accepted the verdict and promised to assign her more of his unusual television favourites.
Psy returns with Gentleman
Psy had promised Scott a picture involving his name but had not managed to send it, leaving Scott waking throughout the night to check. A tweet promoting the breakfast show did eventually appear from the singer’s account, even if Scott suspected that one of Psy’s team had written it.
After the enormous success of “Gangnam Style”, Psy’s follow-up carried almost impossible expectations. He had worked for two days without sleep to finish its video and promised another simple dance which Korean audiences would already recognise. Scott gave “Gentleman” its first Radio 1 play and decided it was not a radical departure from the record which had made him famous.
Your Plan B: the FIFA tournament
Oli and his university friends held a FIFA tournament whenever they returned home, but their friend Tom had gone back to university early. Scott sent Chris to St Neots as an immediate replacement, giving him barely enough time to learn how to pronounce the town or remember Oli’s mother’s name.
The friends had dressed in chinos for the occasion, a detail nobody had passed to Chris. He arrived with an egg bearing his name, negotiated whether shoes should be removed and joined a three-a-side El Clásico contest between Real Madrid and Barcelona. What began as a visit to strangers soon sounded exactly like one of Chris’s own evenings, filled with shouted instructions to pass and growing determination not to lose.
With the match level after two games, Chris increased the prize by calling Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners. The players introduced themselves one by one like a boy band before she congratulated the winners. Oli later confirmed that Chris had made an excellent substitute, while Tom was initially less impressed by the “vindictive and malicious” decision to replace him and worried that he might return to find Oli permanently occupying his place.
Scott assured Tom that Chris had been a temporary solution. The tournament had continued, a group of strangers had gained a celebrity phone call, and Your Plan B had worked exactly as intended on its first outing.
Nanny Pat’s first DJ set
Nanny Pat arrived with her sausage plait and stood at the breakfast-show controls for her first DJ set. She pressed play on listeners’ choices, dedicated songs to names including Charlie, Mark, Adriana and Bessie, and calmly accepted Scott’s minimal technical instruction.
The sausage plait created almost as much excitement as the music. Scott and Chris had watched her make them on The Only Way Is Essex, while the sight of food in the studio concerned their boss. Nanny Pat reassured him that she would clean up and continued the set, explaining that the plait itself took only about half an hour to prepare.
She played “Harlem Shake” after confirming that she had already taken part in the dance dressed as a carrot. Producer Cara’s hurried movement around the studio briefly gave online viewers an unintended view, but Nanny Pat remained unflustered and kept choosing the next request. Scott declared it the best DJ set ever and accepted that she was in no danger of taking his job only because she already had enough going on.
—
COMMENTS