Fish Pie Sue returns with Saucy Beth
The show’s mystery-phone-contact feature had already produced enough strange names for “Fish Pie Sue” to become the generic label for anybody saved in a phone with no obvious explanation. The previous week’s Darren Manhole story had even developed into a date, with both people enthusiastically sending Scott and Chris relationship updates afterwards. Friday brought a new mystery from listener Isaac: a contact saved as “Saucy Beth”.
Isaac thought he might have met her on a night out in Halifax around his birthday, but could remember very little. Scott put him on the phone and a woman answered. She remembered Isaac, remembered him dancing Gangnam Style repeatedly in her face and knew rather more about the night than he did. The problem was that her name was not Beth at all. It was Lydia.
Scott interrupted when the conversation began going in circles. Lydia admitted she may have supplied a false name even though her real number had apparently still ended up in Isaac’s phone. Isaac remained unable to place her properly. The mystery was therefore solved in the least flattering possible way: “Saucy Beth” was really Lydia, and Lydia had remembered an encounter which Isaac had largely forgotten. Scott suggested he could at least update the contact to “Saucy Lydia”.
Girls who hate other girls with their name
A conversation about the team’s friend Verity uncovered an irrational phenomenon. Verity was perfectly friendly until she met another woman called Verity, at which point sharing her relatively unusual name was enough to make her instantly suspicious. Producer Cara, who was particular about being Cara with a C, understood the feeling immediately.
Scott expected the idea to be too strange to produce many responses. Instead the texts flooded in. Adele had been annoyed when another Adele became famous, Helen wanted other Helens to leave her name alone, and one Philip with two Ls admitted that he disliked men who shared the exact spelling. Listeners compared it with seeing somebody else wearing the same dress.
Liberty called from her garden while tie-dyeing clothes and gave perhaps the purest example. She had encountered only a few other Libertys, but that was already too many. Her name represented freedom, she explained, and other people should stop stealing it. Scott and Chris were delighted that something they assumed was unique to one friend had turned out to be widespread.
Chris invents a tuxedo T-shirt and discovers it already exists
Chris had another business idea, this time aimed at men who hated shopping for smart clothes. He genuinely liked the idea of dressing well but found the process of choosing shirts, suits and shoes stressful. For a university graduation ball in Southampton, where he and Scott had been DJing, he wanted the appearance of formalwear without actually renting or buying a tuxedo.
His friend who printed T-shirts had therefore made a black shirt with a tuxedo, lapels and bow tie drawn onto the front. Chris unveiled it as the solution to every future black-tie invitation. Scott stared at it and immediately rejected the premise: it was very clearly still a T-shirt. Chris insisted that it “ticked the box” and began imagining a business built around the design.
Listeners ruined the dream almost instantly by sending links to shops already selling the same idea, often in more convincing versions. Chris had recently worried that music might eventually run out because every melody would have been used; now he wondered whether ideas themselves had run out too. He promised he had one more invention developing, involving craft, but refused to reveal it until he had made the prototype.
Matt Edmondson promises an extreme Innuendo Bingo return
Matt Edmondson finally arrived after missing the Innuendo Bingo session which had forced Chris to play the yoghurt-covered extreme edition alone. He offered a formal apology and, more dangerously, volunteered to return for an extreme game as compensation. Chris immediately began proposing a version in which one of them would plank above the other so the losing water would fall directly onto the person underneath. Matt was much less enthusiastic once the mechanics became clear.
They moved instead to Real or No Real. Shania Twain really had never favourited a tweet, perfectly matching the premise of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and inspiring listeners to start sending her increasingly unimpressive achievements in the hope of earning the first favourite. A Japanese trend for licking eyeballs, with warnings about conjunctivitis, was also real, despite everybody desperately wanting it not to be.
Anne Robinson had not quit The Weakest Link because a contestant answered a Winter Olympics question with “Taunton”, although the dreadful answer itself was genuine. Steve Wright was not preparing Radio 2 interviews from an Encarta CD-ROM because he could not get broadband at home. Matt won the round 30-20, then looked ahead to a weekend programme in which he planned to engineer a date between Gary Lucy and Nina Nesbitt.
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