The Speedos plan does not make it to air
Aled arrived for his first Innuendo Bingo worried not only about the water but about a rumour that the men would be playing in Speedos. He had actually brought spare swimwear for Chris, which only encouraged the idea. Scott and Chris began treating a swimwear edition as if public demand had made it unavoidable.
Management was less enthusiastic. Scott reported that the plan had been discussed at a surprisingly high level and that there were concerns about putting three men in Speedos on the Radio 1 webcam in the middle of the afternoon. The special edition was therefore abandoned before anybody changed clothes. Aled, despite having brought the spare pair himself, seemed relieved.
He used the visit to promote the new-look Surgery with Dr Radha, beginning on Sunday night. The programme would continue to take big and small listener problems seriously, with the first edition concentrating on summer subjects including holidays, alcohol, sex and wellbeing.
Aled discovers how wet Bingo really is
Once the cameras went live, Aled’s nervousness proved justified. Wimbledon supplied a commentator praising a firm wrist and another describing a player as a “ball basher”. Alan Titchmarsh offered three balls, a BBC Four documentary revisited the unfortunate phrase about people being “tossed” into sewers, and the Gadget Show contributed the familiar Fanny Wang headphones.
There were clips from EastEnders, cookery programmes, Radio 4 and more Wimbledon coverage, with Aled becoming progressively wetter. One of the best sequences came from a tennis commentator praising the useful “tool in the belt” her colleague could pull out whenever necessary. The annual men’s semi-final reference then provided the closing link into Friday’s long-established Wimbledon joke.
By the end, Aled was soaked through to his feet. Scott thought he looked slightly stunned as he left, as though the reality of the game had been much wetter and stranger than the feature he had watched other guests play for years.
Tomasz Schafernaker agrees to play
The show’s campaign to recruit BBC weather forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker had also moved forward. Chris had discovered earlier in the week that BBC staff could be found on the internal email system and had wanted to contact several familiar faces from Innuendo Bingo clips. Tomasz had not personally replied, but his agent had.
The important news was that he was up for playing. Scheduling still had to be worked out around his weather commitments, but the possibility of getting one of the feature’s favourite BBC personalities into the studio delighted Scott and Chris. Their wish list immediately expanded to include other familiar sources of innuendo, including Vanessa Feltz and Dick Strawbridge.
Listener-requested animal tennis takes over
Goat or Grunt had evolved again. Instead of identifying the noises, listeners were now phoning in requests for fantasy rallies between animals. A camel could serve, a donkey could face a duck, and Scott happily constructed a match between a goat and Serena Williams. One caller asked for a seagull only to discover that the show’s rapidly expanding sound library did not yet contain one.
Scott accepted that the entire thing probably had a limited lifespan and should disappear when Wimbledon ended. For this week, though, the volume of requests suggested people were quite happy to hear animals apparently playing tennis against one another.
Greg James finds out why Wimbledon needs so many tennis balls
Greg James joined Scott for Real or No Real. David Hasselhoff was not so determined to appear tough that he refused to chop onions in case a camera caught him crying. That nevertheless prompted listeners to pass on the unlikely tip that holding a spoon in the mouth might prevent onion tears, an experiment that would return the following day.
Used Wimbledon tennis balls really were donated to help create homes for endangered harvest mice, while an early alternative to the computer mouse really had been designed to sit underneath a desk and be controlled with the knee. Scott loved the knee-control idea, not least because the old Radio 1 studio had contained a knee-height panic button which he had repeatedly hit by accident.
Eliza Doolittle had not received a new kit bag as part of a sports-clothing sponsorship deal. Scott finished with 40 points to Greg’s 20, then turned his attention to a more immediate problem: Chris was going to Henley Regatta at the weekend and apparently needed a wardrobe unlike anything he normally wore.
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