Tomasz Schafernaker finally plays Innuendo Bingo
After days of anticipation, BBC weather forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker arrived to play Innuendo Bingo. Scott and Chris treated him like one of the feature’s dream bookings. He worked only a few floors away in Broadcasting House, yet his television appearances had made him feel like a far more exotic guest.
Tomasz knew what he was walking into and arrived with spare clothes. His forecast was for heavy downpours. Scott, meanwhile, could not resist returning to Tomasz’s famous on-air hand gesture from a few years earlier and produced tape as a supposed “health and safety” precaution now that the webcams were live. Tomasz took the joke well, even as Chris began losing control simply at the sight of his taped hand.
The clips were relentless. Radio 4 asked whether there was anything Tomasz had not “put in your mouth”; Test Match Special supplied a suggestion about giving someone a blow and a trip to the Vale of Belvoir; Radio 4 Extra returned to the bird-watching line about watching “little tits” grow; a pottery wheel needed its rim kept wet; Dinner Date promised pork inside; EastEnders placed the moon in Uranus; and the long-standing Crimewatch police-horse clip closed the game.
Tomasz threw himself into it rather than trying to stay dry. Water went up his nose, into his ears and through his clothes, while Chris became so helpless at points that he could barely introduce the next item. Scott said the reaction online was among the biggest the feature had received and promised a video of the soaking on Radio 1’s YouTube channel. After all the build-up, the weather legend had delivered exactly the downpour the show wanted.
Scott invents “farmhouse” music
Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” had become Scott’s big song of the week, but he wanted a new category for its mixture of dance production and acoustic, folk-like instrumentation. His answer was “farmhouse”: farm music combined with house music.
The programme already had a cow sound effect it liked to deploy over folky records, so Scott upgraded it to a disco cow and played it over Avicii. Young farmers immediately began messaging to approve the genre, including one who said the track worked perfectly while sitting on a tractor raking hay. Scott took that as confirmation that he had identified a genuine musical movement.
He predicted that B-Traits would soon be playing farmhouse on Radio 1 and wanted the cow noise to become the genre’s equivalent of a club air horn. By the end he was asking whether it could work during a DJ set in Kavos, while admitting that the amount of cow he had layered over the song might have been excessive.
A street photo shoot becomes lunchtime entertainment
Scott and the team had eaten outside after the previous day’s show and found themselves watching a model pose beside railings across the road. There were photography studios in the area, so the shoot itself was not especially mysterious. What amused them was how glamorous the poses were trying to look when seen from the other side of an ordinary London street, complete with bins and a pub full of people watching.
The sight reminded Scott of holidaymakers who stage full fashion shoots by hotel pools, fountains and landmarks while pretending not to notice everybody else. Listeners supplied examples from honeymoons, beaches, supermarkets and holidays, including people posing in trees or setting up tripods for elaborate personal portraits.
Scott accepted that the finished photograph could look perfectly normal. It was seeing the full performance from ten metres away, with the photographer crouching and the subject repeatedly producing “cheeky pout” poses against completely mundane surroundings, that made it so entertaining.
Greg opens the wrong gift in Edinburgh
Greg’s third sofa-surfing stop was Edinburgh, where he stayed with student India and her friends. He cooked, cleaned the bath, climbed Arthur’s Seat, went to the pub and was joined by Nina Nesbitt for part of the evening. He also slept in a tent erected inside the living room, a suitably strange solution for a feature supposedly based around sofas.
The gift caused the real trouble. Greg thought he had finally worked out the routine and confidently told India she would love what he had brought her. He had not seen inside the parcel. When she opened it, the present turned out to be an extra-large negligee and thong. His instant switch from confidence to horror delighted Scott and Chris, particularly because Greg had only just met the women he was supposedly presenting lingerie to.
By Thursday he had reached Glasgow for the final night and been handed a suspiciously bottle-shaped package. Scott encouraged him to tell the next host, with complete confidence, that he had brought them “a bottle of something”. Greg had learned enough by then to know that the obvious interpretation was unlikely to be correct.
Matt Edmondson finds elephants in contact lenses
Matt Edmondson arrived late enough for Scott to make a mock station announcement asking him to report to Radio 1, then joined Real or No Real. Short-sighted elephants really have been fitted with contact lenses, which immediately sent everybody image-searching for elephants in glasses instead.
Barbara Windsor had not needed elocution lessons at 12 to remove a thick Cockney accent, and the average British household did not own 16 obsolete mobile-phone chargers. A claim about Armageddon was real: the film’s scientific errors had been used as an exercise associated with NASA training. That gave Scott and Matt another opportunity to admire just how implausible the entire Bruce Willis drilling-an-asteroid plot was.
Chris and Matt finished level on 20 points. The more important discovery was probably the image of an elephant wearing glasses, which both of them thought was far better than it had any right to be.
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