Scott’s heatwave solution goes much too far
Britain’s unusually persistent heatwave had reached the point where Scott was looking for increasingly desperate ways to cool down. He had previously recommended putting an ice cube under each armpit, but now thought he had found something even more effective: putting the ice directly down his shorts. Chris became suspicious as soon as Scott told him to change into swimming shorts before explaining what they were about to do.
Scott insisted that a single cube had worked perfectly when he tried it at home. That was not quite what happened in the studio. With both of them trying not to look at each other while pouring the ice, a sensible experiment rapidly became handfuls of cubes disappearing into their shorts. Scott then made them read a list of BBC programmes while they tried to keep talking through the shock of the cold.
Within seconds, both were desperate to get the ice out. Scott said it felt as though he had frostbite and Chris thought the cold was closer to burning than cooling. The idea that had started as a genuine heatwave tip was quietly withdrawn, or at least reduced back to one ice cube rather than an entire cup. The cameras had been running too, much to Chris’s concern when somebody followed them towards the toilets as they went to change.
The weather dominated much of the afternoon. Scott marvelled at the annual newspaper photographs of crowded beaches and women apparently recruited to frolic in the sea, while Chris had just returned from Kavos and reported that matching lads’-holiday T-shirts appeared to be disappearing. He had even spent part of his trip trying to fool the hotel-room electricity slot with a piece of cardboard so the air conditioning would stay on.
Dear Scott becomes a lads’-holiday survival guide
The summer theme continued in Dear Scott, with Pearl Mackie as the Posh Radio 4 Lady reading messages from listeners away in the sun. One listener preparing for Ayia Napa wanted Chris’s essential advice for a lads’ holiday, which naturally produced recommendations rather different from anything a travel company might publish.
Chris warned against putting crisps in somebody’s bed, partly because the joke eventually affects everybody sharing the room. He also advised not repeatedly sending the cleaner away. On his trips, the room had sometimes become so bad that housekeeping eventually cleaned around the occupants whether they were ready to get up or not. Most bizarrely, Chris recommended a designated hour in which everybody sharing the room could use the toilet before the group went out for dinner, allowing plenty of time for the room to recover.
Another listener admitted that she and her friends were spending their holiday in Malaga watching episode after episode of Storage Hunters instead of going to the beach. Scott could hardly criticise them because he loved catching up with television on holiday himself. A message from Cyprus complained about the rock-hard beds in cheap self-catering accommodation, prompting Chris to develop a theory that uncomfortable beds were deliberate, designed to keep holidaymakers out of their rooms and therefore out of trouble.
Pearl also recorded several increasingly enthusiastic versions of “lads” for the item. Scott found the outtakes funny enough to play them together, momentarily turning Radio 4’s most refined voice into the programme’s resident package-holiday announcer.
Carly Rae Jepsen inspires a terrible-sport competition
Scott had found Carly Rae Jepsen’s ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game in America and could not stop watching it. The ball went spectacularly off target and nearly took out a photographer, despite reports that her practice attempts had been much better. The commentators immediately compared it with the famously bad pitch by Gary Dell’Abate, better known as Baba Booey from Howard Stern’s show.
The discovery delighted Scott for two reasons. First, he thought Chris looked like Britain’s answer to Baba Booey. More importantly, it gave him the idea for a sporting event in which everybody was deliberately bad. Scott admitted his own throwing would probably be just as poor as Carly’s and suggested gathering all the people who had been picked last for teams at school for a game of rounders.
Dan and Phil were quickly recruited. Both remembered trying to escape school sport, with Phil claiming to have kept up a fake toe injury for months and Dan admitting to forging parental notes. Chris was less certain he qualified because he thought he could at least throw a ball in a straight line. Scott wanted him there anyway, if only as the person who became irritated by everybody else’s complete lack of ability. The game was tentatively set for Friday.
The speech jammer is waiting for Zane Lowe
Friday’s speech jammer was still fascinating Scott. A tiny delay in Chris’s headphones had been enough to scramble his speech completely, and Scott replayed the moment Chris tried to make a perfectly ordinary phone call while sounding as though he had forgotten how to talk.
There was now a new target. Because Zane Lowe was famously fast and energetic on air, Scott wanted to hear what happened if the same delay was put into Zane’s headphones. Talks were apparently under way, although nobody yet knew whether Zane would agree to having his brain temporarily defeated in the name of radio.
Dan and Phil return for Real or No Real
Dan and Phil were around for Real or No Real, which this time had a film-heavy selection. The claim that Tony Stark’s sunglasses in Iron Man had been added digitally because Robert Downey Jr looked tired was no real. James Cameron really had begun developing Avatar many years before its eventual 2009 release, giving everybody another opportunity to admit how little they knew about films ahead of Radio 1’s Movie Week.
The supposed female “voice of God” responsible for a third of major movie trailers was no real. The final claim, however, was true in the game: The Muppets had encountered censorship in New Zealand over a fight involving Fozzie Bear and a pirate.
Dan and Phil also promoted their latest Radio 1 video, the Cotton Ball Challenge, in which blindfolded participants tried to scoop almost weightless cotton balls into a bowl on their heads. Scott thought internet challenges might be running out of ideas. That did not stop him looking forward to Friday’s proposed rounders match, which was shaping up to be a whole challenge of its own.
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