Calling companies with brilliant names
Chris revived a game the show had first played years earlier. He spent the morning searching online business directories for companies with names that were childish, suggestive or simply funny when answered aloud. The twist was that Scott and Chris would give each other phone numbers without revealing which business was at the other end.
That meant the entertainment came from hearing the receptionist answer and then watching the caller improvise a reason for ringing. “OMG” turned out to be an accountancy business, Sticky Fingers was a shop, Short and Curlies was a hairdresser and another company answered with a name that immediately made the supposedly mature presenters lose their nerve.
Scott and Chris repeatedly had to ask what the company did before escaping with claims that they had the wrong number. Listeners began supplying more businesses almost immediately, giving the revived feature more material than it could use in one afternoon.
Sharknado leads to Ghost Shark
Scott’s fascination with Sharknado was intensifying ahead of its UK television broadcast. He had discovered that Tara Reid might speak to the Breakfast Show and was already planning a communal viewing as if the deliberately preposterous disaster film were a major premiere.
Then came Ghost Shark. The trailer’s premise, that a supernatural shark could attack through water, sounded like the logical next step after a tornado full of sharks. Scott played the trailer and marvelled at a genre in which plausibility was something viewers were expected to abandon before the opening titles.
The combination of Tara Reid and the film became part of an increasingly absurd guest list for Scott and Chris’s forthcoming two-week spell covering Radio 1 Breakfast.
Breakfast’s guest list gets out of control
Scott was finally handed the list of guests planned for the Breakfast Show. It included Tara Reid, Chloë Grace Moretz, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, Rizzle Kicks, Ollie Locke and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who Chris knew principally as McLovin from Superbad.
Most exciting of all to Scott was a provisional appearance by Pitbull. He immediately pictured Mr Worldwide arriving in a suit and sunglasses and became so excited that Chris pointed out exactly why producers normally kept provisional bookings away from him.
There was also another mystery edition of When Chris Meets…, using the format that had produced the Mila Kunis phenomenon. Scott would not identify the celebrity but promised Chris it was somebody genuinely enormous. Chris’s anxiety returned immediately.
Sara Cox plays Real or No Real
Sara Cox faced another strong set of Real or No Real stories. Zane Lowe had not been a New Zealand hula-hoop champion, but the alarming sport of BASE skydiving described in the quiz was treated as real. The idea that the original Titanic script ended with a successful voyage was no real, although the existence of an actual low-budget Titanic II film proved almost as surprising.
The best true story involved a married couple who discovered that the strangers with whom they were both conducting online affairs were actually each other. Scott and Sara tried to find romance in the coincidence before remembering that both people had still intended to cheat.
Sara finished with 40 points to Scott’s 30, extending her successful run and leaving Thursday clear for a guest Scott had wanted on Innuendo Bingo for years: Vanessa Feltz.
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