Are Scott and Greg still friends?
Scott woke on Friday thinking about one thing: did Greg James still like him after the Keith Lemon stunt? Overnight, the video of Greg discovering Keith at his flat had spread rapidly, while Scott had started imagining revenge.
The prank had involved far more people than Scott, but he knew the on-air reveal made it look like his operation. He remembered previous Radio 1 stunts involving his own home and began picturing suspicious packages, garden gnomes or worse appearing outside his door.
Greg said things were fine. Scott was not entirely convinced that “fine” meant he could stop checking over his shoulder.
Sara Cox searches the forgotten end of her phone book
For her last appearance on the show for a while, Sara Cox handed over her phone contacts. Like everybody with a phone accumulated across years of jobs and nights out, she had entries that once made perfect sense but now meant almost nothing.
Scott selected “Sam Panto”. Sara had no clear idea who Sam was, so she called and tried to discover the relationship without admitting she had forgotten him. The conversation became increasingly transparent as she made clumsy references to pantomime and tried to suggest they should catch up.
Sam eventually helped solve it. He had previously worked in a role through which Sara had obtained pantomime tickets; he no longer did that job and was now producing his own jewellery. Once Scott admitted they were live on Radio 1 and explained the phone-book experiment, Sam took the whole thing with impressive patience.
Listeners immediately began sending their own inexplicable contacts, proving that “Sam Panto” was less an exception than a universal phone problem.
Please do not scream when Scott appears in This Is Us
Scott’s tiny appearance in the One Direction film had become its own audience game. A listener reported going to see This Is Us and screaming when Scott’s face appeared, earning angry looks from everyone nearby.
Scott begged people not to copy her. His contribution lasted only a couple of seconds, taken from a BBC Breakfast clip in which he described the band’s success as “not just unusual, it’s unprecedented”. The brevity apparently encouraged fans to point it out rather than let the cameo pass quietly.
Scott could see the funny side, but the thought of cinemas full of people shouting at his enormous face made him profoundly uncomfortable.
Nine DJs, eight hours and one very tense Monday
Radio 1 was about to launch its Even More Music month with a “reboot”. Nine DJs would sit together in one room, each with an hour of music prepared, but listeners would decide hour by hour who went on air. There were only eight available hours, guaranteeing that one presenter would spend the entire day waiting and never get selected.
Scott’s proposed hour was “Happy Hour Hits”. He and Chris immediately fixated on the social horror rather than the music: who would become irritated, who would cope badly with being left until the end and what they would do in a small room together for most of a day.
Chris considered learning a Beyoncé routine to perform if Scott’s hour was chosen, only to realise this might mean dancing in front of Zane Lowe and every other waiting DJ. Scott thought Zane might be the person least delighted by the whole experiment.
Grimmy prepares a new Lady Gaga interview
The show also previewed Nick Grimshaw’s interview with Lady Gaga for Monday’s extended Breakfast programme. Gaga had discussed fish and chips, the unfamiliar British idea of putting gravy on them, NSYNC and ARTPOP, and posed wearing cucumber-shaped glasses.
Scott had interviewed her only a week earlier, but the new conversation was deliberately lighter and stranger. It would help launch the September music month while Scott and the other presenters waited to learn whether listeners would actually put them on air.
August therefore ended on a cliffhanger of a very Radio 1 kind: not a celebrity mystery or a prank, but the prospect of nine competitive presenters locked in one room on Monday morning.
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