Scott’s brutally honest guide to Freshers
With students arriving at university, Scott offered the sort of Freshers advice unlikely to appear in an official welcome pack. Parents were useful for the lift and unloading, but in his view should resist the temptation to linger, make tea or start conversations with every new flatmate.
He remembered arriving at Southampton and being suspicious of the over-friendly second-year reps helping with cars, later discovering there had been rather less wholesome motives behind some of their enthusiasm for meeting people’s families.
His other warning was to be wary of the person who appeared to take control of every night out immediately. Freshers Week encouraged everybody to perform a slightly amplified version of themselves, and the person organising every plan on day one might not even be in the friendship group a few weeks later.
Then came Scott’s annual, deliberately bleak relationship prediction: couples arriving at separate universities would probably split up. Listeners immediately supplied counterexamples, including somebody whose relationship had survived for three years, and Chris pointed out the obvious flaw in Scott presenting himself as a university expert when he had never actually attended one.
Chris learns to live without his flatmate
Chris’s flatmate had been away for months, leaving Chris to confront both cooking and the belongings still occupying the flat. A neglected plant was going brown, a table-football game was being used largely to hold washing and a huge bottle of loose change raised an ownership dispute because both men had contributed coins over the years.
Scott was less interested in the legal theory than in the image of Chris trying to transport an enormous container full of small coins. It was another glimpse of Chris attempting domestic independence while still finding dinner considerably harder without somebody else around.
Lisa gives Chris permission to call Steve
The previous day’s friend-zone idea became real. Lisa confirmed that she wanted to try the seven-day experiment, leaving Chris with the delicate job of ringing Steve without immediately announcing, on Radio 1, that Lisa wanted to date him.
Chris framed it as a hypothetical. Suppose there were a nice girl he already knew, they were both single and they were firmly in the friend zone, perhaps even sending each other pictures of cats. Would he agree to spend a week dating her exclusively and see whether friendship could become a relationship?
Steve was confused and initially cautious, but he did not reject it. When Chris finally revealed that the girl was Lisa, the experiment had its second participant. For the next seven days they would treat each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, meet every day and report back honestly to the show.
Scott immediately understood that the feature could either produce a lovely story or make an existing friendship spectacularly uncomfortable. The first update was booked for Monday, when Scott would unusually be covering the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for a day.
Avicii facts and Danny Howard
Avicii supplied the day’s memory challenge. A listener was asked to retain facts about Tim Bergling, including his Swedish background, age and the extraordinary sales of “Wake Me Up”, before trying to beat the person interviewed on the street.
Danny Howard then joined for Real or No Real before covering Pete Tong’s dance show that evening. One genuine fact established that The Wanted’s Jay McGuiness owned a bearded dragon, while the imagined Robin Thicke backstory as a unicycling street performer called “Tricky Thickie” was unsurprisingly false.
Danny won the game, but Friday ended looking ahead to a much less predictable result: whether Lisa and Steve would still think dating their best mate had been a good idea after an entire weekend together.
—
COMMENTS