The biggest Bingo set yet
Halloween gave Innuendo Bingo an excuse to become substantially more elaborate than two chairs and some plastic sheeting. The Live Lounge was blacked out, the production team had been disappearing into it for days and both contestants had been asked questions about allergies before they were allowed inside.
Scott had deliberately stayed away from much of the preparation so the effects could surprise him too. Chris was less worried. After appearing on Most Haunted and walking through horror mazes, he claimed he tended to laugh when something tried to frighten him.
Barbara Windsor, covering Greg James’s programme later that afternoon, admitted she jumped much more easily.
Barbara Windsor enters the dark
Barbara and Chris were sent into the blacked-out room while Scott remained outside to run the game. The usual clips were accompanied by Halloween effects, strange noises and luminous-looking water that made the video feel very different from a normal edition.
The material itself remained reassuringly stupid. Clips from BBC programmes and television included the familiar formula of perfectly innocent sentences becoming filthy as soon as two people sat opposite each other with full mouths of water.
Barbara threw herself into it, reacting to both the innuendo and whatever the production team had hidden in the darkness. Scott was delighted with the result and immediately told anybody who had never watched Innuendo Bingo that this was the edition to start with.
Halloween itself gets over-branded
Scott and Chris had already noticed that almost every ordinary activity acquired a spooky name on 31 October. Food became “frightening fajitas”, normal housework could be “terrifying tidying”, and anybody could turn an unrelated fancy-dress costume into Halloween wear simply by declaring themselves the dead version of it.
Scott admitted he was guilty too. He was genuinely planning frightening fajitas that evening, despite conceding there was absolutely nothing frightening about them.
The Halloween theme continued into Real or No Real, with folklore about wet sheets supposedly revealing a future husband, Jonathan Ross’s famous Halloween parties, the Michael Myers mask’s connection with William Shatner and the claim that Swedish newsreaders dressed up for the 31 October bulletin.
Video evidence of the Russians
The other big release was the finished film from Scott and Chris’s night with Kamaliya and Mohammad Zahoor. After spending Wednesday trying to explain the experience on radio, they could finally show the moment a billionaire entered a 99p store and the pair’s reaction on arriving at the enormous penthouse.
The video captured why the story had worked. Scott and Chris took their hosts into their own very ordinary world first, then found themselves completely out of place in Kamaliya and Zahoor’s.
October therefore ended with two of the month’s strangest storylines preserved on video: Scott somehow becoming an X Factor guest mentor in Serbia, and a casual discussion of a reality programme leading directly to a night out with its stars. Even by this show’s standards, it had been an unusually escalatory month.
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