Father’s Day creates an underwear problem
Scott and Chris began Monday comparing Father’s Day. Scott had combined several present-giving occasions and bought his dad Pete a properly fitted suit, something Pete had never owned before. The generous idea still came with an awkward afternoon of sitting around while somebody measured his father’s body and Scott wondered exactly how much of the fitting he needed to witness.
Chris had gone in the opposite direction. He bought his dad beer glasses and boxer shorts from the gadget shop he traditionally used for much of his family Christmas shopping. It only seemed strange once he handed the underwear over in front of relatives and they asked why he had bought his father pants. Scott considered that a line family members simply should not cross, reviving memories of an old discussion about whether he could ever buy Beccy underwear as a birthday present.
Pete later reappeared in the conversation after Scott found a photo of him making a victory sign. Scott thought parents should avoid trying to look cool in pictures; Chris’s problem with that argument was that Pete genuinely was cooler than Scott. That produced exactly the reaction he expected, with Scott immediately insisting this could not possibly be true.
Four seconds of The Voice
The team had been enormously excited when The Voice filmed Danny O’Donoghue’s Innuendo Bingo appearance the previous week. The studio had been full of camera operators, lighting staff and production people. Scott had done his hair, Chris had worn his smartest tuxedo T-shirt and everybody assumed a substantial part of the game might appear on Saturday night’s programme.
Scott sat down to watch and timed the result. His contribution lasted about four seconds. He replayed the tiny fragment, unable to reconcile the amount of production activity he had witnessed with how quickly he disappeared from the finished programme. There were at least a couple of later shots of the Bingo game, but his carefully prepared appearance had essentially been reduced to a blink.
Scott accepted that this was simply how television editing worked, yet remained amused that an hour of excitement at Radio 1 had become a few seconds at home. It also set up the following day’s visit from The Wanted, when Scott promised another game of Innuendo Bingo which listeners could watch live without waiting for anybody else to edit it down.
Spanish Scott and Spanish Beccy
Scott then fulfilled a genuinely long-held ambition. He had always loved watching British and American television abroad and hearing familiar stars dubbed into another language. The Simpsons, Friends and Hollywood films all received replacement voices, but Scott had never been famous internationally enough to require one himself.
A listener on holiday in Honduras had found the solution. An old episode of Dynamo: Magician Impossible featuring Scott’s Radio 1 show had been dubbed into Spanish. The segment came from Dynamo’s studio visit with a locked cash box, and the translated version gave Scott, Beccy and Dynamo completely different voices.
Scott listened in delight. Spanish Scott sounded deeper and, in his view, considerably more masculine than the original. Spanish Beccy was equally strange, while even Scott’s noises as he struggled with the box appeared to have been recreated. Chris thought the replacement voice actually suited him. For Scott, the accuracy hardly mattered: after years of wanting to hear it happen, he had finally been dubbed.
Cara Delevingne inspires a celebrity-friend pass
Scott had spotted photographs of Cara Delevingne out with Rihanna and became fascinated by the pass hanging around the model’s neck. Rather than a conventional job title, it effectively identified her as “Rihanna’s friend”. Scott loved the idea that being somebody’s famous mate could become an official touring role.
The question was how useful the pass remained when Rihanna was not standing next to her. Scott assumed being Rihanna’s friend came with free clothes, food and access to almost anywhere, but wondered whether the lanyard alone could open doors. Chris proposed an experiment: he would make his own pass identifying himself as a famous person’s friend and see what happened.
They settled on a pass connected to Danny Howard. Scott wanted Chris to go beyond easy free samples and try for genuinely valuable privileges, perhaps a haircut or something similarly ambitious. The idea was left ready for Tuesday, when Chris would take the homemade lanyard onto the streets.
Shania Twain remains impossible to impress
Friday’s Real or No Real fact about Shania Twain had also turned into a listener mission. Her Twitter profile showed no favourited tweets, which fitted “That Don’t Impress Me Much” so perfectly that people began trying to become the first person she would acknowledge.
Scott read increasingly desperate attempts. One listener claimed to have held a rich tea biscuit in coffee for a full minute without it collapsing; another had played football at Upton Park. Others offered deliberately mundane achievements and tagged Scott into their campaigns. Shania still had not favourited anything.
The joke continued into Real or No Real with Dan and Phil. A driver really had crashed into a sign welcoming careful drivers to an Oxfordshire village, and British parents really were contributing enormous sums to their children’s gap years while very few expected repayment. Australian girlfriends could not buy dog-style protective cones to stop boyfriends receiving unwanted attention. Shania, however, really had called Brad Pitt an amazing actor and a heart-throb despite the famous lyric saying he did not impress her much. Dan finished the strongest of the three players, while Scott was mostly pleased to have found proof that something could, in fact, impress Shania Twain.
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