Chris joins the baboons
Chris was looking forward to spending Saturday tackling a high-ropes course, swinging between trees in a harness and climbing obstacles. The only problem was that the organisers’ relentlessly cheerful emails made him feel as though he had accidentally enrolled in a children’s holiday club.
Participants were addressed as gorillas and baboons and told when they needed to arrive for their adventure. Chris could hear every message in an overenthusiastic children’s television voice, while Scott happily demonstrated the tone by welcoming the baboons and thanking them for “swinging by”. Chris knew he genuinely wanted to go, but the wording was making him question whether he had somehow become too old for it.
That led to a discussion of indoor play centres with ball pools, slides and climbing equipment. Chris had heard about one which offered adult-only sessions and immediately wanted to go. Scott’s advice for the ropes course was simpler: stop being embarrassed and commit completely to being a baboon.
Studs and Wolverine solve each other in Fish Pie Sue
Friday meant another attempt to identify a mysterious contact in a listener’s phone. Sam had somebody saved simply as “Studs” and thought the number had probably been collected while he was volunteering at Reading Festival the previous summer. Beyond that, he could not remember whether the name referred to jewellery, a band or a particularly stud-like person.
The first call produced only a woman’s voice saying hello before the line went dead. Oddly, that single word was enough to restart Sam’s memory. He suddenly remembered a woman with several studs down from her neck and thought this must be her. The abrupt hang-up still worried Scott, particularly because it had happened immediately after Sam introduced himself.
On the next successful call the woman identified herself as Heidi. Then came the twist: she had Sam’s number saved under an equally mysterious name, “Wolverine”. Sam admitted that he had worn large sideburns at Reading and had been compared with the character. In one call, the show had therefore solved two forgotten contacts at once.
There was an awkward hint that the pair might once have liked each other. Heidi remembered Sam but had no plans to volunteer at Reading again, which seemed to leave him disappointed. Scott and Chris detected a little tension and listeners immediately wondered whether Wolverine would send Studs a message after the show. Whatever happened next, Fish Pie Sue had finally produced a genuine two-way mystery.
Gail Platt is singing again
The show had previously enjoyed an excruciating Coronation Street scene in which Gail Platt sang along to Alexandra Burke in her kitchen. Listener Grace had now spotted another example. This time Gail was singing Stooshe’s “Black Heart”.
Scott and Chris loved the obvious attempt to give an everyday soap scene a current pop soundtrack, but Gail’s unusually emphatic rendition made it even more awkward. They replayed the short clip and begged her to stop doing it, delighted that what had looked like a one-off had apparently become a habit.
The magazine headlines game returns
Scott revived the game in which he and Chris called real-life story magazines and attempted to sell ridiculous personal experiences. Neither knew what story he would be telling until the magazine answered and the other handed over a written headline. From that point, the only objective was to improvise convincingly and keep the call going for as long as possible.
Chris received: “A bee sting made me gay.” He claimed he had been sunbathing in his garden on an improbably warm winter evening when a bee stung him on the bottom. Later that day, he said, he realised his interests had changed. Asked how he knew, Chris improvised that he had become interested in men and started listening to different music. The magazine representative remained remarkably calm and eventually invited him to send in more material, although she stressed that the story would have to be checked before publication.
Scott then had to sell the headline: “I only eat things I’ve seen the Kardashians eat.” He claimed repeated television marathons had transformed his diet and produced dramatic weight loss. The story became steadily stranger when Scott began worrying that Kim Kardashian having a baby might mean he too would have to start breastfeeding. Even that did not immediately end the call. The magazine asked for before-and-after photographs and explained that suitable stories could earn money.
Both were impressed by how far they had managed to take the nonsense. Chris had turned a bee sting into a life-changing event with almost no preparation, while Scott had discovered that invoking the Kardashians could apparently sustain a conversation through almost any logical problem.
When your partner works with very attractive people
Chris had spent part of a long drive talking to a friend whose partner had been offered an administrative job at a modelling agency. The work itself was ordinary office work, but his girlfriend was unhappy because it would place him around attractive models throughout the day. Chris wondered whether there were jobs which a partner could reasonably ask somebody not to take purely because of the people they would work alongside.
The discussion moved to a fashionable clothing chain notorious for hiring particularly attractive shop-floor staff. Somebody Chris knew had worked in its stockroom, prompting texts alleging that workers hidden away from customers were treated rather differently from the people at the front. One particularly brutal message claimed stockroom staff were known as “trolls in the dungeon”.
Other listeners admitted to wanting photographs of the colleagues their partners travelled with, just to assess whether there was any “competition”. Scott and Chris thought that level of inspection was mad. They were also amused by the instinct to reassure a partner by insisting somebody else was unattractive, since saying it at all could make a perfectly innocent message sound suspicious.
Matt Edmondson recaps the Big Weekend
Scott recommended Matt Edmondson’s latest Radio 1 montage, built from the enormous quantity of footage filmed at the Big Weekend in Derry-Londonderry. Matt had previously produced a similarly funny running commentary around the Radio 1 Teen Awards, and Scott thought linking so many unrelated clips into a coherent comic recap was a genuine skill.
The finished Big Weekend film included performers and Radio 1 presenters from across the event. Scott joked that Matt had spent two days locked in a dark booth with only water and gruel while watching everything, but the result was now available for listeners to see. After the many weeks of Chris’s backstage interview challenges, #TeamClare and other Big Weekend stories on the show, it acted as a suitably elaborate postscript to the event.
Charlie Sloth wins Real or No Real before Scott’s holiday
Charlie Sloth joined Scott at the end of Friday’s show, delighted that listeners who heard him on Scott’s programme had started seeking out his own material. He promoted the latest Slothpod, including an encounter between his producer and Dizzee Rascal, and Scott again promised that he and Chris still intended to visit Charlie’s house for a summer barbecue.
In Real or No Real, Wiley’s manager had not bought him a watch for his birthday, even if Wiley’s reputation for timekeeping made the idea sound sensible. People with larger signatures really do tend to have higher self-esteem, a claim Charlie enjoyed after producing an enormous signature of his own.
The strangest fact was also real: Eamonn Holmes had once been wrongly detained after being mistaken for somebody suspected of stealing printers. Scott could relate, having himself once been stopped by police because he matched the description of a burglar. The final story, claiming Anne Robinson’s Gran Canaria dining room displayed decades of Countdown teapots, was false. Charlie won 20 points to Scott’s 10.
Scott then handed Radio 1 over for the week. He was going on holiday, with Huw Stephens taking the afternoon show the following week, and promised to return a week on Monday.
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