Give It A Restival
Scott and Chris were back after a week away, but plenty of Radio 1 listeners and staff were still making their way home from Glastonbury. Scott had loved watching the BBC coverage, particularly Mumford & Sons, and was happy to concede that the festival had been brilliant. What he could no longer tolerate was the wave of intensely emotional Facebook and Twitter updates from friends who had been there.
The messages were full of declarations about magical weekends, lifelong memories and spending the best days ever with the best people ever. Scott suspected some of his irritation came from not having gone himself, but that did not stop the new campaign. If a friend posted another particularly “melty” Glastonbury status, listeners were encouraged to reply with a simple instruction: “Give It A Restival”.
Chris argued that people had genuinely had a special experience and were entitled to say so. Scott agreed, up to a point. The show had spent weeks talking about the festival before it happened, the BBC had delivered all the music, and now he wanted everybody to enjoy that music and move on. Inevitably, by the time they noticed they had spent most of the opening 40 minutes discussing Glastonbury themselves, Scott realised the campaign might need to be applied to the programme too.
Chris encounters a very open Spanish toilet
Chris returned from a family holiday in Mallorca with a question about Spanish toilet etiquette. In a restaurant he had walked into the men’s toilets to find the usual urinals and a sit-down toilet, except the toilet had no cubicle around it. More alarmingly, a man was already sitting on it.
The door had not been locked and the man gestured that Chris should come in, leaving Chris to use a urinal while trying to pretend neither of them was aware of the other’s presence. He then had the second awkward encounter of seeing the same man back in the restaurant afterwards. Chris wanted to know whether this was an established Spanish custom or simply one exceptionally strange toilet.
A Spanish listener said he had never encountered anything like it, which did not help Chris’s theory. Then Ben called with a memory of a Barcelona bar where a toilet had similarly been left without a cubicle, apparently visible from the bar area. It was enough to prove Chris had not imagined the concept, even if the show remained no closer to establishing why anyone had designed it that way.
Scott DJs at Wembley and loses his lift to Princess Beatrice
Scott had spent the weekend doing something he never expected to put on his CV: DJing at Wembley Stadium. He played a 45-minute set before the evening’s live entertainment, made full use of the obligatory “Hello Wembley”, and left through the players’ tunnel. The scale of the stadium struck him most, with people high in the stands appearing almost like cardboard cut-outs from his position.
His accommodation was rather less glamorous than the stars’. While Robbie Williams had the England dressing room and Olly Murs had the away dressing room, Scott found himself based in a room labelled as storage. Even that was eclipsed by what happened when he tried to leave. Scott stepped into a lift only to be told he would have to get out because Princess Beatrice was about to use it. He took it personally, wondering why the princess could not simply share.
Greg James gets trapped in the Glastonbury traffic
The Glastonbury aftermath eventually reached the programme itself. Greg James was supposed to be taking over but was stuck in his electric car in the enormous traffic leaving the festival. Scott called him from the road, where a fuel spillage had made the already slow journey worse, and listeners reported driving past him in the queue.
Greg’s estimated arrival time had been creeping later throughout the journey. Scott therefore kept going until his visibly flustered colleague finally ran into the studio. It was exactly the sort of unscripted handover Scott enjoyed: a traffic problem became part of the programme, Greg gave live updates from the queue, and Scott teased him about compensation for having to stay on air.
Dan and Phil interview Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn
Dan and Phil joined Scott after speaking to Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn for The Internship. Rather than conduct a normal film interview, they had approached it like a peculiar job interview and asked the Hollywood actors deliberately odd questions. Wilson and Vaughn played along, including with the suggestion that giant ants might eventually take over the world.
The interview had taken place remotely, which Dan and Phil thought made the normal Hollywood time-limit ritual even more precarious: an unseen person could simply end the connection. Wilson had asked for green tea before the conversation, leaving the pair amused that there was little they could do about it from Britain. The resulting video was on Radio 1’s YouTube channel.
The pair stayed for Real or No Real, which continued the day’s festival theme. A claim about the enormous crowd watching England play Portugal during Euro 2004 at Glastonbury was real, as was the introduction of extremely large men’s clothing sizes at Debenhams. Charlie Sloth had not accidentally hypnotised thousands of Swedish radio listeners with a story about a bread maker, and Lily Allen’s 2007 Glastonbury set had not featured the wildly unlikely combination of Michael Portillo, two members of All Saints and Brian Blessed. Dan and Phil finished with 20 points to Scott’s 30.
—
COMMENTS