Scott pitches ridiculous movies to Daniel Radcliffe
Radio 1’s Movie Week had handed Scott exactly the opportunity he wanted. After becoming obsessed with Sharknado, the television film in which a tornado throws sharks around Los Angeles, he had started inventing equally ridiculous disaster movies. Daniel Radcliffe was in the building with Nick Grimshaw, so Scott took his ideas directly to somebody who could actually star in them.
Radcliffe was already surprisingly receptive. He described Sharknado as a kind of logical conclusion to a century of filmmaking and said he liked films that were either genuinely brilliant or bad enough to enjoy with friends. That encouraged Scott to pitch Tsunarmadillo: a freak wave carrying thousands of armadillos towards Los Angeles after a chain of increasingly implausible weather events.
The hero would be BBC weather forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker, with Emma Watson potentially playing his weather-presenting love interest. Scott had even built armadillo puns into the plot. Rather than politely humouring him, Radcliffe appeared genuinely amused and said he would watch the film. When money was mentioned, he even joked about finding finance for it and pencilling the project in for January.
Scott then moved to daytime television. Bargain Hunt: The Movie would turn Tim Wonnacott into a magical time lord searching for the ultimate bargain while the world was divided into warring red and blue teams. Radcliffe corrected Scott on Wonnacott’s name and revealed himself as a genuine Bargain Hunt viewer. Scott immediately saw an entire franchise: Homes Under the Hammer: The Movie, Cash in the Attic: The Movie and even Loose Women as a British answer to Sex and the City.
For somebody who had merely hoped to make a celebrity laugh with Tsunarmadillo, Scott came away feeling as though Daniel Radcliffe had almost green-lit a new branch of the British film industry.
Unlucky Gary needs saving from Mr Wu’s
An alarm went off on Scott’s phone at 1.45pm for a very specific reason. His friend “Unlucky Gary” had developed a habit of visiting an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet at lunchtime, despite worrying about the effect it was having on him. Scott had therefore created a daily reminder to text Gary and tell him not to go to Mr Wu’s.
The intervention was not working. Most days Gary simply replied with a photograph of the food he was already eating. He was also visiting after work often enough that staff could apparently predict his order before he had properly entered. Scott began wondering whether the restaurant could formally refuse him entry for his own good.
The discussion fitted Scott’s growing habit of setting phone reminders not just for appointments but as messages to his future self. Gary’s was the most elaborate: every lunchtime Scott became a one-man support service trying to keep his friend away from the buffet, only to receive photographic proof of another defeat.
Movie Week heads to Grimmy’s house
The evening’s Radio 1 film was The Fifth Element, to be watched communally at Nick Grimshaw’s house. This presented a problem for Scott and Chris because science fiction and fantasy were exactly the sort of films they normally avoided. Chris had barely heard of Gary Oldman and the 127-minute running time already sounded daunting.
Listeners were invited to start the film at 6pm and follow Radio 1’s tweets from Grimmy’s house. Scott wondered why they could not simply have chosen There’s Something About Mary, while Sara Cox later admitted she had seen only part of The Fifth Element herself. Movie Week was meant to educate Grimmy, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that much of Scott’s team required the same course.
Follow Me Follow You checks celebrity friendships
The Twitter game Follow Me Follow You returned to test whether famous collaborators really followed each other. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams followed each other, but the relationship with T.I. was less symmetrical. Weather presenters Tomasz Schafernaker and Laura Tobin provided particularly timely material because Laura was due to follow Tomasz into Innuendo Bingo the next day.
The programme also checked Dizzee Rascal and Robbie Williams after their collaboration, then looked for clues in the Twitter habits of The Apprentice finalists Leah Totton and Luisa Zissman. Lord Sugar did not appear to follow either finalist, while Luisa’s failure to follow him was treated as the kind of potentially disastrous social-media oversight only this game could turn into a major omen.
Taylor Swift’s old relationships supplied the inevitable final round. The point, as ever, was less whether following somebody proved friendship than how quickly a missing follow could be turned into an awkward story about two people who were publicly supposed to get along.
Sara Cox learns about David Tennant’s fox deterrent
Sara Cox played Real or No Real ahead of the Fifth Element evening. Daniel Radcliffe had not worn the exact same shirt on each of his recent Radio 1 appearances. Voice artist Redd Pepper really had worked on the London Underground before his film-trailer career, a story Scott remembered hearing directly from him.
A claim contrasting unwatched copies of The Da Vinci Code DVD with unread copies of the novel was invented. The strangest true answer concerned David Tennant, who had reportedly used urine in his garden as a way of discouraging foxes. Scott was particularly interested because he had his own problems with foxes and had already bought an ultrasonic deterrent.
That gave Sara an additional suggestion for the trip to Grimmy’s house: if foxes were a problem there too, perhaps Scott could help with that while everybody was waiting for The Fifth Element to finish. Scott won the game 40 points to 30, an unusually decisive result for a feature whose facts had become increasingly hard to distinguish from things the programme had simply invented for its own amusement.
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