Radio 1 tries to understand Kanye
Radio 1 had spent the previous evening glued to Zane Lowe’s interview with Kanye West. Scott, Chris and apparently most of their colleagues had been tweeting through it, fascinated by an interview that began conventionally and then headed into increasingly expansive ideas about creativity, design and Kanye’s place in culture.
Scott was not mocking the ambition so much as admitting that he could not always follow the argument. He imagined the conversation needing a red-button translation service and created the idea of “Kanye face”, the puzzled expression listeners inevitably pulled while trying to process what they had just heard.
He and Chris then acted out what an ordinary evening at Kim Kardashian and Kanye’s home might sound like, with Scott as Kim attempting normal conversation while “Kanye” turned everything back towards grand creative declarations and T-shirts.
The interview had become compulsory Radio 1 listening, and Scott encouraged anybody who had missed it to catch up before the next video instalment appeared online.
Carol Kirkwood enters the legends club
Scott had wanted BBC Breakfast weather presenter Carol Kirkwood on Innuendo Bingo for a long time. She had supplied clips to the feature before without ever being in the chair herself, placing her alongside the show’s other sought-after “legends”.
Carol arrived after starting work at 2.45 in the morning and was still relentlessly cheerful. Scott joked about BBC Breakfast forever sending her to bleak bridges and blizzards, while Carol insisted she genuinely loved the weather because it changed every day and remained impossible to control.
They also remembered a festival appearance on a cherry picker, where she had presented the weather to a huge crowd with an engineer standing beside the machinery.
Once Bingo started, Scott worried that Carol might be too innocent for the clips. She disproved that quickly. Material from Radio 4, weather colleague Tomasz Schafernaker and assorted television programmes had Carol and Chris struggling to keep their water in, while the novelty of hearing a familiar breakfast-weather voice in the middle of the show’s wettest feature did the rest.
The Freshers line keeps checking in
Messages continued to arrive on Scott’s student check-in line. The point remained deliberately possessive: freshers could enjoy their new friends and nights out as long as they periodically reassured Scott that they had not stopped listening.
The calls were becoming a rolling diary of first weeks at university, full of late nights, missing belongings, parents finally leaving and the kind of detail that would never have justified a normal request line.
A Kanye-themed Real or No Real
The day’s fascination with Kanye carried into Real or No Real. Genuine facts included Kanye buying an extravagant aquarium after the success of The College Dropout, working in telesales before his music career and at one point naming Franz Ferdinand as a favourite band.
The round inevitably turned into more speculation about what Kanye would be like as a salesman, travel agent or restaurant owner. By then the show had spent hours trying to understand him and had reached the only safe conclusion: he probably would have been very difficult to hang up on.
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