The election-night house party
The final Breakfast Show followed the general election, and one member of the programme team had stayed awake all night tracking results. He and his housemates had drawn an enormous map and used Twitter to find somebody in every constituency, despite working at the BBC and having professional coverage available outside his office.
Scott and Chris were due to DJ for the Young Farmers that evening, but a smaller social commitment was causing Chris more stress. Scott was supposed to visit his home first, prompting discussion about takeaway food, a deep clean and whether Chris could still fit in an afternoon sleep.
Five minutes after a break-up
Taylor Swift’s comments about heartbreak led Scott and Chris to the peculiar short period in which a newly single person believed they were coping brilliantly while friends watched them behave completely out of character.
After one break-up, Scott filled a week off with an activities programme that included a Wembley Stadium tour and Churchill’s War Rooms. Other listeners took up hang-gliding, skydiving, classical music or aggressively different hairstyles, while one temporarily abandoned ordinary phones and became reachable only on a landline.
Caroline Flack called while waiting for the AA after losing her car keys. She remembered her mother forcing her to end a relationship when she was 15 because the boy was 17. Caroline responded by running away for around five hours and later went through a brief fishing phase, adding another example to a morning of supposedly rational decisions made during emotional chaos.
Friends fear she is drinking custard again
Scott’s favourite magazine headline showed Vanessa Feltz with the claim that she was two stone heavier and that friends feared she was “drinking custard again”. He loved the suggestion that custard was an old vice requiring concerned friends to stage an intervention.
Vanessa heard the discussion from elsewhere in the BBC and texted Scott before arriving in the studio. She said she had eaten custard with puddings but had never treated it as a drink, so the team produced a discounted carton and invited her to test the allegation.
She poured it into cups, toasted everybody’s health and discovered that cold custard was unexpectedly drinkable, if difficult to talk through. The programme ended with Vanessa insisting that she was not secretly downing pints of it and Scott declaring that everybody had got “right on the custard”.
The end of Breakfast
A listener joined Real or No Real, with Scott finishing the week’s early games in competitive form. The contest was almost secondary to an hour in which the studio had acquired custard, Caroline Flack and an election party that had lasted through the night.
Scott and Chris handed Breakfast back after five programmes. Their final image was Vanessa leaving with her reputation intact but considerably more direct experience of the habit the magazine had invented for her.
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