The strange days after Christmas
Scott covered Breakfast during the period when nobody knew what day it was. Retailers had immediately replaced messages about last-minute presents with demands for a new outfit before New Year’s Eve. Listeners returned to work in deliberately low-effort clothes, while Scott ate leftover pizza at 5am and crept around his own house to avoid waking visiting family.
A listener joined Real or No Real, revisiting facts from across the year. Scott won 20–10 before the show moved into another 2015 highlight.
Instant Dragons’ Den
The programme replayed the day it obtained Deborah Meaden’s home telephone number and removed the lengthy television application process from Dragons’ Den. Listeners were put straight through to pitch business ideas in a feature called Instant Dragons’ Den.
Deborah had not necessarily wanted a series of surprise domestic calls, but she heard the proposals and questioned the callers in recognisable Dragon fashion. The feature turned her ordinary landline into the Den without applications, lifts, researchers or any chance to prepare.
Eddie Redmayne
Eddie Redmayne discussed playing Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, set in the 1920s before modern language or community existed around transgender identity. He described meeting trans women, learning from their experiences and feeling a responsibility to treat the story with care.
He had flown from the film to collect his Oscar for The Theory of Everything, then returned with a hangover for a scene which conveniently required him to lie down. His Oscar sat in his living room wearing novelty white underwear sent by Jimmy Kimmel. Eddie never received the extravagant awards gift bag he had read about and still travelled on the Tube, where strangers sometimes recognised him and then asked what he had appeared in.
He avoided social media because he would spend hours editing a post and did not use a stylist, a fact Hollywood treated as astonishing. His favourite television programme was Gogglebox. When his own Oscar clip appeared, he paused the show, left the room and sent his wife Hannah back to check the viewers’ reaction before he dared return.
Eddie also refused to identify his supposedly terrible taste in pop music. Scott pushed repeatedly, but the secret survived and listeners were left guessing S Club 7, the Vengaboys and Blazin’ Squad.
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