The show wanted things which are legal but simply not right
Scott had seen somebody behaving oddly in a restaurant.
Nothing illegal had happened.
Nobody was in danger.
Still:
it looked wrong.
That produced the day’s listener appeal.
What can a person legally do while making everyone around them think:
weirdo?
The examples arrived quickly.
Eat a KitKat whole rather than finger by finger.
Brush your teeth with hot water.
Order a glass of milk in a pub.
Eat popcorn with a spoon.
Wear completely different shoes on each foot.
Scott admitted he had accidentally done the last one himself and only noticed while using the leg-press machine at the gym.
No laws broken.
Still unsettling.
Dan Sheehy became a Mastermind legend
Scott had watched Mastermind and found a contestant he immediately loved.
Dan Sheehy, a cataloguing assistant, chose as his specialist subject:
the High School Musical trilogy.
Not Shakespeare.
Not political history.
Not 18th-century engineering.
*High School Musical.*
Scott was delighted.
The questions included the name of East High’s basketball team and Miley Cyrus’s cameo in the second film.
Dan knew his material.
Some Mastermind subjects were apparently considered too easy
Scott had also learned that the programme had restrictions around some extremely popular topics.
Subjects such as *Father Ted*, Harry Potter, Narnia and Roald Dahl had reportedly become too well-trodden.
That made Dan’s High School Musical choice even better.
It was populist.
Specific.
And exactly the sort of thing Scott would rather hear questions about than obscure royal genealogy.
Chris’s own Mastermind archive returned
The segment reminded the programme of the time Chris had been put through his own specialist-subject challenge.
His subject was the “great man” Danny Howard — another example of the show transcript routinely replacing names and titles in surreal ways.
Scott replayed the archive and enjoyed the contrast.
Real Mastermind:
High School Musical.
Radio 1 Mastermind:
knowledge of another DJ.
Bamboleo remained legal and arguably weird
Wednesday meant Bamboleo.
By the standards of the day’s main feature, the weekly ritual probably qualified perfectly.
Playing the same Gipsy Kings record every Wednesday while shouting listener names is completely legal.
Whether it looks normal to outsiders is another question entirely.
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