UB40 frontman Ali Campbell gave Dermot O'Leary one of the best interviews of the year, recalling a 1984 "cultural exchange" tour of Russia that went horribly wrong. Campbell said police waded into the crowd with sticks and dogs during their first show in St Petersburg because fans had started dancing. "We came off stage and went, you've invited us here and you're beating up the audience for dancing," he told Dermot, adding that an on-stage translator then deliberately mistranslated his brother Robin's pleas for calm, telling the crowd the opposite of what was being said.
Listen: Ali Campbell on the Soviet police story
There was a lighter surprise earlier in the show when travel presenter Sally Traffic admitted to Dermot that she once had a teenage crush on Campbell. "You were pinned on my wall at one point," she confessed, before insisting she'd never act on it now they were colleagues. Sally also turned up dressed in an adult-sized romper suit printed with Romesh Ranganathan's face, complete with dummy, ahead of his 10am show, a bit Dermot admitted bordered on "disturbing".
Listen: Sally Traffic's romper suit confession
The Mystery Voice feature kept running its usual gauntlet of wrong guesses. Susan Ross, calling in from a gym in Fourmarks fresh from a motorbike trip through Morocco's Atlas Mountains, guessed Ray Winstone and got it wrong, while retired pilot Chris McNulty plumped for golfer Nick Faldo, also incorrect, joining what Dermot said was now "32" wrong guesses and counting.
With National Album Day in full swing, the show was wall-to-wall vinyl, from Dusty Springfield and The Who to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which Dermot kept dipping back into throughout the morning as a running joke.
More from Dermot O'Leary
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