From a £25 holiday to Bali
Chris’s previous bargain break had cost £25 and included a welcome hamper. This year he was making an enormous leap from familiar European resorts to Bali, partly because the programme had spent so long mocking his reluctance to travel further.
He booked every available injection and bought the silver level of travel insurance, then learned that monkeys could steal cameras, sunglasses and food. The policy did not explicitly mention monkey theft, and the insurer initially thought his question was a joke.
Scott described monkeys calmly opening bottled water and chocolate before discarding the packaging. Listeners recommended exchanging stolen possessions for food, keeping valuables away from windows and attaching lanyards to everything. Chris also planned to visit the Gili Islands and heard, with mounting concern, that electricity could be limited.
Fat fingers discover voice notes
A listener had been chatting to a man late at night through WhatsApp. Her room was hot, her hands were sweaty and typing had become difficult, so she recorded a flirtatious voice note instead.
Scott and Chris were delighted by a feature they had barely used. They immediately exchanged recordings, including Scott’s greeting: “All right, fat fingers, you sweaty-handed man.” Voice notes appeared to remove every inconvenience of predictive text.
The listener’s experience supplied the warning. Her adult message did not appear to send, so she recorded another. Both had gone to her former sister-in-law, who was also a colleague. The recipient was surprisingly calm because another friend had recently made a similar mistake, but seeing her at work remained difficult.
There was a further danger: some messages downloaded into a phone’s audio library and could interrupt shuffled music. A private recording or an unexplained fart might therefore appear between two songs without warning. Scott and Chris continued sending voice notes anyway until the number arriving from other people made the novelty exhausting.
Ten minutes at the Edinburgh Festival
Phil Taggart and Alice Levine were taking Radio 1 to the Edinburgh Festival, and Scott and Chris had been offered a ten-minute slot on 11 August. Previous visits had produced a musical about Scott, one-man shows and large Fun and Filth cabarets. One performance involved the entertainer Le Gateau Chocolat sitting on Joey Essex while singing.
The new slot was much shorter but late enough to allow material near the edge. They asked listeners for an idea that could work at the largest arts festival in the world with almost no preparation. Scott defended Edinburgh against the belief that it was inaccessible or overly artistic: its tiny rooms, free shows, famous comedians, experimental theatre and terrible acts all contributed to the atmosphere.
Ice-cream vans try modern music
A caller had heard an ice-cream van use Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” through a boombox. Scott approved of updating the repertoire but wanted new songs translated into the thin, chiming style of “Greensleeves” and “Three Blind Mice”, not simply played from a window.
The team continued making pop songs sound like clockwork van tunes. The result was contemporary but also faintly sinister, especially when imagined moving slowly along a dark street.
Greg James invents Bali hummus
Greg played Real or No Real. “Dogging” really could mean jogging with a dog in Germany, creating considerable room for misunderstanding in Britain. Alice Levine did not watch Newsnight while presenting her evening show. Angelina Jolie really did give her children insects as snacks.
Hummus was not a traditional accompaniment to every Balinese dish; Greg had invented that claim because it was the one food Chris could not tolerate. Scott won 30–0, while Chris’s holiday anxiety expanded from monkeys and injections to bats, volcanoes and a food that was not actually waiting for him.
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