Back to normal
Scott and Chris returned to their regular afternoon show after the Christmas schedules, relieved that the festive records had disappeared and Radio 1 once again sounded normal. Scott still had a few presents to distribute, including one for a boss who would not be back until Wednesday, but the Christmas relationship transfer embargo officially ended that day.
The deadline had not protected everybody. Listeners reported being dumped before Christmas, on Boxing Day and shortly before New Year’s Eve, prompting Scott to consider penalties for breaking the rules. Returning presents was suggested as a minimum requirement, while one listener proposed putting everybody abandoned over Christmas into separate draws and matching them with one another.
Chris also complained that Scott had ignored his excited messages about the PDC World Darts Championship final. Scott had tried massages, tanning and other activities for Chris, yet still would not watch the darts. He reluctantly accepted that making more effort with Chris’s interests could become a New Year’s resolution.
Ice Bucket Dating
Unlucky Gary returned with a method for researching people he met through dating apps. Once he had found somebody’s Facebook profile, he searched for their Ice Bucket Challenge video. Unlike a filtered photograph, it showed how they looked, moved and sounded, while the moment the water landed revealed their natural scream.
Gary admitted that several promising conversations had ended because a man’s scream was not sufficiently masculine. Scott and Chris played examples ranging from a restrained reaction to a prolonged shriek and discovered that Gary wanted something closer to Brian Blessed. He denied using the videos simply to watch wet men in T-shirts and insisted that they were useful miniature showreels.
Listeners admitted conducting similar investigations. Some already looked for Ice Bucket Challenge videos, while one person’s friend checked a prospective date’s Spotify history before agreeing to meet. Scott wondered whether the amount of information available online had made everybody excessively selective, but the idea immediately gave Chris the basis for a larger dating experiment.
Deborah Meaden discovers The Hangover
Chris had resumed his Twitter friendship with Deborah Meaden and discovered that she had watched The Hangover for the first time over Christmas. Deborah enjoyed the film, including the photographs that revealed the missing events at the end, and joked that her own Las Vegas experience had been exactly the same apart from the tiger.
Scott and Chris decided that she had missed too much popular culture. They proposed an evening watching The Inbetweeners, followed by internet videos on Scott’s large screen and fishbowl drinks. Deborah worried that she ought to preview the material, but eventually agreed to find a date. She had never been on a girls’ holiday to Kavos, drunk a fishbowl or even visited Magaluf beyond sailing past it, giving them an extensive programme to plan.
The conversation also produced Chris’s new name for her, “Deborah Meat Feast”. He imagined a pizza tied to each episode of Dragons’ Den, while Deborah backed the show’s idea for a follow-up series revealing what happened to former contestants. Scott wanted a role in that programme too, leaving contracts to be discussed later.
Winter bulking and Real or No Real
The first working Monday of the year brought the inevitable displays of green juice and determined exercise. Scott asked people to stop trying to make kale happen and objected to photographs of blended vegetables appearing across social media. Chris described the festive period more honestly as winter bulking.
Greg James played the year’s first Real or No Real. Jamie Oliver really had been offered a cameo in The Hobbit in return for cooking Peter Jackson’s birthday meal in New Zealand, but work prevented him accepting. Nick Grimshaw had not taken intensive swimming lessons before a celebrity holiday in the Maldives.
A Norfolk man really had paid £300 for surgery on a constipated goldfish, a sum Chris considered reasonable because of the skill involved. Barbie’s full name was also genuinely Barbara Millicent Roberts. The round ended level, but the goldfish operation would continue to trouble the programme the following day.
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