Penny dating chooses lunch
Vicki introduced “penny dating”, a method for couples bored with visiting the same places. They would leave home, choose a number of turns and flip a coin at every junction. Heads meant right, tails meant left, and wherever the final toss placed them became the date location.
The idea had worked beautifully for a couple in Venice, who reached a square with a fountain and wine. Scott pointed out that Vicki lived in the countryside and was much more likely to reach a field, barn or swamp.
Chris tested the system by using it to find lunch near Radio 1. The coin took him past a shop selling pet fish and eventually into an extremely expensive hotel known for celebrity guests. He lowered his voice, asked whether the restaurant offered takeaway and discovered that quail and other dishes would be impractical for the team. The supposedly decisive experiment ended with no food and a refusal to repeat the route.
A double-gap Bamboleo
Wednesday’s Bamboleo included two extended gaps and clips from the Student Tour. The Harper Adams video showed the entire audience freezing in place while Ed Sheeran, Jamie Lawson and the agricultural crowd waited for the music to return.
Listeners joined from tractors, warehouses, dental surgeries and car parks. Scott and Chris replayed the extraordinary frozen crowd online, deciding that a gap long enough to make everybody question the broadcast had become an event in its own right.
Everyone discovered Ed first
Thinking back to Ed’s surprise visit, Scott claimed he had been among the first people to hear of him around the release of The A Team. He deliberately escalated this into saying that he had effectively discovered Ed Sheeran.
The boast produced exactly the irritation he expected. Listeners insisted they had seen Ed in smaller venues, known him at school, watched him from a pub garden or posted about him online first. One person said Ed had tattooed his signature on a cousin before becoming famous. Others argued that his mum, midwife or garden-centre colleagues had a stronger claim than Scott.
Scott eventually reminded everybody that it was a joke, but the volume and seriousness of the responses proved how strongly people valued being an early fan.
Clara Amfo returned for Real or No Real. Dating-app users really had taken profile photographs in IKEA showrooms to suggest they lived in better homes. A mundane Justin Bieber wall-painting photograph really had attracted more likes than Cameron Diaz’s entire output across the previous year, although Diaz had posted only twice. A proposed storm called “Yes” was false, but “Yolo” genuinely appeared among the possible names.
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