A power breakfast and a lettuce emergency
Scott and Chris begin by reporting on a surprisingly civilised breakfast together, a miniature summit at which they discussed plans and even produced a few ideas. The calm does not last. Britain is suffering a shortage of iceberg lettuces and broccoli, and Scott needs supplies for the weekend. Newsbeat’s Eleanor Roper has become the unofficial lettuce correspondent, while Chris—an enthusiastic “salad dodger”—worries most about the nation’s tortoises.
Scott decides he must act before shelves are stripped bare. He heads out with the furtive air of somebody trying to obtain contraband, asking shops and passers-by whether they have any lettuce. The language of a harmless grocery trip steadily turns into the language of a street deal. The scarcity is genuine, but the programme’s mock seriousness makes one ordinary iceberg sound like the weekend’s most valuable commodity.
Dot Cotton’s fortune and a return to The Jump
Elsewhere, the team considers property prices after hearing what a modest East London house near a station might cost. The required deposit is so large that Scott concludes Dot Cotton must have been secretly minted from years behind the laundrette counter.
Channel 4’s The Jump is returning, which means another chance to ask why celebrities keep agreeing to a programme with such an alarming record of injuries. The answer matters less than revisiting Davina McCall’s unfortunate instruction involving the mayor’s ball bag. It remains exactly the sort of innocent television phrase that the show cannot leave alone.
Vegetarian admin and recycled melodies
Listener correspondence forces Chris to clarify whether he is still “part vegetarian.” Evidence includes his former habit of disappearing with packets of ham and the full English breakfast he has eaten in broad daylight that morning. On the facts, even Chris concedes that the experiment is probably over.
The week ends with more examples for the theory that popular music is running out of new melodies. Declan McKenna’s “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home” is compared with Mumford & Sons, while Bangers reaches its Friday decider and both presenters admit to recycling old choices. Between scarce salad, reused tunes and Chris’ abandoned vegetarianism, the programme finds shortage and compromise everywhere it looks.
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