Christmas Eve Eve
Chris recovered the phone he had left in a taxi the previous day. He collected it from driver Solomon’s house, offered a thank-you and received such a warm Christmas greeting that the encounter felt like the ending of a Channel 5 festive film.
He had also finally clicked and collected some presents, although the amount of shopping still unfinished continued to alarm Scott.
Da boooys of da N-W-P-D choir
Listeners asked for the return of Felicia Ricci’s lesson on singing “Fairytale of New York”. The American vocal teacher had previously taught Chris to imitate Sia by changing ordinary lyrics into phonetic sounds, and she applied the same method to Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl.
Chris began with a blocked nose and pushed every word into an exaggerated nasal delivery. “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank” became a set of deliberately misshapen sounds. The famous chorus was rebuilt as “da boooys of da N-W-P-D choir”, while the final insult and “Happy Christmas” went through equally dramatic transformations.
Felicia had barely known the song before the show sent it to her, but her method lodged permanently in listeners’ heads. Scott played the original with Chris’s new vocals inserted, creating the version requested every Christmas thereafter.
Predating
Scott’s newly single friend had adopted “predating” after being catfished twice. Rather than commit an evening to somebody who might be entirely different from their profile, he arranged a 15-minute coffee in a shopping centre first.
Both people knew it was only a predate and arrived in ordinary clothes without the pressure of planning an impressive activity. If they were real, reasonably pleasant and still had their teeth, a proper date could follow. If not, the fixed cut-off reduced the damage.
Chris struggled to distinguish it from an ordinary short date, but accepted that the consultation made rejection less brutal. The success rate was not especially high, which its creator regarded as proof that the filter worked.
The final Bamboleo Wednesday before Christmas used clips from the previous day’s Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg interview. Scott initially called it the last of 2015, then realised another Wednesday remained on the 30th.
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