Category: News
Best Guest Week and Come Dine with Me
The team reviewed a week of guests including Tim Minchin, DJ Talent, the Dolly Rockers and Zoe Salmon before choosing a favourite.
The discussion adopted the scoring and competitive atmosphere of Come Dine with Me, with each person defending their own booking and criticising the others.
Dear Scott
One listener defended Chappers, arguing that he received too much criticism from Scott and Beccy.
Other messages dealt with school-leavers, the week’s guests, the [...]
The cancelled Wushu Warrior
The planned Best Guest Week booking was a martial artist who intended to balance breeze blocks on his head while an assistant smashed them with a sledgehammer.
Radio 1’s health-and-safety process did not approve the demonstration for the studio.
The team explained the intended stunt while accepting that a live radio office was probably not the ideal location for flying masonry.
Zoe Salmon
Zoe Salmon stepped in at short notice.
She discussed a previous Radio 1 date wit [...]
The Dolly Rockers
The Dolly Rockers were the latest act booked for Best Guest Week.
The programme had repeatedly presented them as a French group because of their song Je Suis une Dolly and their exaggerated accents. Sophie, Brooke and Lucie finally admitted that they were British.
They said the French idea emerged while writing music in Jersey and that part of the accent had been inspired by Del Boy’s unreliable French in Only Fools and Horses.
The group brought personalised T-shirts for Scott [...]
DJ Talent
The team member known as “the one that doesn’t speak” booked DJ Talent for Best Guest Week.
DJ Talent arrived wearing his large gold necklace and repeated the refrain: “Britain’s Got Talent — it’s the DJ Talent.”
Scott suspected that the apparently naïve act might be an elaborate comedy creation and worried that everybody would later discover they had been fooled.
DJ Talent discussed his audition, praised Amanda Holden and repeated his desire to take Kelly Brook out for chicken and sal [...]
Tim Minchin
Tim Minchin was Beccy’s choice during a week in which each member of the team attempted to book the best guest.
He discussed performing dark, adult or profane comedy songs on breakfast radio, where most of his established material could not be played unedited.
At the studio piano, Tim demonstrated his style and improvised musical ideas. Scott then asked him to contribute to the Edinburgh production that was rapidly becoming Mills: The Musical.
The conversation produced the first mate [...]
Dear Scott
Listener correspondence returned to the week’s new musical project, the previous old-people descriptions and the recurring members of the programme.
The Posh Radio 4 Lady read the messages in her mock-serious style while the team corrected misheard names and discussed which suggestions might become part of the Edinburgh production.
What Are Those Old People On About?
Older people were again shown photographs of current celebrities and asked to describe them without saying their names. [...]
Mills: The Musical
Scott revealed that a theatre had been booked at the Edinburgh Festival for three nights during the second week of August.
The difficulty was that the team had no completed script, coherent plot or finished songs. The working idea became Danny Howard: The Musical, despite Danny himself not yet having supplied a story.
Listeners were asked to send musical numbers, plot lines, character ideas and suggestions for how Scott, Beccy, Chappers, the flatmate and other recurring figure [...]
Beccy’s Classifieds
A seller offered an old brown “bachelor” sofa free in exchange for a decent case of beer. Four people could sit on it, many drunken friends had slept on it and, according to the advert, nobody had vomited on it during the owner’s care. Chappers was put off by the repeated references to the “bum joy” it had provided.
Another person had lost a cardboard box containing 10,000 live food crickets on the Underground. They were intended for three bearded dragons, and the advert warn [...]
Dear Scott
Listeners wrote about meeting Beccy at Big Weekend, with one pair saying she had been lovely while Scott was merely “all right”. Beccy admitted she initially thought their excitement was a prank because they specifically recognised her from Beccy’s Classifieds.
Another listener said Swindon had experienced its best weekend ever, while a student revising for finals had discovered Wing’s catalogue on iTunes and was struggling not to buy it all.
A correspondent said Scott’s slow Westwood [...]
Dear Scott
Dear Scott was the listener-correspondence feature in which the Posh Radio 4 Lady read emails and texts before Scott, Beccy and Chappers responded.
One listener asked which person was Beccy because she had always imagined her as a 60-year-old Women’s Institute member with large grey hair and “jam everywhere”. The team clarified that Beccy was in her twenties and pointed listeners towards a photograph from the Big Weekend “Beccy Cam”.
Another message replayed Greg James advertising Big [...]