Scott Mills Show, BBC Radio One January 24th 2008

Another job for Radio 1, this is one of the strangest assignments I have ever been asked to perform. I was asked onto the Scott Mills show to help with a stunt which involved Scott giving me, in the guise of a high-up BBC executive, a tour of the Radio 1 building and meeting various employees - including the venerable Jo Whiley. My brief was to drop in a really bad joke at some point in the conversation and see whether our victims did a 'career laugh'. What made it hard was that I had to be able to pass as a BBC boss. This entailed in-depth research, mostly watching clips of BBC Director General Mark Thompson on Youtube doing a Powerpoint presentation at a conference called 'Zeitgeist'. It turned out to be a priceless repository of every media buzzword in the book and gave me a vocabulary of cliches for my character to spout. I also discovered that Mr. Thompson thinks it is 'cool' for 'users' 'out there' to nick BBC material and use it for our own ends. As he said with evident pride, "There's a little bit of Youtube about the BBC." Therefore what I am presenting here is my own edited version of Scott's show without his or even the D.G.'s permission. It is also a sort of payback for the fact that, as you will hear, I remained completely anonymous and uncredited throughout the broadcast. Spooky...