[alli55]

“Did I really put a worm in my mouth?” asks Lissie, concerned about what exactly she might have submitted her younger self to.

“You certainly did!” I tell her.

“It was really disgusting,” Maddie recalls, “and really funny at the same time! Especially when the other end wiggled about and curled round the end of your nose!”

Lissie covers her face with her hands in an attempt to conceal her disgust and embarrassment, as Maddie revels in regaling her with all the gruesome details.

“It was half-in half-out of your mouth, hanging there, with its other end wriggling around. Then it sort of coiled itself into a loop and found the end of your nose, and it began trying to grip on. Mam had to stop it from actually going up inside your nose! Didn’t you, Mam?!”

“I did!” I affirm, chuckling at the memory of it.

“You mean you were there and didn’t get it out of my mouth?!” Lissie exclaims.

“You wouldn’t let me!” I retort. “You had your mouth clamped shut!”

“You were trying to suck it in!” Maddie reveals.

“What?! Why?” asks Lissie, incredulous at this latest detail.

“I think you thought it was like the spaghetti you used to have for your tea!” I explain.

Lissie covers her face once more. “Urgh, that’s gross!” she declares. Maddie and I simply exchange looks and nod in agreement.

The theme music begins before we can embarrass Lissie with any more tales of her disgusting toddler behaviour. Phil returns from the loo just as the show is resuming.

“Welcome back!” says Trixie. “We’re touring the country looking for Britain’s Most Daring, and we have three more regions still to visit, so where are we going next, Joe?”

“We’re off to sunny Scotland!” Joe informs Trixie, the studio audience, and the watching public. “Or should I say, soggy Scotland! I think you’ll see why, when we cross over to Lorna!”

The screen fills with a shot of a tall, slim brunette sheltering under a large umbrella as an incessant rain beats down. She has a thick dark-green sweater on and a knee-length skirt that has a tartan pattern that makes it resemble a kilt. Lorna is doing her best to keep the umbrella over her head without obscuring the view of her that the camera is getting.

“Hallo, and welcome to Glasgow!” she begins with a soft Edinburgh lilt that is frequently rated as the nation’s favourite regional accent. “As you can see, we haven’t exactly picked a lovely summer’s day, but we Scots are used to a bit of rain, so I’m sure it won’t dampen the enthusiasm of our daredevils!”

She may be sure, but, by the looks of the bedraggled queue, they don’t seem so certain. The weather has clearly put people off coming, as the queue is considerably shorter than any of the others we have so far seen.

“As I’m sure you know,” Lorna continues, “we have a reputation for battering and deep frying everything from Mars Bars to shortbread via dry roasted peanuts. And no, I’m not joking about the peanuts! So, to get in to our lunch today, our wannabes are going to be coated in batter, though we won’t be deep frying them you’ll be relieved to know!”

The montage begins and slightly fewer than half the soaking-wet hopefuls give up when they find they are about to be coated in a batter mix that probably won’t come out of their wet clothes. The others are gunged from above and emerge the other side with batter and rainwater dripping from all parts of them. None of them look remotely happy!

“You have to feel sorry for them, don’t you?” Lorna comments, from her position in the food-hall. “Well, we did anyway,” she adds, “so we gave them a bath-robe so they could get out of their wet and sticky clothes.” The view behind her, of a fairly small number of people sat at the tables, all wearing bath-robes, confirms this.

“Now they’re all ready for their lunch, and we’ve got a special Scottish treat for them: haggis, which we’ve battered, of course! But just like our wannabes, we didn’t deep fry the haggis either; or cook it in any other way. Let’s see how they get on!”

The montage begins with most of the haggises being toyed with rather than eaten. One young woman, in particular, seems intent on spreading the bits of minced sheep’s organs over as big an area as possible. We come back to her repeatedly during the montage, as the mess in front of her keeps growing. A few hardy souls are eating, with another young woman doing particularly well, but the dripping batter mix isn’t helping anyone. The final shot of the montage sees us return to the woman and her minced mess, only now she has re-arranged it in such a way as to spell out the words ‘this is shit’! Being Channel 4, there is no censoring of the bad language.

“Oh dear!” Lorna sympathises, as the camera closes in so that she fills the frame, “you have to feel for them, don’t you?!” By now, we’ve seen the format enough to realise that the winner will be standing next to her when the camera shot widens out. “Well, we had a clear winner here in Glasgow, and here she is, … Ayla!” She puts an arm around her companion and says to her, “Congratulations, and just you be sure to go and show them how daring we Scots can be!”

A young blonde-haired woman, with a curvy figure, beams with a mixture of pleasure and pride, next to Lorna. “You can count on it!” she promises.

Trixie gives her usual welcome to the latest regional winner. “Let’s meet our Scottish champion, 22-year-old graduate from Musselburgh, Ayla.”

Ayla walks on to the expected rapturous applause. She is grinning from ear to ear, and, with the fingers of one hand, gives a cheeky little wiggle-wave to the audience.

“Ayla, welcome!” says Joe. “What’s the weirdest deep-fried thing you’ve eaten?”

“I don’t really like deep-fried stuff!” Ayla replies, taking Joe a little by surprise.

He is quick-witted enough to have a comeback ready, though. “Are you sure you’re really Scottish?” he asks, jokingly.

“Oh, aye,” she tells him, deliberately enhancing her accent for effect, “and dinnae you tell me anything tae the contrary, you cheeky Sassenach!”

The audience lap up Ayla’s confident reply, and Joe milks it a little more.

“So, are you doing this for Scotland, like a little braveheart?” he asks.

“Aye,” replies Ayla, “I’m gonnae win this for everyone the correct side of the border!”

Joe points her to her chair, as Trixie says, “Ayla, everyone, our very Scottish champion!” The audience whoop with delight, as they take Ayla to their hearts.

“Our chairs are filling up nicely!” Trixie says, as we get a quick shot of the 8 regional winners so far revealed, all sitting in their places. It means that just over half the chairs are now occupied. “Only two regions left, so where are we heading next, Joe?” she asks her co-presenter.

We note that Gemma is looking relaxed, sitting on the furthest end of the front row of seats.

“We’re going from one end of the country to the other,” Joe tells her. “Down to the South-West, where every ooh is followed by an arr! Let’s check in with wor resident yokel, Olly!”

The filmed segment begins with Olly, a tall young man with a striking appearance and an even more striking hairstyle, standing in front of a large barn. He is wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, complete with a pair of wellies, but it really is his hair that draws your attention. Cut short at the back and sitting just above the ears, it then rises up in swirling strawberry-blond waves that end in an extravagant pointed tip protruding forward fifteen centimetres above his forehead. Behind Olly and his hair, there is the familiar sight of a queue winding its way away from the entrance to the building. The only difference is that this building has two distinct doors a couple of metres apart from each other, rather than the usual single door.

“Greetings from Bristol,” Olly begins, with a distinctive West Country burr apparent from the off, “and welcome to the South-West regional auditions. We’ve decided to hold our event in a cowshed, and to start with we’re just asking our wannabes to simply dare to enter the cowshed! They have a choice of two doors, and just like with a cow, which entrance they choose will determine what they can expect to receive. Choose the right one and they’ll be given a light milk shower, but choose the wrong one and … well, I’ll leave you to imagine what else comes out of a cow!”

The early part of the montage is filled mainly with refusals, which is to be expected, given that this dare is another potential clothes-wrecker. As we go on, though, more people are choosing to try their luck. After each person has gone through, there is a period of clean-up, not surprisingly, given the messy nature of this dare. While the clean-up is undertaken, there is an opportunity to switch the gunge tanks behind each door, which is sometimes done and sometimes not. So, even we don’t know what each entrant will be coated in. Those we see gunged during the montage are split fairly evenly between milk and cowpats.

The bath-robes are in evidence again, behind Olly, as he does his next piece to camera. “Having got in, and got covered,” he tells us, “our wannabes can now have their lunch. We’ve found a traditional West Country delicacy for them to tuck into, though obviously we haven’t gone as far as actually cooking it! Squab Pie is a local treat, and we all know what a squab is, don’t we?! A baby pigeon!” Olly turns to the wannabes, and says, loudly, “Did you get that? Baby pigeon!”

Both of the girls look at me, frowning in half-disgust half-uncertainty. I shrug my shoulders. I have no idea whether you actually make a pie out of a baby pigeon! The way this show has gone so far, it wouldn’t surprise me!

At the start of the montage, a caption appears at the bottom of the screen. ‘Actually, squab pie contains mutton and apples, and definitely no baby pigeons!’ We now know that, but the poor wannabes don’t! The texture of the raw mutton appears to be enough to put a fair number off, but the added thought that it is actually a baby pigeon does for even more of them. Plenty are eating the bits of apple and about half are tucking into the raw pastry, but the lumps of meat are largely untouched. Except for two men, sitting next to each other, who seem to each be urged on by the sight of the other’s progress. By the time the montage ends the winner is clearly going to be one or other of these two.

Olly re-appears on-screen, flanked by the two potential winners: a big, heavy-set guy with chiselled features and a receding hairline, standing to Olly’s right; and a shorter, stocky man with slicked back hair and a friendly face that’s filled with a warm smile. “Well, as you could see,” Olly says,” it was a very close thing between Bradley here,” he indicates the shorter man on his left, “and Steve. They both did brilliantly, but we don’t do dead-heats on this show, so I can reveal that the winner in the South-West is,” he pauses for effect, then raises Bradley’s hand, “Bradley!” Steve reaches across and shakes Bradley’s hand as the film ends.

“Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, our South-West champion, 28-year-old horticulturalist from Chipping Sodbury, Bradley!” cries Trixie, her enthusiasm showing no sign of waning. The audience, likewise, are as generous as ever with their applause, as Bradley, wearing a smart shirt with equally well-presented jeans, walks purposefully across to the two presenters.

“Bradley,” Joe says, “that was a bit close, wasn’t it?!”

Bradley is keen to acknowledge how well Steve had done. “It was, real close! Steve did really well, and to be honest I thought he’d got it!”

“And I believe you two know each other, is that right?!”

“Yes,” Bradley confirms, “he was the best man at my wedding last year!”

“Well, this time round it was your turn to be the best man!” Joe tells him and sends him across to join the other regional winners.

“Let’s hear it for Bradley!” urges Trixie, and the audience respond. As the applause continues, Trixie says, “Okay, we’ve just one region to go, so join us after the break as we reveal our final regional winner on Britain’s Most Daring!”

Maddie tries again: “So, Dad, what do you think of it?”

“It’s alright!” her Dad tells her. Coming from him, that’s high praise indeed!

“I love it!” Lissie tells us, yet again.