Features
Regular features on the show have included 'Am I Normal?', in which listeners were invited to relate their own unusual habits and personal quirks, the idea of which was to determine if these quirks were socially acceptable ('normal') or not, and 'Jon's 100% Belter', whereby Jon got to play a track of his choice. Shorter running features included 'Time Travel', where listeners were invited to choose which period of history (or the future) they'd like to travel to and why, and the 'Mama Link', which featured Russell and Jon's mums performing a short sketch together - written by Russell and Jon - in which they both adopted an urban 'street' patois while discussing some fictional incident that one of them had been involved in that week.
Another popular feature on the show was 'Bored Games' which in which listeners texted or e-mailed in their favorite ways of alleviating boredom. Games included 'Bum', in which participants pushed two beds together and proceeded to lie between them, slowly falling through the gap to the floor underneath.
'Botwatch' was a series of sketches that developed from a small aspect of the shows broadcast when Russell was in Australia. Pretending that he was joined by the 'Russbot 3000' each week to compensate for Russell's absence, Jon would play in voice clips that Russell had previously recorded, and when Russell returned he decided to pretend he had his own robot version of Jon, and in turn these developed into the 'Botwatch' sketches, whereby Russell and Jon would play exaggerated robot versions of each other.
A longer running item was 'The News Quiz', which originally featured members of the public competing by answering questions over the phone about topical news items. This was halted however, due to the BBC's review of competitions and listener based features in 2007, and was then instead played by the two presenters competing against each other, with the loser having a forfeit chosen by the listeners bestowed upon them - examples being the usually casually dressed Russell having to wear a suit every day for week, and Jon having to dress as a female flight attendant during one show. The forfeit then became a challenge to get a particular movie quote, suggested by the listeners, unwittingly read out on a local radio show, sending the messages in under the guise of Sue the retired lesbian from Clifton (Russell) or Nina, a post-op transsexual from Worcester (Jon). Examples include getting "I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany", a quote from Anchorman, and "Everybody be cool, this is a robbery!", a quote from Pulp Fiction read out in some form. The feature was ended with a three week 'Ultimate News Quiz Championship' where Russell & Jon would decide who was better at the quiz. The person who won the quiz most over the three weeks would become the champion and receive the Ultimate News Quiz Championship Cup as supplied by Jon. Jon subsequently won 2 - 1 and became Ultimate News Quiz Champion and received the cup that he had made.
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)