BBC Radio 1 are negligent. We've got the proof, it's a Radio Today exclusive. Pete Tong deliberately mentioned there was a house party. In a house. Somewhere. And at some time.
As you can imagine, over 2,000 people, probably all drug addicts or teenage mothers we imagine, turned up and wrecked the 21-bedroom manor house in Devon on Friday night. And according to one eye-witness statement we've just made up, Tong himself urinated in a wardrobe while naked.
It was the birthday party of 18 year old Sarah Ruscoe. According to the Telegraph, her mother is considering legal action against the BBC: "I think it's totally negligent of the BBC to allow a statement like that to be broadcast."
The power of radio, eh?
Sales executives would kill for a testimonial from Sarah Ruscoe's mother, if the outcome had been slightly more positive. And not entirely irrelevant. Imagine it: a live read on a radio station with average reach of just 21% in any one part of the country, somehow convinced 2,000 people to appear at the same time in the same location, without mentioning either.
A commercial with no details, an OTH of just one, and more people respond than the Osmond family has teeth.
Fortunately this time around, and unlike last week's preposterous non-story concerning Radio Teesdale (which inexplicably made it as far as the pages of USA Today), the press didn't simply regurgitate the story.
The Telegraph published a complete confession from Ruscoe. In fact she'd put up a poster at school inviting 'everyone' to attend which then, according to the Observer, was published on the internet with the instruction that attendees should cause as much damage as possible.
Which would explain the man found trying to remove the door from the fridge.
The moral of the story is this: no matter how tinpot you or your peers may consider a station to be, the simple fact that it reaches into a person's home or car means it has power. Radio 1 certainly wasn't responsible for the uninvited guests or the subsequent damage, but it's a far more credible scapegoat than a sheet of paper stuck on a corridor wall.
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