Richard Bacon

Stand-in for Simon Mayo in 2009 and 2010. Bacon appears as himself in the 5 Live episode of Armando Iannucci's The Thick Of It ("I'm having an affair with Richard Bacon. I'm incredibly aroused by men with meat in their surnames") in which Simon and Mark both get namechecks (and the Flappy Hands epithet was born).

Having not seen Harry Potter 6 (no change there), Bacon rather gave away the nature of the Unhappy Event when reading out listener correspondence which referred to "Dumbledead". Boyd Hilton, standing in for Mark that week, told him off for the massive spoiler.

In Mark's third book on film criticism, Hatchet Job, Bacon is named as one of the critics who reviewed films he had not seen. Bacon happily outed himself as doing this in his 2013 book A Series Of Unrelated Events, describing how he was caught out when he told the publicist of The Lake House that he would definitely try to get round to see it, only for her to reply that he had already reviewed - and hated - it in a national newspaper.