Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 15th January 2021

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

This week Andy's guests are Nish Kumar, Felicity Ward, Lucy Porter and Gavin Webster.A titanic clash between Team Lock em Up and Team Lock em Down. In an attempt to distract from the globe's currently lower than average performance, this week's programme features some "future news".Written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Max Davis, Alice Fraser, Simon Alcock and Celya AB.Producer: Richard Morris A BBC Studios Production

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello. It's the end of another less than absolutely brilliant week for Team Human. But on the plus side... Er... No, I've got nothing. 49 and a half weeks until Christmas. Welcome to the News Quiz.

And we start this week with a clipping from a newspaper. Please make it stop! paper. Please make it stop! That was from the generic daily sent in by everyone from everywhere. I'm Andy Zaltzman and our two teams this week battling for the American Global Credibility Memorial Trophy. On

Team Lock Em Up, it's Lucy Porter and Gavin Webster. And on Team Lock Em Down, Nish Kumar and Fel Webster. And on Team Lockham Down, Nish Kumar and Felicity Ward. As you can hear, a live audience is joining us via the wannabe Ouija board that is a giant mass video call. If our panellists lose their internet connection, they will be impeached.

Probably not until after the programme has ended. So, firstly, and this goes to Team Lockham Down, Nish and Felicity, who had some very inciting news this week. This is Donald Trump, the man who is, depending on your perspective, a riot-starting white supremacist career criminal or a riot-starting white supremacist career legend. And it's about time we had some balance on the BBC, Andrew. Thank you very much.

Anyway, Trump, who is also the only person in 2021 to have updated their MySpace page, has become the first president in American history to be impeached twice by Congress. The chamber voted for impeachment by 232 to 197. The votes in favour did include 10 Republicans. And Nancy Pelosi, who's the Speaker of the House, said it was one of the darkest chapters in American history, which is pretty damning given some of the other chapters in American history. I mean, considering that book

also includes chapters such as massacring the indigenous people and celebrating with Turkey every year and slavery. Let's face it, if American history was a book, even Stephen King would contact the author and say, dude, some of that was messed up, okay? some of that was messed up.

OK, some of that was disgusting. That's not even including Watergate, Vietnam and the success of the Big Bang Theory. And like the Big Bang Theory, things could be about to go from appalling to somehow even more appalling for Donald Trump, because the Senate is going to have a string of hearings now around this impeachment. Now, the last time he was impeached, the Senate voted against it. But so far, there have been positive noises about a possible impeachment coming from even the most senior Republican on the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who, if you don't know, is a man who looks like a mid-transformation Ninja Turtle. And... Google it. I don't have time for these. who looks like a mid-transformation ninja turtle. And... Google it. I don't have time, OK?

And also, to compound matters even further, Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin has endorsed social media comments demanding that Trump's cameo in Home Alone 2 be digitally removed. So Donald Trump may be about to be impeached from the Home Alone film franchise. I think that's actually the most important piece of legislation of 2021. Very sad that Nancy Pelosi didn't also bring that up.

It seems fitting to me that the best speech against the ex-TV host president was by the former California governor and six-time Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't know if you saw the speech, but it was incredible, literally inspiring. He effectively called the rioters and specifically the Proud Boys, Nazis. I mean, I've never been so relieved to hear someone in politics call someone a Nazi. I'm like, finally! I shouldn't feel as joyous.

Maybe he should have followed it up with something a tad more comical from his films, you know, like Hasta La Vista Baby, or more topically, AstraZeneca Baby. Make it be... What? You know. Proper jokes. I absolutely love between Macaulay Culkin and Arnold

Schwarzenegger. All the cinematic heroes of my childhood are now coming back to save us, and I can only hope this is going to culminate in Will Smith using the Men in Black memory wiping machine to get rid of the last four years from all of our collective memories.

Or Bill and Ted turn up. I'd be happy with that. They're remaking it with Bill Clinton and Ted Cruz, though, so it's going to be a very, very different film. In regards to the Proud Boys, to get rid of them, has anyone just tried pressing Alt-Right-Delete?

LAUGHTER Some breaking news just reaching us on the wires from America. Mount Rushmore has started crying. LAUGHTER The South Dakota-based celebrity Sculpture Rock, which features images of four of the greatest presidents from American history, was reported by local residents last night to have been heard whimpering quietly to itself. By the time authorities arrived at the four-famous-faced granite monument,

it was, quote, weeping tears of rock. George Washington was reportedly sobbing uncontrollably as historians tried to reassure him that his life had not been completely in vain. Thomas Jefferson had his eyes clenched shut and was silently shaking his head. Teddy Roosevelt had turned to hide his tear-stained visage from tourists so only the back of his head was visible, and Abraham Lincoln's teeth

were nibbling into his bottom lip as if he was about to say something beginning with the letter F. Nish, how do you think the impeachment could drag on for quite a while uh it's not it's not going to be uh you know clean in and out by the time of the inauguration now chuck schumer the democratic leader in the senate has said that they're going to try and force uh the hearings to start and mitch mcconnell has just simply refused to cooperate so it looks like the hearings in the senate won't start until after the Biden inauguration. And what you are relying on is the Republican Party doing the right thing. And I'm afraid if you genuinely believe the Republican Party is capable of doing

the right thing in the year of our Lord 2021, I have some fantastic magic beans I would like to say. Because whatever that... The Republican Party is like Facebook. Whatever its original reason for being founded was, it has now been washed away in a sea of Nazis and conspiracy-believing uncles. It's a bit like Frankenstein's monster, this Trumpism, because it isn't an aberration.

It is the logical conclusion of the last 20 years of Republican Party politics. And at this point, people are drawing a comparison with Frankenstein's monster. But that comparison only held true if Frankenstein had spent the entire novel just going up to the monster and going, get him.

Just kill him all. Yeah, yeah. Before hastily disavowing the monster, but only in the epilogue to the novel. Another question. This can go to Gavin and Lucy. What else has Donald Trump's name been carved into,

as well as the annals of infamy? Ooh, this is an interesting one. Yeah, that's an animal in the zoo, wasn't it? A mammal Correct Can you be a little bit more specific? It was a mammal that doesn't lay eggs I'll give you half a point

It was a manatee A manatee, correct, it was a manatee They actually spoke to the manatee. A manatee, correct. It was a manatee. They actually spoke to the manatee and he was a bit annoyed, actually, because he said, look, I've actually been a Trump fan for years. I'm not Johnny Cum lately. You know, I carved it in myself.

I actually liked him in The Apprentice. And to be honest, I was even a fan when he did the League Cup draw in St. Greavesy about 30 years ago. That's what paved the way to the presidency havoc. Of course it did. That is a terrible thing to do to a big, blubbery creature, isn't it?

And not so great for the manatee either. I had to finish that. I had to finish the thought. I did feel, I feel you know, again in the interest of balance I think, say what you like about Trump but it is very impressive that a man of his age can manage an insurrection.

The word Trump was scrawled across the back of a manatee in Florida. Experts confirmed this was in fact fact, the nearest thing yet found to actual evidence of an uncounted vote for Trump from November's election. I mean, there was always something deeply suspicious about the small number of manatees cast in Pennsylvania

compared with previous elections. Another Trump-related question, this time on the subject of golf. What did PGA stand for this week? Pro Golf Association? I don't know what it stands for usually. Incorrect. Oh, the correct answer is please go away. The US PGA announced that the Trump National Course in Bedminster, New Jersey has been stripped of next year's US PGA Championships. Organisers insisted that using the course would be detrimental to their brand.

Trump's... Trump's response was, Et tu, golf? Et tu? He doesn't speak French. And that brings the score at the end of the first round to Team Lockham Down 3, Team Lockham Up 1. Moving on, this is for Gavin and Lucy on Team Lockham Up. Who is shaping up to take a shot in the dark?

Oh, yes. We're going to get night vaccines. Correct. Which I find very exciting, being vaccinated in the middle of the night. Although I would like it if you didn't have to go to them, if they came to you, kind of like a sort of medically qualified milk tray man, where you just wake up at 2am, you've got a sore arm,

a single rose, an illegible prescription next to your bed, and then you just catch a glimpse of that nice Dr Christian from Embarrassing Bodies just disappearing over the garage roof in a black polo neck. So the government initially said they didn't think there was a clamour for people to be vaccinated 24 hours, but I am clamouring. I will tell you that. I'm absolutely clamouring for it. 4am is the time when I, as a perimenopausal woman,

like to wake up and worry about everything from the plight of the orangutan to whether or not we need a new hall stairs carpet. Are those two connected? Are you planning to have one made of orangutan pelt on? Do you know? Ooh, that would be downy, wouldn't it, Andy? It would be lovely.

Nish, is there not a problem with this? That, you know, with the current system, I guess this is why they're looking at round-the-clock vaccination, with the current system, if you just chuck everyone out of the vaccination hubs at closing time, you're encouraging binge vaccination. Like, young people under the age of 100 just going to pile out into the streets

and vaccinate themselves silly, aren't they? 100% Andy, it's going to be like the back of Tiger Tiger in Croydon. There's just going to be people being sick, just vaccine coming back up behind the bins. Other people who were trying to mitigate the effects of the vaccine by having a kebab. It's going to be

an absolute mess. Do you know what, Nish? You've actually just made me more keen to have the vaccine because I've had some brilliant times around the back of Tiger Tiger in Croydon. Some of my fondest memories of my youth. They're actually missing a trick here. They're setting up all these separate 24-hour clinics.

Why don't you just set them up next to the Macca's drive-through? Go to your 24-hour Macca's drive-through, turn up, hi, can I get a large quarter pound of me on nine nuggets and a Pfizer? Thank you. Actually, can I upgrade that to the double vaccination? Oh, not till April? OK, you know, that's fine. It's good.

I think it's really impressive to see the government taking this seriously 10 months later. They have pounced on it. They have pounced on it. My concern is if we follow the trajectory of everything else the government has done with coronavirus since the beginning, it's going to end up with a situation where the contract to distribute the vaccines ended up going to a MP's neighbour's nephew, who it turns out had no qualifications in distributing vaccines whatsoever, had no qualifications at distributing vaccines whatsoever,

who then dropped all of the vaccines and yet somehow won the contract to clean up the now useless vaccines and smashed containers. My husband and I have been volunteering to drive people to have their vaccinations, and it is actually amazing when you see the over-80s, when they're getting something free, they can put on a spurt. British people love anything free, don't we? We love it.

I was in free. All right. What other policies would you say are best implemented under the cover of darkness? Anything Dominic Raab's got to announce. I think the cover of darkness is his Tinder profile, isn't it? I mean, school meals, for example, would be surely better at 3am. You wake up a child, they're so tired,

they don't know they're eating a handful of gravel and a delicious tea towel carpaccio. I just hacked that out of Gavin Williamson's internal monologue. Maybe if they're going to bring back fox hunting, then I think that would be better at night because it gives the foxes an advantage, doesn't it? Do it on bin night, because I've seen foxes on bin night. That was Thursdays at Tiger, Tiger and Croydon, wasn't it?

Yes, this is indeed the 24-hour vaccine service that could be offered in our race against the virus. I say race against the virus. It's not a great race, is it? I mean, we can already see the virus on the other side of the athletic stadium with a gold medal round its neck and a commemorative teddy bear signing autographs before nipping off to Waz in a test tube.

We're still plodding round, hoping we get to the finish line and be done. Ideally quick enough that we don't get the sympathy clap from the crowd for being very brave boys and girls. And remember, it's not the winning that counts, it's the being taken apart. It's the taking part. Another question.

Who set a great example to the public this week by not technically doing anything wrong whatsoever? Is this, Andrew, by any chance, our Prime Minister? Correct, it is, isn't it? Well done. It's really incredible. He popped himself on a little bike ride more than seven miles away from his house, I think, or possibly exactly seven miles away from his house. It's pretty incredible the way that they've gone about this

because the government has really spent a lot of time this week blaming the general public for the most recent spike of coronavirus. And it's pretty incredible. To be fair to Boris Johnson, he has evaded the allegations that he's mishandled this pandemic, like he was evading one of his biological children. I was in a way I saw, you know, Prime Minister breaks lockdown rules or whatever. And the government has set the bar so low when it comes to abiding by their own rules that I was actually pleasantly surprised it was just a seven mile bike ride, not sitting in a limousine with a load of maskless supermodels fresh from Johannesburg and Rio

going on a pensioner licking tour of Britain's busiest care homes. You know what I mean? I was like, oh. As far as I'm aware, you can go on a virtual exercise bike these days. There's no excuse for Boris Johnson, really. I mean, you go down to the gym, I believe that's what they're called. I don't know what they've been. And what a good workout you can have is by hoovering. And I don't know if you know,

you can actually plug the back of your hoover into your Mac or PC and you can hoover virtual courses. Wonderful, great buildings in different parts of the world. There's the Louvre. You can hoover the Louvre.

So there's lots of things you can do. Yes, this is Boris Johnson criticised after he was seen cycling in the Olympic Park in East London, seven miles away from his home in Downing Street. It raised my hopes that he was about to do what I personally have been calling on him to do for a very long time, and that is call a Snap Olympics.

Mid-February, I reckon we're in. Get the army involved once they've finished machine-gunning vaccines into our nursing homes, reactivate Danny Boyle, and with Covid, as well as no competitors from other countries, we're going to crush that medal table like a cheap sausage. It's possible Johnson was just simply trying to osmose the spirit of 2012, never forget, just nostalgically reminding himself of a simpler, happier time when people used to lampoon him for deliberately

getting stuck on a zip wire as a faux incompetent publicity stunt, rather than for presiding over a catastrophically genuinely incompetent response to the kind of massive crisis for which a half-arsk career in journalism and zip wire dangling doesn't entirely prepare you.

Here's another question with the score standing tantalisingly poised at 10 all. We'll just pick a number out of thin air. It's 2021, that's what we do. Stop the steal. Stop the steal. I demand a recount. Why does going Dutch now mean having no food and having to pay for everything? Ooh, I know this one.

Oh, yes. Lucy. This is... It was a lorry driver who had his ham sandwich confiscated by a Dutch border guard. Correct. There's so much about this that's wrong. For a start, the Dutch are not meant to enforce rules.

They're meant to be like the sort of cool older cousins of Europe. they're kind of meant to get you drunk and show you a dirty movie and pierce your ears with a drawing pin you know they're but they've been enforcing the brexit rules and the thing that really upset me about a couple of things firstly the fact that it now means if europeans are seizing our ham it means the the Europeans have to know what kind of ham we eat and it is embarrassing because... LAUGHTER You know, Europeans, they have lovely ham, they have lovely cured meats that you can have with a glass of wine. What we have as ham, what we put in our sandwiches,

looks and tastes like what you'd find in the plug hole if you gave a pig a particularly vigorous shampooing, right? LAUGHTER It's awful. a particularly vigorous shampooing, right? It's awful. And it sounds like... So this means, basically, you can take your bottle of drink into the EU, you can take your bag of crisps into the EU,

but you cannot take your sandwich into the EU. Effectively, what this means is we've got a no-meal-deal Brexit. And a very appropriate Brexit joke because it was worth the long build-up. I have to say, I'm scandalised by this anti-Brexit sentiment. I am very much in favour of Brexit. I think it's going amazingly and this has nothing to do with my imminent fears of being deported. I think it's going brilliantly. I've always thought it's going amazingly. And this has nothing to do with my imminent fears of being deported. I think it's going brilliantly. I've always thought it's going brilliantly. Leave means leave.

My name is Nick Cooper. This is the story of a Dutch TV network filming border officials confiscating ham sandwiches from British drivers arriving in the Netherlands under post-Brexit rules. Some sandwiches are exempt. The club sandwich, well, the Bullingdon club sandwich... LAUGHTER

..do not think about where the ham comes from. LAUGHTER Is there a fact about the sandwich, the sarnie? Do you know who it was named after? The Earl of Sandwich, innit? The sarnie, no, it wasn't. In fact, the Sarnie was named after the famous 18th century politician, actor and strongman

Sarnel Schwarzenegger. Let's move on with the score now. It's 12 to Team Lockham up and 10 to Team Lockham down. And while it's time now, we look a lot at the present and the present is having a tough time in the moment things are tough, even Joe Wicks is starting to look dead behind the eyes

and he is fumed from 100% pure positivity so we're going to try and look to the future now with some questions about significant developments of human ingenuity, this goes to Lucy and Gavin on Team Lockham up, what will probably say sorry before wiping out the entire human race?

This is the empathetic robot, isn't it? Correct, the empathetic robot, yes. I would have thought an empathetic robot with me in the past would have been something like, oh, you couldn't even understand HTML4, you're really all hopeless, aren't you? The story was that a robot watched another robot doing tasks and it could put itself in the shoes of the other robot.

So it says that it's developed a level of empathy roughly akin to that of a three-year-old human child. So in that case, I would say please definitely don't show the robot the scene where Mufasa dies in The Lion King because it will just cry and cry. Spoiler alert, Lucy! Sorry, guys. It will have to have a biscuit after that. Soiler alert, Lucy! Yeah, sorry, guys. It will have to have a biscuit after that bit.

So, yeah, they decided, oh, it's empathetic. I think this is political correctness gone mad. When I was a kid, robots travelled back in time to murder children and enforced the whims of a crypto-fascist state in The Terminator and Robocop. And now, thanks to the woke brigade, robots are all like, ooh, one zero, one zero! This is woke nonsense, and I won't stand for it.

You want a robot to say, I'll be back, because it's about to come back armed to the teeth, not because the robot's worried you have abandonment issues. because it's about to come back armed to the teeth, not because the robot's worried you have abandonment issues. This is scientists at Columbia University who claim to have created the first ever robot to display glimmers of empathy. I'm not sure this is entirely a beneficial development.

If you think things are bad at the moment for humanity, just imagine being a robotic colonoscopy camera suddenly granted emotional sentience. Another question on the future. This goes to Team Lockham Down. What is 170 kilometres long, infinitely pointless, and in the desert? Oh, this is amazing.

Saudi Arabia has launched a plan to make a zero carbon city and it's 170 kilometres in a straight line. I mean, it sounds like one massive, fancy train platform. I'm excited. Apparently, the entire city is going to rely on artificial intelligence techniques to facilitate communication between the technology and humans. And it's supposed to save you time because you know how much time it saves when you speak to voice recognition on the phone. Doesn't that save time? Debit card. Did you say debutante? No. I don't have an Alexa anymore. I bashed it to death. It's quite extraordinary. It's a classic Saudi Arabia, isn't it?

They finally get round to allowing women to drive and then they build a 100-mile stretch of road with no cars allowed on it. Patriarchy hates to share, Andy, it really does. They're obviously thinking about their carbon footprint because by building one nice straight street with no cars on it, it can double up as a new runway when they want to bomb Yemen. I was wondering how you actually...

How do you ask for directions when there's one street? How do you get to my house? Well, look, mate, do you know Riyadh Road? You do? You do? You live there? Funnily enough, so do I. Anyway, to get to Maine, you head out on Riyadh Road, you go straight on, right, and then you come to the lake, you go straight on again,

and then you carry on straight on, and you can't miss it. It's basically, it's for people who find Milton Keynes a bit too exciting, isn't it? Yeah, this is the story of Saudi Arabia's ambitious plan to construct a zero-carbon city built in a 100-mile straight line across a desert costing half a trillion dollars. It's a classic magician's distraction trick, isn't it?

Oh, I was so busy looking at his hands, I didn't see him add water to the powdered rabbit. Genius, the kind of thing you see. So it is with Saudi Arabia. I was looking at the 100 mile long linear carless eco-city and I didn't see the proxy wars, gender apartheid, state-sponsored assassinations and legalised slavery.

It's just, I've seen it all before. The city will be called Neom, a massive city built in a straight line or as it will surely henceforth be known, the not particularlyparticularly-democratic Republic of Conger. That brings us to the end of this week's News Quiz. The final scores, Team Lockham up, have 14 points. Team Lockham down have 12.

It's a victory for Lockham up. Just some quick breaking news coming through to us, slightly disturbing news while we've been on air. Hugh Edwards' frown has slipped off his face and is now at large in Broadcasting House. The frown, which has been deepening throughout the last 12 months, finally fell off his face completely at the end of last night's news at 10. He fell onto the floor and scuttled into the darkness.

Edwards has said he will miss the frown, which has become a close friend and confidant during the Covid crisis. He said he'd look forward to being able to express surprise and happiness again. Thank you to our panellists today, Lucy Porter and Gavin Webster, and Nish Kumar and Felicity Ward. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Thank you for our panellists today, Lucy Porter and Gavin Webster and Nish Kumar and Felicity Ward. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Taking part in the news quiz were Nish Kumar, Lucy Porter, Felicity Ward and Gavin Webster.

In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material was written by Max Davis, Alice Fraser, Simon Alcock and Celia Aby. The producer was Richard Morris and it was a BBC Studios production. Thank you. until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us

two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks.