Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 19th February 2021

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

A satirical review of the week's news with Andy Zaltzman and guests Andrew Maxwell, Ayesha Hazarika, Scott Bennett and Kiri Pritchard-McLeanIt's the last in the current series and there are pressing issues on the agenda from climate change to the story of an incorrectly measured man.Written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Simon Alcock and Runi Talwar.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. And now it's time for the news where you are. The News Quiz has just begun, and you're listening to it. There. Told you. Hello, I'm Andy Dalton. Welcome to the News Quiz. Thank you. We have propped our broom against the door just in case the Foreign Secretary tries to gate-crash the recording.

See how he likes it. And we start this week with a cutting. £1 billion of funding for youth services in the past ten years. And that cutting was sent in by a Mr The Treasury from Westminster. Thank you very much for that. Do keep sending those cuttings in as and when vital public schemes are whittled back to the point of futility. And now it's time to meet our teams.

Well, there are signs of hope with COVID, but still the worry of further variants to come. And this is the last news quiz of this first series of the year. So our teams this week are Team Thank Heavens It's Over and Team Yeah, It'll Be Back in April Anyway. Firstly, on Team Thank Heavens It's Over, it's

Andrew Maxwell and Aisha Hazarika. And taking them on, on Team Yeah, It'll Be Back in April Anyway, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Scott Bennett. Yeah, it'll be back in April anyway. Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Scott Bennett. Yay! And we start with a question for Team Thank Heavens It's Over, or Team Heavens, we'll call them.

This series of the News Quiz began in early January. What has strongly declined since then? Standards. Standards have greatly declined. I've been listening to this show since it started in the mid-1940s with the original host, Foxy Douglas.

War hero and bigamist. Famed for his 800 wives and having successfully completed 800 sorties over occupied Europe, which is very difficult for him because he was a submariner. I don't know. My mental state?

I don't know what's declined. Possibly. Is it the rate of COVID infection? Correct, yes. Two points to Team Heavens. Well, that's a good thing. Yes, definitely. I thought it was my ability to get back into jeans.

I thought it was a standard of conversation in between myself and my wife. The other night, to pay me a compliment, she just said, I quite like your forearm hair. So that's how... That's how far we're scraping the barrel when you're down to forearm hair. At least she liked us.

I know, yeah. I think she wants a pet, not me. I think that's what it is, really. She wants a forearm for a pet. Unusual. So, I mean, this is great news that, you know, the return of the news quiz brought about this decline in the levels of COVID, vaccine, schmaccine. All you really need is a few little quips about the news

and, of course, the hidden antivirus messages when you play it backwards, of course. But, I mean, how optimistic are we? Are we in a glass half full situation, a glass at least getting fuller, but maybe still with a baby shark and a couple of piranhas in the bottom of it? Well, I can tell you for one thing, the Scottish dogging community is back out in force.

How did you do your research for that? It's a classic bellwether of whether the country's in a good shape. Just genuinely true. On the 4th of this month, the police in Scotland had to break up 50 doggers in a car park in Paisley. It's true. So, long story short, Andy, I think there's optimism in the country. If you can look out your window in Paisley in February

and think there's love out there for me, for me and 49 other people. A question now for Team Yeah. This is for Kiri and Scott. Who is going to get paid £4,500 for sitting around doing nothing? Oh, I do hope it's me. I really hope it's me. Is this the Human Challengers trial?

Correct. Yes, two points for team, yeah. I mean, I think they're using, obviously they're using 18 to 30s for these sort of clinical trials. And I think there's plans to test the vaccine on children at some point, I think that's what I've heard which, you know, I think they'll struggle because I can't

even get my two to try broccoli so, you know, good luck good luck with that I think it's doomed before they've started to be honest You've tried smearing it in ketchup, that's what I'm saying I've tried everything, I've tried deep frying it. You know, that's not happened.

I've tried, you know, intravenously putting it in while they're asleep. None of that works. I love that it's called Human Challenge because I just skim-read the headline about these Human Challenge trials and I just got really excited that Gladiators was coming back. It does make you think a little bit. I've been thinking about this a lot this week with this story.

What do actual guinea pigs do for a living these days? We've put them out of a job, haven't we? I think the fairest way to do this, I think members of the COVID recovery group who basically don't believe in COVID and think that lockdown needs to be opened up now, I think they should be put forward to sort of give this a go. Ayesha, we are a democracy. You work in politics. We must be committed to the idea of letting the public have their say. And if it's choosing who gets to be blasted up the snout with Covid, so be it. It's the will of the people.

It's the will of the people. This is the story of young volunteers who are going to be paid four and a half grand to be blasted up the snout with a sock full of coronavirus in the world's first COVID-19 human challenge trial to test out vaccines and treatments and also whether the microchips Bill Gates

is implanting in our brains do actually work. Boris Johnson is placed to focus on data, not dates, and this lack of focus on specific dates might explain why they got the year of the introduction of the quarantine wrong. Let's give them some credit, people. The month was okay to be fair, wasn't it? February, that's a one in 12 shot. The year, that's a lot more difficult, isn't it? They've been billions of years, or 6,000, delete as applicable. So it's just a lot harder to get the year

right, so let's cut them some slack. Now, Ayesha, you've worked in politics, you're a Westminster insider. Is that an accurate label for you? I don't know anymore. Well, I'm inside because I'm inside the whole time, so that probably feels accurate. We're all insiders now.

Is everyone too busy high-fiving each other about the vaccine rollout going so well to worry about, for example, the quarantine hotels being, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, a farce? So I think there's definitely a degree of self-congratulation. But to be fair, the rollout has gone really well. And if the rollout had gone really badly, we would all be up in arms. But yeah, there is a feeling that this came along and provided like, you know, to pardon the pun, a real shot in the arm for Boris Johnson. And there is a worry that a lot of people will have forgotten about the myriad of other things that went really, really badly wrong

in this pandemic, like going slow into lockdown, like not having a proper track and trace system. Has anyone seen Dido Harding just putting it out there? So I think there is that worry. And Boris Johnson is having his sort of moment in the sun, literally every day at the moment. Andrew, have you ever done anything precisely a year later than you should have done? I don't know. I'm moving nowhere. I'm going nowhere.

I don't want to sit in a travel lodge for two weeks. Do you know what I'm sick of? Is online people praising New Zealand. Let me be sick of goody two-shoes New Zealand. Well, they've done it really well. Why don't we do it like New Zealand? New Zealand have done COVID so well. They're nowhere near anybody.

New Zealand is four and a half hours flying time from Australia. There's three million people on two islands big enough for 50 million people. There's nobody there. I did like it, though, when they said, oh, it's like, you know, the quarantine hotels are like prison. And that's kind of the idea, though. I like to think that they're saying prisons are like holiday camps. I bet in a parallel world there's a prisoner in a cell and he says to his cellmate, you know, we think we've got it tough.

You know, there's someone doing a ten-day stretch in the Holiday Inn and they've got to wash their own towels, mate. You know, it's the... Well, I mean, to be fair, in many ways, prisons are like hotels, as people keep complaining, because they seem to be specifically designed to do everything in their power to make their guests come back for another stay. This question now goes to both teams. A healthy 32-year-old Liverpudlian was offered a vaccine because the NHS thought he was what?

This is great. They got the calculations wrong on him and they thought he was six inches tall. Incorrect. Six centimetres. That is correct, 6.2 centimetres tall. I mean, six inches and six... I mean, it's still ridiculous. But, yeah, it's borrower height.

We're talking borrower height, aren't we? Yeah, it was reassuring to me because they thought he was, basically he's six foot two and the decimal place is put in the wrong point. So it means they had a really, really high BMI of like several thousand. And I think about... 28,000. Yeah, that was it. 28,000.

And about 45 is morbidly obese, so they were like, quick, get a vaccine in this guy. So they were desperately like, we need to find the 6.2 centimetre man, which is the worst superhero you've never heard of. But I find it incredibly reassuring because I finally found someone who lies about their height-weight ratio in the same way that I do. I mean, what's incredible about that is that there were people

who were before him in the queue. I mean, what are they? What's going on in their lives? The really weird thing is they said, oh, he was quite high risk. I don't think COVID is the risk if you're that high. I think you're more likely to be trodden on by the family dog. What I love as well is I love that, you know, he told his mum that he'd been put in the clinically obese category. And she said the most mum thing ever to him.

She sort of said, well, maybe this is the wake-up call that you need. Yes, well, this was a rare glitch in the otherwise successful vaccine rollout programme. It was described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week as an unprecedented national achievement, but he added, it is no moment to relax. And this reaffirms the government's current line of attack, saying

now is not the time for complacency. In fact, the time for complacency was, it turns out, a year ago. We got in well ahead of the curve. Time for complacency. Also, most of the time since then, and indeed in the years before the crisis, when we ignored official reports warning about the need to be prepared for pandemics.

That was the time for complacency. So it's amazing how much complacency you can fit in when you really put your mind to it. If indeed you can really put your mind to complacency i'm not sure if that is technically possible there is still concern about the covid variants that have been sprouting up around the world but i guess on the plus side with all these international variants it's the closest any of us are going to get to going on holiday at the moment you know where's your variant been south africa oh that's lovely at this time of year, isn't it? What about yours?

The Copacabana in Rio. Sensational. What about yours, Alan? Margate. Happy with it as well. If it's good enough for Chas, if it's good enough for Dave, it's good enough for me.

Moving on to one final sort of COVID-related story. This goes to both teams. What bastion of immutable Britishness is under threat this year? What fundamental pillars of justice look set to be toppled? What precious historical relic handed down to us through the generations is set to be ripped from the heart of this once great nation? Please interrupt me with an answer, someone. What totemic central supporting bulwark of society is being...

It's Wimbledon. Correct. Wimbledon what specifically? bulwark of society. It's being cancelled. It's Wimbledon. Correct. Wimbledon what specifically? They're getting rid of the people that bend over in nice blazers. Correct. Often known as line judges, but I'll give you the points for that.

They've been told you can keep the blazer, but there's no more bending over for you. Their bending over has been replaced by something called Hawkeye and I don't want to know. So they're basically outsourcing the job to robots, that's what's happening, right? Yeah, slippery slope, isn't it? Well, it sort of makes sense because I feel like Andy Murray has been outsourcing his interviews to robots for absolutely years. I don't think your average

Wimbledon spectator is going to mind, though. As long as the computer or the robot wears a tie, I think they'll be happy with it. Standards must be upheld. Yes, this is the harrowing suggestion that Wimbledon line judges could become a thing of the past. Another victim of Covid. Where will it end? What more do they want to take from us? There are positives, however, to take from further evidence of the worrying, creeping robot takeover. I mean, when we get to the stage

of fully robotised sporting officials, at least in tennis we'll see improved on-court behaviour. You know, when a ten-foot metal umpire with rotating blades for arms can respond, oh Mr McEnroe, I think you will find I can be serious. I think that heralds a better behaved era.

Right, so that brings the scores to Team Heavens have five and Team Yeah also have five. Let's move on now to this question. Let's move on to climate. Let's cheer everyone up. This question goes to Team Yeah, to Kiri and Scott. It's a missing word question. Bill Gates has a new book published this week

entitled How to Avoid a Blank. It's a missing word question. Bill Gates has a new book published this week entitled How to Avoid a Blank. What is the blank? Ooh. Is it climate catastrophe? That is correct, yes. It is climate catastrophe. Have any of you got any tips for how to avoid a climate catastrophe?

I mean, I think, because obviously we came to the past the point of no return, I think. I think, because obviously we're getting to the past the point of no return I think. I think that's where we're coming. If Covid's here now, then we've took our eye off the ball with the environment. I think the way we need to do it though is we need to be shamed into doing something. I think that's the reality. If I've got a dental

appointment at the end of the week, I'll start really trying. I'll really start brushing my teeth and flossing and stuff just so I don't feel embarrassed. And I think if you've got an email saying, we're going to come and check on your environment, you know, you better be ready.

But you don't know when it's happening and you'll be sat in your front room and then you just see her coming up the driveway with a clipboard, Greta Thunberg and you'd be like, quick, you know, turn the fire off, you know, put some solar panels up. My wife would be upstairs trying to flush plastic straws down the toilet like they were, you know, contraband.

And I think we'd have it sorted within a year. This is Bill Gates' new book, How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe. And according to the celebrity computer whiz and paperclip glamoriser Gates, solving climate change would be the most amazing thing humanity has ever done. But then again, he probably didn't watch the 2005 Ashes. Another environment question. The lack of what could hinder the world's efforts to stop climate catastrophe? Any suggestions?

Draft excluders. That's not the answer I've got written down here. No, but Andy, it is the answer. OK, right, is it the answer? Where have all the draft excluders gone? Back in the day, everybody had a door snake. Where have the door snakes gone? Is it like a suitable emoji?

Correct, yes. That's what's missing, apparently. I know. I don't know why people are going, what, I mean, an emoji is the thing that's going to save us obviously i saw this this is the fact that we don't have an emoji for a wind turbine so it means that people can't talk about it um so they're really like environmentalists are pushing for there to be a little wind turbine one but can i just say as a welsh person we didn't have a Welsh flag until 2017. That is two years after the poo emoji arrived, right? Which means you could accurately describe how your caravan holiday was, but not where it was, which I

don't think is fair. Renewable energy organisations have reacted angry-faced, sad-faced, eye-rolly-facedly after Unicode, the body responsible for greenlighting new glyphs in the emoji vocabulary, rejected a proposed wind turbine emoji, saying it was too similar to the windmill emoji. But don't green groups have more important things to worry about than how to be cute in their tweets about the total devastation of everyone's planet? And there's a bit of inconsistency here. The wind turbine emoji has been rejected,

despite there being emojis for environmentally naughty things like petrol, nuclear explosions and golf. This question goes to Team Heavens, Andrew and Ayesha. What has gone up 72% this year? Is this, like, cryptocurrency? Yes, correct. Which one specifically? Bitcoin? Yes, that is correct. I think one Bitcoin is now worth something like $50,000. So the early adopters are going to be really, really rich. And the early adopters are largely like weird men who live in their mum's basement. And I think there's a big feminist argument to this.

I think it's just going to grow the gap in wealth and equality between men and women. So the big question is, how can I meet one of these men and how can I marry them? That is the really, really big pressing question, I think. Well, Bitcoin is one of those things that men at house parties whip out to make themselves interesting and everyone else around them is just incredibly

depressed? It's basically the acoustic guitar of the financial world. I don't. The whole Bitcoin thing, I don't give a toss. They can just do all the Bitcoin they want. I'm holding on to my South Sea shares. I have the most unique tulips in the world.

I'm sitting on money, money, money, people. They said that it's a better investment than gold, haven't they? But it doesn't make as good a song, you know. Bitcoin finger. He's the man with the gigabytes of data. It's not as catchy is it

yes bitcoin the famous uh cryptocurrency rose to a new record high this week of more than fifty thousand dollars per whatever it is i'm just going to ask our audience who who understands bitcoin no uh well i've actually written a book about Bitcoin, so I'll explain Bitcoin for those of you who don't know quite as much about it as I do. Fact one, Bitcoin does not exist. If you want to know how it works, just guess, or ask a brick. That will explain it to you as coherently as a sentient human being. Fact two, the value of Bitcoin has fluctuated throughout its made-up history, from not loads to shed loads, back down to loads, then shed loads again,

then back to much less loads, which, to be fair, was still well above its fundamental real terms value of absolutely sod all. Fact three, the original blockchain, anyone? Nope, me neither, runs on an algorithm, and algorithms, in case you don't know, are very clever things that do the kind of unseen, mysterious, weird, inexplicable hocus-pocus that in wiser, simpler times was correctly attributed to Beelzebub himself.

You can mine bitcoins, even though they don't exist. Take that, Thatcher. To mine them, you do a special sum, and then ta-da! Magic bitcoin! Yay! Who invented it? No one knows. Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, maybe? Or was it Peter Andre? Who cares?

There can only ever be 21 million bitcoins because... If you think you have Bitcoins but you're not sure, see a doctor or eat more prunes and 20% of all existing Bitcoins are lost, which is really quite impressive and they didn't bloody exist in the first place! So I hope I've explained Bitcoin for you there.

On the subject of things that are entirely fictitious, this question goes to Team Yeah. How many fake reviews does it take to change your opinion of a light bulb? Oh, I've seen this. This is the story that people are bulk buying Amazon fake reviews. Correct. And that's a big problem for Amazon. They're worried about damaging the reputation of Amazon. Imagine that, guys.

So people are just buying these positive reviews, which, I'll be honest, I wish you could do the same for the Edinburgh Fringe. That would be nice, wouldn't it? I'd love that. Keira Pritchard-McLean, five stars, friendly delivery, warning, much bigger than in the picture I mean, you mentioned deliveries

It's the Wild West at the moment for deliveries It's just, it's not delivering anymore It's fly tipping It really is I mean, I'm getting stuff over fences In my wheelie bin In the bin In on bin day, marinated in bin juice, some AirPods, thank you. So, Andrew, are we too susceptible to these kind of reviews, do you think?

Well, there's genuinely, there's a strange psychological thing that Amazon noticed years ago, when they were still only selling books, and driving those worthless hippies off the high street with their second-hand bookshop. Cesspool is a far-left opinion. You've got to have balance. Nobody else was going to say it. Second-hand bookshops.

Marxists on your high street, ladies and gentlemen. It's genuine. The psychological thing with reviews that they discovered, that if you get, say, 10 glowing reviews, you'll sell 100 copies of your book. But if you get nine glowing reviews

and one absolute stinker, this is the worst book I've ever read, this person's despicable, this is rubbish, this is excrementious nonsense, it will actually sell 120 copies. So there's something about the negative review that

psychologically makes people value it more. It does slightly make you wonder, if that's the way that book sales work, what on earth were the first reviews of the Bible like? Because that has shifted some units over the years. Both the blockbuster original, and if I may say this as a second-generation lapsed you,

the unnecessary sequel. Right, the scores are now Team Heavens have 11, Team Year have 12. Just some breaking news. Reaching as scientists have announced successful trials of a new inoculation against vaccine scepticism. The drug has been developed by the start-up pharmaceutical companies Better Med Than Dead and Pharma Chameleon, who have claimed...

..who have claimed that in trials, the anti-anti-vaccination vaccination was 99.94% successful. They hail it as the drug as one of the most successful anti-sceptics ever developed, but acknowledge the challenge now is to persuade the people who need it most to actually take it. And the final question of this series of the News Quiz. This can go

to both teams. What is threatening to cause an entire town in Devon to turn to a life of crime? It's so great. There's a statue of two lady pirates that they want to put up somewhere in the West Country and some locals are in outrage.

One of the quotes was, they should be putting up a statue to the Pilchards, not the pirates. Apart from anything else, they're not called Pilchards anymore, they're called sardines. They're not called pirates anymore, they're called called pilchards anymore they're called sardines. They're not called pirates anymore they're called hedge fund managers.

What I love about this is like it is like a fantastic story. I think apparently upon killing one fellow pirate in a duel one of the female pirates, Mary Read, exposed her breasts to show that he'd been slain by a woman. I mean this is the plot that Pirates of the Caribbean could have been. I mean, this is, you know, and instead they want to go for pilchards. There's nothing sexy about pilchards.

But I think what's incredible as well is that the local council has said it's glamorising crime. And now I feel terrible because every time I've gone on that pirate ship at Alton Towers, I thought it was a family day out. Now it seems like I was endorsing piracy, which is a horrible thing to realise. Apparently the women as well, they talk about the women used to dress, these pirates used to dress in men's clothes,

and historians say they did it to get more respect, but I think they just wanted pockets on their clothes. I mean, it is an amazing story. As Scott said, you could just picture the film and I want Olivia Colman playing both the pirates, obviously. Just the instinct to put up statues baffles me. In Mongolia, they've put up one of the world's biggest ever statues. They've put up this giant statue of Genghis Khan on a horse.

It's the same height as Nelson's column, right? But it's all statue. It's not like Nelson's column, which is a column with a cheeky little imperialist on the top. This is all horse,

all giant man. It's colossal in Mongolia. And the first time I saw it, I thought, when the people who built that find out Genghis Khan's personal opinions. This is the story of a statue of two 18th century pirates in Burg Island in Devon. A proposed figurative artwork

inspired by the female pirates has sparked concern that the figures could glamorise violent criminals. The proposal for the statue was rejected by Bigbury Parish Council, who instead were reported to have suggested a statue of a pilchard instead. And you've got to feel for Bigbury any other year. They'd have absolutely waltzed off with the

most ridiculous Parish Council award. But not this year. Well, instead of to bring this series of the News Quiz to a close, we have a tie for the last show of the series. Team Thank Heavens, it's over to bring this series of the News Quiz to a close. We have a tie for the last show of the series. Team Thank Heavens It's Over have 16. Team Yeah It'll Be Back In April Anyway also have 16. Thanks to Andrew Maxwell and Aisha Hazarika,

to Kiri Pritchard-McLean and to Scott Bennett. Thank you all for listening. If you wish to own an illuminated transcript of today's show, please send a medieval monk to Broadcasting House. We will be back in April. Until then, if you find some news, you're going to have to quiz it yourself. Thank you for listening.

I've been Andy Zaltzman. Goodbye. Taking part in the news quiz were Aisha Hazarika, Andrew Maxwell, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Scott Bennett. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman, and additional material was written by The producer was Richard Morris, and it was a BBC Studios production.