Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 27th October

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Andy Zaltzman quizzes the week's news. Providing the answers, hopefully, are Ian Smith, Ria Lina, Hugo Rifkind, and Robin MorganIn this final episode of the series Andy and the panel discuss some problematic protests, the looming general election, and BRITS IN SPACE!Written by Andy ZaltzmanWith additional material by Cody Dahler Mike Shephard and Adam GreeneProducer: Sam Holmes Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Co-ordinator: Dan Marchini Sound Editor: Marc WillcoxA 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. Oh, comedy gods. Laughdor, Methuselah, Satiricalatus, Quipubis, Ponsidon, Jeremy Ardy and Slapsticko. Grant me, your loyal servant servant Andy Zaltzman, some hopeful news to talk about in this week's news quiz, the last of this series.

To you, I humbly sacrifice this aubergine, the most comedic of all vegetables. So bequeath unto this quiz at least a shred of optimism. Send. Amen. Sorry. Andy? Oh, laughter. Oh, great one. Can't help. Sorry. Why not?

We're taking the millennium off. What, you as well? Is there a single deity actually at work these days? Well, the book deal's dried up, so what's the point? Fair call. Can I do the intro, please? Yeah, sure, why not? Sure. Welcome to the News Quiz.

Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman. I have some very bad news. It is the last News Quiz of the year. Aww! But some good news. There is still a pretty good chance that the world will still exist in January. We're scheduled to be back. Better than 50-50, according to most experts,

so all is not yet lost. Our teams this week, we have Team Oh No against Team Not Again. Summing up the state of the planet right now, I think on Team Oh No we have Rialina and Robin Morgan. And on Team Not Again, it's Hugo Rifkind and Ian Smith. First question goes to Hugo and Ian. Now, we are always, as a species, searching for knowledge, but who promised to teach whom a lesson this week?

OK, this is the fun, fun story of events in the Middle East. You're putting the UN into fun. Yes. Look, Israel promised to teach the UN a lesson this week by not giving people from the UN visas. This is because the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, basically said that the Hamas attack a fortnight ago

had happened not in a vacuum which Israel took to be sort of excusing it basically what's behind all this is Israel's long running problems with the UN generally and vice versa since 2015 the UN General Assembly has adopted I think 140 resolutions

criticising Israel which is more than twice as many as it's its past overall other countries in the world put together. And it's all a little bit bitter. The plus side, I would say, if Israel is going to teach the UN a lesson by not giving them visas, in the general scheme of things, considering how Israel normally teaches people a lesson, that's not so bad. considering how Israel normally teaches people a lesson, that's not so bad.

Yeah, so, I mean, it wasn't kind of... Because Guterres has repeatedly and unequivocally condemned Hamas's atrocities in numerous speeches and statements since 7th October. He's described them as inexcusable and unjustifiable, urged the world to stand up against anti-Semitism. Yeah, but what does he really think? I think I've found a more common-sense analogy for it. The UN have basically said it takes two to tango,

and Israel have said, no, it doesn't. We're not doing any tangoing, we're all about salsa. But what we do do is we'll control the lights and water access to the people who are tangoing, and we won't let them leave the tango session. And if anyone at the tango session is a terrorist, then we will bomb the tango session and the factory that makes tango,

the soft drink, just in case. I mean, it's that kind of journalistic insight that the world has been missing in the past. Let's move on to things in this country. Ria and Robin, you can have this this what might need to be redrawn now that's quite a vague question so i'll give you a couple of clues one it's not england's batting plans for the cricket world cup uh and two the met police chief mark rowley made this claim after recent rallies in london so what might need to be redrawn? Is there any cartoon in The Guardian about Israel? It's hate crime laws. Yes. This is according to Mark Riley. He said that it was the police's job to enforce the line, Parliament's job to draw the line, but maybe some of the lines

aren't in the right place, which sounds like he's just blaming VAR. I thought all the lines were in the toilets at Parliament. I thought all the lines were in the toilets at Parliament. A lot of fans of cocaine in the room tonight. Why, maybe this sounds naive, but why were the laws drawn? Why would they not be written down? It seems mad that you're just having to get someone in every time there's, like, a new... Like, right, armed robbery. Who's good at shotguns?

This is about people chanting jihad on demonstrations, isn't it? Yeah. And I'm really anxious to get this one right. I know attitudes are changing and I don't want to be left behind. I don't think Radio 4 audiences are in favour of jihad. But who knows? Well, shall we put that... LAUGHTER There was a guy on the radio pointing out that, like, are in favour of jihad. But who knows? Well, shall we put that... LAUGHTER

There was a guy on the radio pointing out that, like, I mean, the word jihad, it doesn't just mean holy war, it means different things to different people. He was saying, you know, it's just about struggle, really. And he goes, and I wake up in the morning, I struggle to get out of my bed this morning, that's a jihad. And I was thinking, that's probably not the one they were chanting about, I think.

It was Robert Jenrick, wasn't it, who said that chanting jihad on the streets of London is reprehensible. I think jihad on the streets of London sounds like a song that Morrissey would write now. It's a worrying thing, though, because every time there's a protest about anything, the government and the police come out and go, we should draw some more lines. And the lines are always closer and closer together. And I think that that's possibly why the Tories aren't worried

about the next general election and whether or not they'll win it, because by the time they've drawn these lines so tightly that no-one's allowed to express an opinion, there will be no reason to vote. I'm going to leave my cards on the table and say I'm not a fan of jihad. Right. You racist. And also, I think we sometimes romanticise British values when a lot of the evidence suggests

we don't always live up to them as a nation, but I really do think quite strongly that marching through the streets calling for holy war is absolutely not on. I mean, the thing about... Look, most people who were protesting against the war in Gaza on the streets of London were not calling for jihad. The problem is, most people who were protesting against the war in Gaza on the streets of London were not calling for jihad. The problem is most people who were marching were basically saying

we would like it if there wasn't a war and nobody got killed. The trouble is that some people who were there next to them were saying we would actually like it if there was a bigger war and different people got killed. And these aren't wildly similar viewpoints, but they're sort of next to each other. It's like if you got vegans going on marches alongside people who wanted to eat sausages made out of farmers. It's also the problem about decibels, because my neighbours can hear me when I yell at my kids,

but they can't hear me when I tell them I love them, because I don't yell that at them. And that's the problem, is that when you're doing the protest properly against war, which is obviously to not be violent in that protest because it's a bit contradictory if you're going to be violent in a protest against violence, that sometimes gets overlooked by those few people that ruin it for everybody else. I think the solution to that is start shouting,

I love you at your kids, but whisper when you tell them off because if anything, that's more menacing. I think the solution to that is start shouting, I love you, at your kids. But whisper when you tell them off, because if anything, that's more menacing. Because they have to come to you for you to then say, I don't want the neighbours to hear this, but if you do that one more time... And then you can cover it up with, I love you so much! I love you!

No, that sounds dirty. OK. I mean, it is very hard, you know, in a chance to express a complicated issue such. I mean, you can't really shout free, free Palestine alongside and also an equally free, free Israel in which both states learn to work, work together for the benefit of all their people

and strive, strive above all for a shared and sustainable peace, however distant I hope that may seem at this current time of crisis, for without mutual cooperation, there can only for a shared and sustainable peace, however distant I hope that may seem at this current time of crisis, for without mutual cooperation there can only be mutual failure and tragedy. Just really hard to fit that on a waggleable body. It sounded like the lyrics to a Eurovision song. Robin and Ria, Keir Starmer admitted this week that what could have been handled better? How long you got?

He went to a mosque in my home city of cardiff and he was criticized quite heavily for it because he went there and spoke to people from the muslim community and he did a little tweet afterwards saying that he called for more aid and he called for water and power and then at the end he said oh and also i also called for the hostages to be released it's like you called for the hostages to be released. It's like, you called for the hostages to be released while in a mosque in Cardiff. What do they have to do with it there, you ham-looking man? Like, where did you go next to call out Hezbollah and a Halfords?

It's mad. Down the road from that mosque is a vodka revolution. Go there and call out Putin. That's what you need to do. I mean, he spent so long practicing having no personality and just being nothing and just sort of being very very neutral that this is a really difficult time for him and i think we need to all sympathize a little bit more with kirsten armor as the world is bipartisan dividing down two lines and he's like i don't know how to

do that he's not ready okay give time. I sort of admired the confidence because it sort of came out that this was actually a, the quote is, a tense meeting and he's gravely misrepresented it. I think there's something quite endearing about coming out of a tense meeting and then saying to all the cameras there, well, that went absolutely fantastic and I've nailed that.

Don't talk to anyone in there. And their voices are very sore from all the whooping and the cheering. Some of them, their arms ache because I was crowd surfing for a bit. It went fantastically. In the mosque afterwards, after he was there, they said that they hadn't invited him to the mosque and they also hadn't known who he was. And I was like, I wonder who they thought he was.

Did they think he was Claire Balding? Kind of similar, you think about it. Why would they have been expecting Claire Balding? Well, I don't know. She's like the Spanish Inquisition. No-one expects Claire Balding. Yeah, the Middle East crisis ended its third week of unimaginable horror, tragedy, violence and heartbreak with the watching world unable to do much other than shiver at the brutalities past, present and future

and argue about the semantics of the word pause and cease. To summarise the story, well I can't summarise the story and I sincerely hope you don't need me to summarise the story. There are still some vaguely reputable news sources out there. So all I can do is issue an ultimatum, and that ultimatum is this. I refuse to do another issue of the News Quiz unless and until a full, instant and everlasting peace is established across

the entire Middle East, and what the hell, let's go for it, the rest of the planet. Or until New Year, whichever is sooner. See you in January. Well, that brings us to the end of what we now call our awkward first round, with the scores at two points all.

One of the great difficulties in the world at the moment is learning how to tell truth from half-truth from total fiction in news coverage. So I'm going to challenge our panellists to prove their skills at that. I'm going to give them two headlines, one real, one fake. They have to tell me which is which. So, for example, if I was to give you headline one, England cricketers spread waves of joy around the world. And headline two,

Kiss cam installed in United Nations General Assembly Hall in an effort to bring about global peace. Which one would you say is true? It's actually the first one. England have spread joy to the people of Sri Lanka. Selfless people. So, two headlines. The first ones can go to Ria and Robin.

Matt Hancock resigns as head of charity that hasn't been set up yet. Is headline one. Headline two is pumpkin-headed gove announces levelling up to be replaced by trick-or-treat scheme for northern cities. One of those is true. One is false. Oh, it's Matt Hancock. I can't even begin to imagine a charity that would want him as their...

Did they sign him up and then open Google and go, oh, no, actually, never mind? We're so embarrassed we asked, we're going to shut down before we've even begun. No, he set it up himself. Dyslexia charity, a very, very laudable charity, but apparently he's ended his role before it's actually been officially set up.

I like the way that Matt Hancock resigns his head is a sentence with three body parts in it. Let's move on now to more domestic issues. Hugo and Ian, you can take this question. According to a survey, nearly three-quarters of voters in the United Kingdom want what to happen before the end of May next year? Christmas.

Christmas. Sure, by the end of May, sure. It's an election, isn't it? I mean, May is a good time to have an election. By May, Rishi Sunak will have been Prime Minister for literally ten times longer than his predecessor, which is pretty good. But they are talking about maybe delaying the election

until January 2025, 15 months away. Yeah, exactly. That's pretty much what a poll said this week. It was kind of, oh, no. Basically, the Tories, their only strategy, the Tories have, is maybe something will turn up. You know, maybe something will happen that's just going to sort of make it better,

that they can maybe win. Because they keep thinking about 1992, right, when everyone thought they were going to lose, but then at the last minute neil kind of sort of put everybody off by getting really really overexcited and they're thinking well maybe kirsten will do that too guys what's he going to do like slightly loosen his tie i think there's probably not going to be a need for another general election because if we keep having by elections at the rate that we're having them, you know, it will have been like a general election.

It does feel like the tide has turned now. Even Brenda from Bristol is like, another one, now! I mean, what would any of you particularly like to see by May next year? Funnier subjects for the news quiz. I don't know, something involving an MP in a bouncy castle. Something really inherently silly. But I mean, yeah, if you put enough

Conservative MPs on a bouncy castle at the minute there's going to be some assault allegations. Yeah, see, I've tried to make bouncy castles positive but with the news at the minute... Didn't Dominic Cummings drive to a bouncy castle to check his eyesight? Leah and Robin, this poll followed two pretty chunky by-election defeats for the Conservatives, but how did the Tories try to find a chink of light in the aftermath of these twin humiliations?

They were soundly defeated in both constituencies. But what I find amazing is that the Tories weren't worried about it. And the reason they weren't worried is that they said, it's not that the people are loving the Labour Party, it's just that they hate the Tories more. That's all it is. The Tories have said that they can work with that because we all know that the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. And as everyone knows, indifference is not staying at home and refusing to vote, as the Tory voters did. Indifference is actually going out and voting for the Lib Dems. They still think they have a shot. The Lib Dems finished third in mid-bads. It was really, really sweet. They said,

we played a crucial role in defeating the Conservatives, which is like when my kids ask if they can help me make dinner. I'm like, yeah, can you lay the table? That's a big help. Thank you. I love the criticism of Labour. Labour's swing didn't go up. It felt like they were saying, there's only one thing worse than being talked

about, and that's not being talked about. She's going to go with a billboard saying, if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best. The Tory, the chairman, Greg Hands, said the results were disappointing, but their biggest problem was Conservative voters staying at home, which is not how an election works. Like, the process of an election is you leave your house to vote to go oh the problem is they're staying at home that's like a key part of what the process is it's like me saying um

well ghoul afc would have been promoted this year if leno messi had bothered to turn up between the matches but he's contracted to another team and doesn't know where Ghoul is. I'm like, my banana bread would be fantastic if the bananas and flour were in the cupboards. Greg Hands has a name I like, though, because it sounds like the name you give to the police when you're improvising. Oh, yeah, my name, it's Greg...

..Hands. Also, I think after Chris Pincher and Peter Bone, Oh, yeah, my name is Greg... Hands. Also, I think after Chris Pincher and Peter Bone, I imagine Greg Hands is currently very relieved that nominative determinism doesn't come in threes. The exception to that rule is James Cleverley. Hugo and Ian, this all happened whilst Who was celebrating a whole 12 months in a job without being sacked?

Rishi Sunak. Correct. The first Prime Minister to do this in a really, really, really long time. I mean, he's lasted a year. It's pretty good. He's done a lot better than his predecessors. He didn't break the country. He didn't lie to Parliament. He lasted longer than a lettuce. He didn't kill the Queen, that's a plus.

So I think a pat on the back for that man. A year's quite impressive. I was given a bonsai tree as a gift once and it died well before one year, but roughly the same height as... LAUGHTER

But yeah, he put up a video on Twitter celebrating his first year in office and everything he'd achieved, but in the first version they uploaded, they spelled achieved wrong. One in ten people think he's doing a good job, which, considering there's five of us on this panel, that's like one of us, but only from the waist down. That conjures up horrific images. So the swing thing, sorry, it really bugs me.

It was Gillian Keegan who said this. She said, there hasn't been a swing because the Labour vote stayed the same and our vote went down. And it was like, yeah, that's a swing. That's literally what a swing is. You had 26% fewer than you had before. It was a swing. That is a swing. Yes. I guess it's just a question of whether it's swinging to Labour

or the Conservatives swinging away from themselves or chopping themselves into a cliff. I think it's bad that a video he's released of everything he's achieved in a year, and that video lasted 46 seconds. I was trying to... I'm going to look at my year. I reckon I could do 46 seconds.

Some of my highlights, I learnt it's pronounced carafe and not carafe. I went to Slovakia with my hairdresser and drove a tank over a car. I bought a 40% stake in the main rivals for Terry's chocolate orange, Malcolm's fudge apples. Yeah, and that's just some of them.

Yes, it's a tough time for the Conservatives after last week losing a majority of 24,664 in mid-Bedfordshire and suffering a 23.9% swing away from themselves in Tamworth. They lost around two-thirds of their total votes compared with the 2019 election. Labour managed to stay on around about the same. The by-election showed the

Conservatives losing support amongst numerous key voter demographic groups including Brexit-supporting voters, Brexit-opposing voters, the young, the old, the in-between young and old, men, women, Pelican fans, amateur macrame enthusiasts and, most worryingly of all, Conservatives. Right, at the end of that round, Ria and Robin have six

and Hugo and Ian have seven. And Hugo and Ian and you now get your real headline or fake headline, tell me which of these headlines is the real one and which is the fake one. Headline A, Donald Trump tearfully confesses in court, bang to rights, Governor, he says, I'm a very

naughty boy. Or headline 2, Catholic bishop quits after sex worker faints at drug-fuelled orgy in local rectory. Which is the real one? Rectory is a filthy word, isn't it? That's the only thing you're picking out from that.

If you'd started with the priest and the drug-fuelled orgy in the rectory, you'd sort of think, surely that's got to be made up. But I don't think Trump's apologising, so, yeah, it looks like the Catholics are having fun. Yep. That's correct. Yep. A Polish bishop has handed in his chasuble and his mitre after it emerged that some extremely biblical behaviourals

had happened under his watch, but Trump sadly has not fessed up yet so that's now nine points to six as we move now it wasn't even his orgy no that's a good yes no it was somebody in his clergy that organized it and then he took the fall for it i know i know but i mean i know well i mean that's so christian isn't it what a good guy. I know, but imagine having to quit when it wasn't even your bishop getting bashed. Family show! Yeah, the bishop resigned

despite having pledged to address the issue head-on, which he's not allowed to do as a bishop. He has to go diagonally. Next round, this can go to Ria and Robin. What, according to science minister George Freeman, could inspire a whole new generation

of young Brits to reach for the stars? We're going to space. Correct. All of us now. Yeah, all of us. Get your coats. This is the UK Space Centre. think i've signed a deal with a u.s company and they're going to use elon musk space x capsules and they're going to go to space at some point they haven't said when it's gonna be four british astronauts and i think they need like an expert astronaut they've gone you know he'll be great at

this tim peak but he retired about six months ago. Then they've called him up and he goes, just when I thought I was out. I wouldn't want to go on a space mission with him because that means this next mission's going to be his last one before he retires. And if you've watched any film ever, that's... he's not going to make it.

He's your most experienced astronaut. If you're, like, sat next to him and he's like, oh, I'm going to retire after this mission, you'd be getting your seatbelt out. I interviewed Tim Peake last week. When you're interviewing an astronaut, it's very hard to ask any questions that aren't just like, oh, my God, you've been into space, what's that like?

But we had a good chat, and the last question I i asked him was so you went to space and now you've retired would you like to go back and he was like oh yeah maybe it would be all right and then like a day and a half later he announces that he's the head of a new uk space mission what a git what a space git right i feel really sorry for the British, because this just got announced. And they're like, hey, we're going to send someone into space. And we went, oh, great, when?

They went, don't know, we're thinking about it, we have an idea. We just thought it would be a great idea. Don't you think we'd look great in space? And then the next day the Chinese were like, hey, we're sending people into space. And everyone went, when? And they went, look, there, up there. Like, they're going now.

There's a lovely quote from Tim Peake.'s gonna be a commercial flight they're gonna get lots of money from the private sector it's he said it's a new model and we'll be paving the way for how we do space in the future do space are we sure we've checked he's an astronaut he sounds mad i'm gonna do some space today um have you got any ambition to go into space? Yes. Because you've driven over a car in a tank. I've driven over a car in a tank, which is the gateway drug to space. There were some people up north who sent a...

You know, it's not up north, it's... That's what I call, like, Martians. Up north. People who have been buried down south. That's what I call dead people. Oh, she's gone down south, I'm afraid. To London. No. Yeah, some Northerners sent a sausage roll into space,

which is, I think, at the time of broadcast, still our most successful space mission. Sending a pastry in. But, no, my school in Gould, we did a school project to see how many helium balloons it would take to lift someone up into space. And the answer is

456, and God rest her soul. Yes, this is Brits in Space. Potentially, possibly at some point in the kind of medium-term future. Tim Peake, who famously became not the first Brit in space, but the first Brit in space to be blasted off using taxpayers' money, a far more heroic way of doing it, could be set to make an Elvis-style comeback.

Peake seemed to have hung up his helmet, his space hopper and his alien-slaying ray gun. But it was announced that he is now set to head up a four-strong British squad that aims to plant a Union Jack in orbit, rescue the Queen Mother and prove whether or not you can in fact see Michael Fabricant from space.

And as the UK takes its first tentative steps towards the stars, Nigel Farage is already believed to be planning a campaign to get Britain out of the solar system. Well, at the end, that means Ria and Robin have ten and Hugo and Ian have more than ten. That means that Hugo and Ian are this week's winners. Just a couple of things before we go.

After the artist David Shrigley pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code and turned them into George Orwell's 1984, a controversially obtuse account of England's disastrous 5-0 defeat by Clive Lloyd's brilliant West Indies team, we will be mashing up this episode of the News Quiz and turning it into a special edition of The Archers, in which the farm animals finally rise up and overthrow their grundy overlords.

It all goes predictably pig-shaped. Don't forget, the times they are a-changing. Sorry, I mean the clocks go back this weekend. We will be back in January. Thank you for listening this year. Sorry that our satirical comedy on the news quiz has not solved all global problems for the, I think, 47th year in a row on this show. Fingers crossed we get it right next time.

Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Taking part in the news quiz were Ian Smith, Ria Lina, Hugo Rifkin and Robin Morgan. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material was written by Mike Shepard, Adam Green and Cody Darla. The producer was Sam Holmes and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.