Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 2nd June

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Andy Zaltzman quizzes the week's news.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello. I'm not doing a start to the news quiz this week. I've been asked to hand over the script for the start of the show, but I really don't want to. It was all in WhatsApp messages anyway. They've just sort of disappeared, so I'm afraid

there is no start to this week's show. Welcome to the New Quiz. I am Andy Zaltzman. I'm also three-quarters of the way to achieving my dream of flying fighter jets for the RAF. I've got the useless white and male bit sorted. Now I just need to pilot something. Also, for anyone listening whilst trying to travel by train, please download the special eight-hour extended version. This week, our panellists are Andy Hamilton, Alice Fraser,

Ian Smith and Deputy Political Editor of ITV News, Anushka Astana. And in a week in which AI was claimed to be on the brink of bringing humanity to a complete stop, we're dividing our panellists into Team A, Anushka, Andy and Alice, against Team I,

Ian. Ian, it's another classic Humberside versus the rest of the universe clash. Are you confident? No, I'm not feeling fantastic about that. Yeah, I for intelligence. That's perked me up. Every point in this week's quiz will be worth £1. I will add up the scores at the end

and give the final sum to our chosen charity for the week, the British economy. Now we start with a choice of loud hailer announcements to the public related to this week's news. So, Team A, Alice, Andy and Anushka, would you like announcement one or announcement two? One. One? OK.

OK, here it goes. There is nothing to see here. Please move along. There is nothing to see here. Said whom about what this week? I'm presuming this is the story about the COVID inquiry impasse... Correct. ..I'm going to try not to say anything

that is unambiguously irrelevant. But the government is in a really quite fierce confrontation now with Baroness Hallett, who, incidentally, is making Sue Gray look like a total wussy. Because Baroness Hallett has powers. She has the powers to demand evidence. And I'm a little bit perplexed as to why the COVID inquiry think that the contents

of Boris Johnson's diaries and notebooks are important evidence because none of it will be true. We are talking about Boris Johnson. It won't be a factual record because facts are like kryptonite to him. I mean, I should imagine the diary will have entries like, you know, Laura Koonsberg definitely fancies me. Because every time I see her, she keeps asking me

what parties I've been to recently. Or, um, England beat the All Blacks at Rugger today. Hurrah! And I got the winning try. But he does seem to have boxed Rishi Sunak into a very tight corner because Sunak's natural caution and love of process is now making him look decidedly shifty. And I don't know whether he kept a contemporaneous diary of his own during the COVID crisis, but if he didn't, I bet he's writing a backdated one now. Changing pen colours between entries.

Staining the pages. Writing some of them with his left hand, like he was learning to write during the process. I can't see a way that it ends well for them because, you know, it's a bad look if the cover-up of your incompetence is an incompetent cover-up. So... Does that not work like a double negative?

That actually becomes competent. Competent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, I mean, it is totally unprecedented for the government to judicial review an inquiry that they set up because they don't like the terms of reference that they put in place which which does seem to be the case because basically the terms of reference included government decision making i mean this inquiry was going to take something like 10 years anyway and this will delay it a bit but it seems to me quite likely that she will ultimately get her way

but the government are worried that like 40 lawyers will get to see all this information. But the slightly weird thing is Boris Johnson's handing over the information anyway, although the thing that emerged is that because of a security breach in the middle of 2021, he's only got the WhatsApp since then anyway. So, you know, all the really relevant ones when they were deciding what to do about covid hasn't got them anymore anyway yeah i mean this judicial review is absolutely that thing where you say i've done my homework check it relying on your parents to be too busy and too disorganized to check it and then they check it and then you are screwed i wouldn't be surprised as well if Boris Johnson's diaries...

Like, they're going to take a lot of time to get a psychologist to decipher the sheer level of crayon drawing. I could imagine, like, Boris Johnson's diary, rather than, like, the written word, is just something you have to unfurl, like, by a tapestry. Like, it just sort of tells a visual story. Or he's done, like, one of those little flick books. So you have to say like

what happened with the first vaccine rollout and he's just going, we'll have a look at this. Woo hoo hoo! He strikes me as a man who would take an opportunity to draw a penis wherever he could. Which did actually happen quite a lot in the Bay of Tapestry. A surprising number of wangs.

It's just not a good look. It looks very suspicious. It's sort of like if your partner has to borrow your phone and your response was, you'll have to take me to court! You can talk to my lawyer before you see my phone. They're going to be like, what's on your phone? It's like the bit in a maths test where they say,

and you get an extra mark for showing you're working, and you're like, I ain't telling you nothing! You feel like... You're like, I think you might have used a calculator, mate. The bit that I think is extremely comic is that the government said that they were taking it to judicial review with regret. Do you know, they keep saying,

we've given loads of material, the Cabinet Office, over to the Inquiry, and they've given over 55,000 documents. But I was just looking through this earlier. Not long ago, they admitted to the Inquiry that they have over 20 million documents. So, I mean, I'm not very good at... Well, I'm OK at maths, but to do this in my head quickly, that is a very small percentage.

You just said you're not that good at maths. You're not going to get the election night coverage. It's all right. It's first part of the post. Maths doesn't matter. And it's been described as a politically motivated stitch-up. Is there any truth in that? I mean, Boris Johnson is basically motivated by the fact, I suspect, obviously I'm not inside his head,

but he's so angry that the Cabinet Office handed over those documents to the police, so angry that even if it means all his information is out there, he's going to go for it in the hope of taking Rishi Sunak down with him. It is hard to understand the government's motivation. I mean, they talk about this idea that you need to have privacy, especially for stuff that is less relevant. But there is precedent for inquiries to demand this sort of information. And that information is not meant to go into the public.

It's a case of do you trust Baroness Hallett to keep it confidential? Maybe they don't. I enjoy that there's a Baron of do you trust Baroness Hallett to keep it confidential maybe they don't. I enjoy that there's a Baroness running this just as a raw colonial out from the sticks I think it's nice that you have a it's sort of old-fashioned someone who's called a Baroness rather than the more modern phrasing which is child free by choice-esque. Yes more post-Covidian squabblings this week the government was accused of a cover-up after telling the Covid inquiry it did not have the pandemic notebooks and WhatsApp messages belonging to former Prime Minister and retired MP for Uxbridge and South Ryslip,

Boris Johnson. The government has now launched legal proceedings to stop the material from being given to the inquiry because what could be worse than an inquiry that has all the evidence it could possibly need? Then we might learn some lessons. And that is not the British way. Because to learn lessons,

you have to admit you've done something wrong. And we are Britain. We never do anything wrong, as history would testify if we've written it. The government says handing over the requested material could set a precedent that would prevent ministers discussing policy matters with each other in future and it has been their right since time immemorial to discuss policy on whatsapp our leaders have been using whatsapp pretty much since king harold sent an i've got a hurty eye emoji at the battle of angela rayner for labour said the public deserve answers not another cover-up but to be honest it's reached the stage of this process where personally, I'd take a cover-up. I just... I don't want what I deserve.

I just want it to end. The material requested includes 24 of Boris Johnson's notebooks. Obviously we don't know what's in them, but we do now have AI and I'll just put into my computer, writes 24 notebooks full of the kind of stuff that boris johnson might write and draw in a notebook oh god

moving on so two points to team a from that question ian on team i, you have loud hailer announcement number two. OK. There is nothing to see here. Please move along. There is nothing to see here. Said who else about what else this week? Is this the society for people who can't do magic eye puzzles? It's a good guess, but it's not the correct answer.

Any other suggestions? I think this is UFOs. Yes. Which have now been called UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. I think they're just trying to make it too hard to say that that's the first stumbling block of reporting them. One of the reports of these UAPs turned out to be an aeroplane heading to a major airport.

LAUGHTER Which means someone's, like, on a flight path going, oh, my God, a UFO! And another one! And another one! This one's got EasyJet written on the bottom of it. My other favourite sighting was there were some people in Australia, not to downplay the intelligence of Australians, but they were receiving radio waves at regular intervals

and they were like, what could this be? And it turned out it was a microwave cooking their dinner. it was a microwave cooking their dinner. These waves that keep coming between 12 and 1 in three-minute bursts, roughly the time it takes to heat one of these ready-meal lasagnas that we've got. I mean, I don't like this renaming of UFOs to UAPs. I feel this is the woke agenda gone mad.

When I was young, a UFO was a UFO. Two bowls alfoiled together floating through the sky on fishing line and then a little green man would roomba you up out of your innocent field and teach you his planet's culture of passionate fingering you'd go up a girl you'd be let down a woman you'd fall in love you'd bear his alien child you'd be released with an ear tag like a pigeon and you'd talk about it to the daily mail that's i think if you turn this story on its head there's something very big to see here. I get it, the microwave

and I think another one was a Bart Simpson balloon as well, which fair enough is not a UFO, but actually, in the kind of small print, NASA basically said that there are 50 to 100 sightings every month in America, and 2 to 5% of them are

truly unexplained. That could be up to 600 a decade, totally unexplained. Even the big brains of NASA don't know what's going on. And I did once interview a guy who worked on UFOs in the Cabinet Office, weirdly, the other side of their work, and he finished that job totally convinced. Right. All true. Yeah, but those 2-5% of unexplained, that's just somebody putting tinfoil on a pigeon, right?

LAUGHTER I think someone did that on MasterChef last week. LAUGHTER LAUGHTER So, Andy, it does look, according to Anushka, we've basically got concrete proof that the aliens have already taken us over. Have you spotted any in public life? I'm agnostic.

I mean, I think it's pretty arrogant for us to imagine that we could be the only intelligent life form in an infinite universe. I do wonder whether... I think it's pretty arrogant to assume that we are intelligent life forms. I do wonder whether, if intelligent life forms found us, they don't seem to do many repeat visits. So I wonder if there are quite a lot of alien species flying up, having a look and thinking,

nah, moving on. Moving on, you know. It does seem like a weird coincidence, or very intelligent from the aliens, that they only ever abduct the sort of people no-one would believe. Like, they're looking at each other. For the last time, don't abduct anyone articulate, anyone who's got a stable job,

anyone with sleeves. Someone in a vest who lives off the land. Yes. NASA has held a public meeting in which, for the first time, it talked publicly about UFOs and claimed, yeah, it's fine. The 64-year-old celebrity space agency from America disappointingly provided no evidence of alien life

having come to Earth yet. Despite numerous sightings of objects in the sky, these have been explained as, amongst other things, an inflatable Bart Simpson, a very thirsty and extremely frustrated Amelia Earhart, a discus thrown by a 1980s East

German athlete, and the egg of an Airbus 380. Mostly, of course, don't lay in flight, but every now and again one slips out. It was always weather balloons, wasn't it? Always, that was how the sightings were

explained. Remember in the 60s and 70s, it was always weather balloons. Did make me wonder what if there's an alien race who have built intergalactic balloons? That's why they call them weather balloons, because you wonder whether they're a balloon or not. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Right, moving on with the scores, tied at two points all. We now have a round called Splash the Cash. Now, we love a bargain in Britain. It's one of the few remaining core values that bind us together

alongside a quadrennial passing interest in seated sports, arguing about what Britishness actually is and harrumphing. Politically, of course, there can be no better bargain than not paying for something at all, which is exactly what we're focusing on in this round, entitled Splash the Cash. Sorry, I've read that wrong. Splash the Cash, brackets,

has fallen into a leaking reservoir of broken promises. So, our first question in this a leaking reservoir of broken promises. So, our first question in this round can go to both teams and it comes in the form of a riddle. What am I? People want me to be there but don't want to come to me. I was meant to be started and nearly finished but now I won't be finished because I haven't been started.

I'm not new, unless a politician says I'm new, which I'm not. So actually I'm still not new. What am I? Are you hospital? Correct, Anushka. Well done. But specifically what type of hospital? 40 not new new ones. Yes, the non-existent hospital, the best kind of hospital.

Steve Barclay being asked about this last week was kind of extraordinary because he basically said, no said no no it is what I said it was it's 40 new hospitals and then he went yeah but only five are brand new and I was like what is the difference between new and brand new I mean like do you reckon Steve Barkley like cleans up his kids shoes at night and then the next morning's like here you go this is a new pair of shoes for you I mean it's just like what there must be a difference because they've obviously thought that script through but I couldn't work it out. Most of these 40 hospitals which have been promised as new are actually refurbs or new blocks within a hospital and actually most of them have not even

started being built anyway. So even if it's just they literally repair the roof to stop it falling down that is a new hospital, is it? I mean, judging by what he was saying, that sounded like that could be new. And certainly if you look at the projects, some of them are far from a brand-new hospital. He actually said there's five urgent hospitals that they've had to kind of divert their attention to because the concrete structure is crumbling.

I didn't know concrete had a use-by date. Concrete is just like a yoghurt. It just goes off after a certain amount of time. He kept being asked in that interview, will you be straight with me before he answered the question? Will you just be straight with me here? And he should have just said no.

Then it opens up everything. Will you be straight with me? No. Will you be straight with me? No. Will you be building 40 new hospitals? No. We're going to be building 100. Just go for it. Once you've established you're not being straight about things, just go, 100% no-one's going to die in a hospital, ever. Happy endings for every bed bath.

I just think emergency departments are now having to ask every bed bath. I just think emergency departments are now having to ask if people will reclassify their heart attacks as heart confrontations. I mean, the truth is, no-one believed this promise, did they? The promise of 40 new hospitals, because Boris made it. But it is shocking, isn't it, the way they've kind of completely... They've obviously decided that the English language is just work in progress.

I'm just rooting for some tech billionaire to upload me onto Reddit so I never have to deal with the horrible reality of having a human body in a country that doesn't have the resources to repair it if I break down. Yes, the nation has been grappling with one of the great philosophical questions of our time. When is a new hospital not a new hospital? And it turns out the answer is when it's not a new hospital.

I guess one of the problems for the government has been that all the extra hospitals they said they were going to build have unfortunately, for whatever reason, not just magically built themselves. They have tried just pouring water over powdered hospitals and that hasn't worked. They've tried, you know, swapping Matt Hancock for some magic beans, planting them in the ground and hoping the hospital grew. That did not work either. And this has put a strain on the actual hospitals that do currently exist and therefore need to be shut down. There were supposed to be 40 new hospitals. Count them. Actually, don't count them, and to be fair to the government, they have built 100% of two of the 40 new hospitals. Cynics may cynicise that a Boris Johnson election pledge remaining unfulfilled is as much a

shock to the system as an eel losing an air guitar competition. Fundamentally, it's a kind of classic philosopher's axe type thing, isn't it? If St Sutterbridge's Hospital was built in 1933 and it still stands, but all the staff and patients are different, does that count as a new hospital? Does this mean we've been promised a lot of new nurses? Are they genuinely new nurses or are they just being refurbished? If they said, we're going to really refurbish 40 hospitals, that would sound quite good, wouldn't it?

Yeah. They didn't need to go that bit extra. It's all right, I've got a strategy. I'm just going to show up at the paediatrics ward in a backwards cap like the worst 21 Jump Street reboot. Anyway, work has yet to start on 33 of the remaining 38 hospitals, although Drellard Buttclark, the junior minister for hypothetical services, did insist that most people are actually feeling fine right now,

so we don't need hospitals for the woke. The ill, the ill, sorry. Other things that do not exist include an ideal system of democracy, walruses, terrific hoax, you've got to say, impartial broadcasters, although I should say that not everyone agrees that there are no impartial broadcasters. Just to balance that out. And also, another thing that doesn't exist is

any respect in a sentence beginning with the words, with all due respect. This question can go to Team A, Alice, Andy and Anushka. The Metropolitan Police, which just missed out on a podium position in Greater London's Best Police Forces Awards last

week, will no longer be doing what from the end of August? podium position in Greater London's Best Police Forces Awards last week. We'll no longer be doing what from the end of August? They won't be coming out to incidents that involve people with mental illness unless there's a threat to life, a threat of violence. I think

I can see a problem there because if someone with a mental illness starts to get animated or upset, how do you know when they're going to reach the point where there might be a threat of violence? I'm a bit torn about this, because at one level, the standard of the skill set of police officers when dealing with mentally ill people is rather variable.

Sometimes they're kind and compassionate. Sometimes they stick a spit hood on them and try and taser them. It's got to be middle ground. I think so. I guess, I mean, the enduring problem, politically and economically, it's just really, really hard to monetise the vulnerable. You've always got good ideas for how to improve the country.

Any suggestions about how we can do that? So I do have ideas of how the police can save time, because they say it's a time issue, and that they can't deal with these things. So one of them is, stop saying hello, hello, hello, and just say just say one, just say hello.

They've been doing that for ages. I've shortened down the Miranda rights so it's just the first letter of every word. So I hope I'm pronouncing this properly. If you arrest someone, you go Y-U-T-R-U-S I-S-W-W-W-W-W-K-I-C Y-U-T-T-T-T-T-L-B B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B and then you sort of say do you understand

i think that's a station in wales isn't it yes under new plans the metropolitan police will now attend calls relating to mental health only if there is a threat to life a police study has apparently revealed that nationwide officers spend almost a million hours a year waiting in hospitals for mental health patients to be assessed, which is, what about the average NHS waiting time these days? And equivalent to the time spent on hold in 1.2 phone calls to book an appointment with your GP. It's further damage to our national mental health provision.

Not talking about mental health, remains, of course, one of our core national values, so cutting public funding for it is always an easy political option. And mental health services are funded in the same way as pensions, but opposite. It's a triple unlock, in which budgets are cut by whichever is bigger out of inflation, the percentage of youth club support services and critical parts of the framework that were shut down in the last year, and the first number that comes into a desperate Chancellor's head on Budget Day. Just some breaking news reaching us.

To raise awareness of the impact of mental health issues, Simon and Garfunkel are releasing a special charity reboot single to deal with mental health in the workplace entitled Hello Darkness, My Old Work Colleague. Moving on now to our final question with the scores at 12 to Team A and a heroic eight to Ian on Team I. He's made you the underdog and then let you punch above your weight.

Interestingly, you get the last question, Ian, and it's worth five points. Prime Minister Rishi, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, Ack. The government is looking carefully at the existential threat posed to this nation by what? Repeated Conservative government. It's close, but it's not. I'm going to have to pass it over. You might have lost your chance to win. Anyone else? This is AI, isn't it? It is AI, correct. Yes.

Yes. A win's a win. Turns out robots might be bad. Yeah, there's a lot of concern that AI will get too intelligent and may decide to wipe us out. I don't know whether there'll be some kind of clue

when AI is approaching that level of intelligence. I suspect it would be if it manages to hide where the plug is. That would be... Well, you say that. Today, half an hour

before we went on air and test my special in the commentary box, I unplugged the entire broadcasting system. Thinking it was my laptop. A robot definitely wouldn't have done that. No.

The problem is there's a lot of money to be made from AI, that's clear. And that doesn't always attract the most philanthropic people. And they're talking about trying to regulate it, but I think it would be very difficult to regulate, particularly if the AI works out you're trying to regulate it.

At the moment, artificial intelligence is usually quite specifically targeted, and the worry is that there will be an artificial general intelligence, that the intelligence will generalise and then sort of take over the world. But I don't think we need to worry about artificial general intelligence, that the intelligence will generalise and then sort of take over the world. But I don't think we need to worry about artificial general intelligence because we haven't yet achieved non-artificial general intelligence. Like, the smartest people in the world are clever about, like, one, maybe two things, and you're lucky if number two is that they know nothing about anything else.

I mean, you all know the brilliant mathematician that can't tie his own shoelaces or the incredible businessman that can't run Twitter. Yes, AI bigwigs have issued their starkest warning yet about the potential of artificial intelligence to destroy all humanity, if not more. And this is AI bigwigs who have said, this is not so much the boy who cried wolf as the wolves who cried,

we've just bred a giant unstoppable cyber wolf that can simultaneously eat all the sheep in the world, And this is AI Big Week 2, it's not so much the boy who cried wolf as the wolves who cried, we've just bred a giant unstoppable cyber wolf that can simultaneously eat all the sheep in the world, blow 2.3 million houses down simultaneously and eat 34.8 grannies per second. That brings us to the end of this week's news quiz and the final scores. Team A have 17 and Ian on Team I has 8. That concludes this week's News Quiz.

I've been Andy Zaltzman. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Taking part in the News Quiz were Ian Smith, Alice Fraser, Anushka Astana and Andy Hamilton. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material was written by Vicky Richards, Adam Green and Cody Darler. The producer was Sam Holmes and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Thank you.