Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 9th June

Episode Date: July 7, 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 Andy Zaltzman. For this week's News Quiz, after a week of news that has encompassed the tragic, the terrifying and the tiresome, I'm trying out a new, exciting, high-tech, so-called mixed reality device that enables you to block out the parts of reality that you don't like. It's called a bucket.

Oh, that's better. Look, I'm reading a newspaper now. It's the first time I've read a newspaper in months without wanting to set fire to it. Thank you, technology, and welcome to the News Quiz. wanting to set fire to it. Thank you, technology, and welcome to the News Quiz. Welcome to the last News Quiz of this series since the BBC this week has been issued an ultimatum

by a cybercrime group. I'm issuing my own ultimatum. Unless all cybercriminals grow up and get proper jobs, which is a bit rich coming from me, I know, then we will take the News quiz off air from this week until our scheduled return in September. Let that be a lesson to you all. Yes, and in a week in which Prince Harry slammed the media

and the government, our teams this week, we have Team Rock Bottom against Team Pass Me A Pneumatic Drill. I reckon we can still go lower. So it's Team Rock against Team Drill. On Team Rock, we have Ria Lina and Rosie Holtz. On Team Drill, it's Ian Smith and from The Times, Camilla

Long. Our winning team this week do win ownership of the Daily Telegraph. So all to play for. And our first question can go to Ria and Rosie. And your featured political leader of the week is Keir Starmer. And Starmer promised this week that he will deliver growth by investing in what? He wants to invest in green energy.

Yeah. Correct. And he wants to stop expanding in oil and gas, which has been a big hoo-ha. So he was talking basically at the unions conference down in Brighton, which says, we care about the North, but we don't want to go there. And he was talking to them, and he sort of,

I don't even know why he's cozying up to the unions. I know they give him money. I think that's why, yeah. But I thought computers were taking over our jobs, so he really should be cozying up to chat GPT. But anyway, he was talking to the unions, and one of the things that's why, yeah. But I thought computers were taking over our jobs, so he really should be cozying up to chat GPT. But anyway, he was talking to the unions, and one of the things that he said, which some of the unions disagree with,

is that we're going to stop expanding in oil and gas, and we're going to invest in green energy, which has also come under fire because the opposition has gone, that's crazy, we're just going to put ourselves in the hands of everyone else who has oil and gas. Why are we stopping British oil and gas? And he went, no, green energy, we're going to do that ourselves. We're on the windiest, wettest island that there is. Surely we can come up with something.

And Ian, what's your view on the energy future of the United Kingdom? Well, if there was a way of sort of getting energy from cynicism and sarcasm. Starmer said that the future is nuclear, but I don't know if he's talking about energy or just war. So Hinkley Point C is coming, apparently, in 2028. And in 2008, we were told that was going to have 13% of Britain's energy in the early 2020s. And that's now. And it isn't built.

I'm trying to remember my GCSE, but doesn't that count as potential energy? Energy they haven't produced. Actually, you can put that in the grid. You're a scientist, Ria. Can you help me out on this? Yeah, it's potentially going to bring us a lot of energy. But the problem is it's not our energy. I know that Hinkley Sea is based in the UK, but it's owned by EDF and China.

So it's potentially expensive energy is what it is. I mean, you worry when a nuclear power plant that's called something C is taken over by a company called EDF. It does sound like a bit of alphabet acquisition. In terms of the state of the parties, Camilla, there was a poll that came out this week that said that Starmer's leading Sunak in 17 out of 17 leadership categories that they polled people on. And obviously there are more leadership categories than 17 things. But what cards can Sunak play, do you think? I mean, he can definitely set up a photo opportunity. He can wear

really too large boots for tiny feet. I think Rishi Sunak would be better at going undercover as a university student. Right. A bit more of a youthful face, but of a smaller structure, coming on a skateboard. I don't know why he's doing this.

What part of leadership is that? I'd watch that show, though. What do you look for in a leader? I love that one of them tells the truth. One of them was just like, what do you look for in a leader? That they tell the truth. You would think that's a given. That's very old school.

It was given. Apparently what they're trying to do at the minute is to make Rishi Sunak, he's trying to focus on making him look too London-centric and obsessed with banks, like a sort of Mr Monopoly type figure. So I think he should sort of go the opposite. Just get up to somewhere weird in the north, like Cockermouth. Because no politician dares to go anywhere with, like, cock in the name.

Because photographers are angling to get it, it's just caught but it means you've just got to be quick so as whenever you see the camera people come in erratic head movements all the time so when you're doing your speech you're sort of like we're gonna focus on like that's um that's what i think kia should do i think i'd like a leader that can focus on a number other than five, ideally higher than five, because I don't know if you know, there's this obsession with the number five now. Both Keir and Rishi both have five things that they're going to achieve. Keir's are called missions.

He's on a mission. But to his credit, his missions are actually like full sentences and they make sense. And when you read them, you go, OK, fair enough. Yeah, I can get behind that. Like what we've been talking about, make Britain a clean energy superpower. Rishi, though, has priorities, which were originally called promises. They were promises when he first brought them out, which is kind of like when your husband

says he'll promise to fix something and then eventually it becomes a priority, you know, like doing the dishes or stop sleeping with susan from work but the difference is with rishi's priorities is that he decided he would put them down into two word statements so where kier says we are going to secure the highest sustained growth in the g7 rishi has gone, economy growing. That's it. Make Britain a clean energy superpower. Rishi, debt falling. Is it weird that the ones you're saying second, I'm like,

yeah, yeah. I understand. I like this guy. Oh, okay. If I say, make Britain's streets safe. Not interested. No. Okay. Make that shorter, please. Small boats.

Yes! I want more small boats! Yes, Keir Starmer has outlined his plans for Britain to become a clean energy superpower. He's committed to no new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Grant Shapps took to Twitter to attack Starmer's plans, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're right. Starmer had been criticised by the GMB leader, Gary Smith,

who warned that Starmer was taking the country to a cliff edge. But this is Brexit Britain. When we see a cliff edge, we hold hands and we get a bit Thelma and Louise on it. We ditch that cliff, who's boss? At the end of that round, the scores are two to Team Rock and one to Team Drill. APPLAUSE Ian and Camilla, MPs have called for action

after the pandemic caused a widening gap between what and what? Everything and anything. It's rich and poor. Yes. Is it children in schools? In schools, yes. They're not catching up in the way that they thought they might, strangely. But that tutoring system that they paid for didn't just snap them all back in place?

Yeah, amazingly, the Zoom lessons didn't work for some people. And they're going to take 1,000 years to catch up. 1,000 years? Yes. Right, OK. Well, that's a lot because there was talk of a lost decade, but you're now saying a lost millennium. Yeah, lost millennium. But they might be good at tapestries, I guess.

I mean, that could be... Ian, do you think the gap between rich and poor in education is big enough at the moment or do you think we should be aiming to widen it still further? Yeah, it'd be weird if that was the balance I was providing. Let's get that wider. No, yeah, it needs to come down. I worked as a teaching assistant for a bit

before all the allegations come through. A few ideas that I've had of how we can help this and hear me out with some of these we get rid of school completely so certain age groups when you get to three everyone in your age group is sent to an island and you sort of lord of the flies it and then 15 years bring them back and see what they've learned and sort of find out what's important through natural selection. Right. I think that's how the public school system originated.

I was going to say, do you have children? I had children, but they got taken away from me because of some of my obscure plans like this. Rosie, any suggestions for how to fix our education system? Well, do we need to fix it? I mean, just bring back the class system. It's been dying and now we're bringing it back. We're widening the gap.

The problem is, of course, if you go to better schools, you get better grades. If you've got better lawyers, you're more likely to be innocent. If you've got more money, things are better. Let's be communists, Andy. What's the worst that could happen? Well, I didn't realise. I recently got a bag of lettuce from M&S.

Oh, things are going pretty well for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A few radio appearances, it's taken off. I didn't know how good lettuce could be. It's not even just like schools and money and lawyers. Lettuce. If you've got more money, lettuce is better. My mind's been absolutely blown with this. I don't know why we're surprised that education is crap, if I'm honest. If you're rich at four, you send your kid to private school. And if you're poor,

you send them up a chimney, right? That's always been the tradition. Do you know that genuinely at the end of the 19th century, animals had more rights than children in this country? They had a protection against cruelty, but children didn't. And to be fair, let's look at this. What has good education really given us, all right? An Eton or Oxbridge educated elite who still don't know how to run the country.

So, you know, if i say to you liz trust gavin williamson grant shapps matt hancock boris johnson do you think oh yeah quality education i think really it's not the state school system we should be looking at i mean if this is the kind of stuff that eaton is spitting out we need to look at private schools again all right because if you can't even give us yeah i mean if you can't even give us... Yeah. I mean, if you can't even give us competent overlords, what are people paying for? Bear Grylls has waded into this debate. He said that education is boring

and failing to prepare our children for what? Well, I don't know what Bear Grylls was getting at, but according to The Telegraph, beware the drag queens. They are coming to your schools and they are reading your children nursery rhymes and bedtime stories in the day and it's a real problem that's they're all falling asleep at school that's the problem yeah okay because also everyone knows nursery rhymes should only be read by a matronly-looking woman

with an ample bosom in an asexual way. Let's get more widow twankies in school. Positive message. Any other suggestions? Is it life? Well, yes, particularly the battles of life. The battles of life. Like what happened with Holly and Phil this week. We need to be prepared for that.

Oh, the audience, they sighed. They're sad. Are you okay? Didn't he go to Eton? Yes, he did. He did go to Eton. What, Philip Schofield? No, Bear Grylls.

Oh, sorry. I don't know. He said that education is boring, didn't he? Bear Grylls. He said education is boring, but then fun to him is drinking his own urine. Just join the rugby team if that's what you want to do. Actually, I think he'd be quite on board with

Ian's idea of throwing kids on an island. If you had children battling out on an island but Bear Grylls, that's alright, isn't it? That's okay. Because your one was a bit dodgy, but stick Bear Grylls in there. You've got a TV show. Well, this is what collaboration is all about.

But I think going to a school in Gould, where I'm from, prepares you for drinking your own piss. But we didn't find school boring in Gould. The bell would go off at the end of the day and all the kids would be screaming, No! 15 more minutes! Come on!

We were refusing to put our protractors away. We absolutely loved it. I think we just have the same problem with education that we have with the NHS, don't we? We have a great system. We have great people in it that want to do well. And then we've got incompetent overlords

that don't want to pay for it. They thought the answer was a tutoring system. So at the end of the pandemic, they just went, oh, the children in state schools need to be caught up. We'll give them tutors because that's what they all had in their private schools is they had teachers and then they had tutors at home. And then, well, this is the answer, but there isn't enough money. There aren't enough tutors. And then you go, well, why don't we get tutors to teach like a bunch of kids together, you know, at one time in order, and you just go, how do you not see what you're doing with that answer?

Oh, OK, we'll just get one tutor, many children, and then instead of on Zoom, we'll get them in one place and we'll maybe put a building around them and then... What should we call that? Yes, people say education is the springboard for our younger generations to be launched into happy and fulfilling lives. The problem is, at the moment, it's a springboard above the empty swimming pool of cold, hard reality and national decline.

There are concerns that the pandemic has also affected children, in particular their attention spans, their memory and their ability to concentrate. It's not just children it's affected, but also... LAUGHTER No, it's gone.

Just for any of our listeners currently sitting GCSEs or about to sit A-levels, some of the answers in this summer's public exams include... Yes. X squared over 3Y minus 2. B. That's from a multiple-choice question. I'm too sexy for my shirt.

The Lost Opera by Giuseppe Verdi. Hopefully that'll help our kids fly through their exams. At the end of our education round, the scores are four points all. We now enter a round entitled It Should Have Ended There. Now, we all know things that should have ended sooner. For example, Game of Thrones, the second millennium uh and liz truss's prime ministership so this round i'm going to give a headline from this week that should have ended sooner so i'll give the abbreviated version our panelists have to tell me how it actually did end so for example sunak

accepts johnson's resignation but sadly it didn't end there it went on with the words honours list so we can start with this Prince Harry says I just want the phone hacking case to end end Piers Morgan well that's a good guess I think Piers Morgan

is an honest hard working journalist and I won't have his name besmirched. He said, I want the phone hacking case to end abuse of me and my wife. Camilla, you've been following this. It's basically been another unedifying endoscopy into the workings of the British media. Any lessons that we can learn from it, do you think? What we can learn is how far not much evidence could be stretched.

I mean, I think Harry gave something like eight hours of evidence on 37 articles. But as a spectacle, it was completely amazing. There was one moment where I thought he was actually, he was crying, I thought. And you'd look at it and you just think, how have we got to this scenario where a member of the royal family is so frustrated that he is sitting in a court of law on the verge of tears? How do we get there? And I think that's kind of a disgrace

actually. But I heard that he was using like his SAS training in the chair you know, his interrogation training. He killed all the jurors. There weren't any jurors actually. Oh, okay. Not after I'd finished with them. Rosie, have you followed this case?

Yeah, I liked the fact Prince Harry said, democracy fails when the press fail to scrutinise and hold the government to account and instead get into bed with them, which is an outrageous claim, isn't it? And I, for one, want to hear what broadcaster Jacob Rees-Mogg has to say about it on his show. Or Nadine Doris on her show. Let's hear from the broadcasters. You know what he also said? He said, our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government, both of

which I believe are rock bottom. I imagine the government were pretty upset about being told they'd reached rock bottom because I think they thought they'd reached that ages ago have you not been paying attention yes prince harry has been in court to show us all what happens when we have a full-on collision between free will hereditary magicness and a society addicted to gossip harry was the first member of team crown however to give evidence in a court of law since, anyone? 1891, when Harry's nephew, young Prince Louis, had to defend himself against allegations

that he'd driven a time machine without due care and attention. The scores are now six points to Team Rock, four points to Team Drill. This can go to Rosie and Ria. This is your headline that should have ended. Doctors are calling for children to be banned.

From buying disposable vapes. That's correct. I mean, you're a medical scientist. Thank you. It's tricky. They're really bad. Like, an investigation, I think, by the BBC, found that there were unsafe levels of lead, nickel and chromium

found in the vapes that they confiscated from one particular secondary school. But on the other hand, if we hadn't found those things, how else would the kids have learned anything about the periodic table? But vaping is, it smells so good. You want to know some of the most popular flavors? I looked them up. Okay. Watermelon. Yum. Right. Who doesn't want to breathe in hot watermelon? Look them up. Okay, watermelon. Mm, yum, right? Who doesn't want to breathe in hot watermelon?

Blueberry raspberry ice. Pink lemonade. Cherry sour ice. I mean, actually, these kids don't want to vape. They want an ice cream. They just need to make them flavors that kids wouldn't like. Make them sort of more sophisticated. So the only flavors of vape are like olive.

Olive, blue cheese. Cote de boeuf. Cote de boeuf flavoured vape. Well, in my part of North London, I get that. It's pretty much standard. But that's where they started, with cigarettes. And if people aren't going to be put off that, I mean, those are pretty disgusting, aren't they? Cigarettes started with...

No, no, but... Like the color orange. be put off that i mean those are pretty disgusting aren't they cigarettes started with no no but other than menthol they're pretty disgusting so if they weren't put off by that i don't understand i thought that vapes were meant to be i mean probably not to give to children but they were meant to be the solution and now everybody's really angry about them why is that do we think i would say for balance as well that i found selling vapes to kids to be incredibly lucrative i mean are you in favor of this proposed ban and what else would you ban children from doing

well i don't know if we should it doesn't sound too bad when there's a doctor, Mike McKean, a respiratory consultant, and he said we're sleepwalking into a crisis. And that sounds better than doing it awake. If you sleepwalk into a crisis, if no-one wakes you up, you don't know you're in a crisis. And then you're more relaxed. And if you're more relaxed in a crisis, like people say, if you're relaxed when you get hit by a car, you're more likely to survive.

You've just got to really try and learn the instinct of seeing a car coming towards you and going, Oh! Yeah, you've just got to change the way you think about things. Yes, doctors are calling for children to be banned from buying disposable vapes. Sadly, it has turned out again that selling something highly addictive containing poisonous chemicals to children, which might have serious adverse effects on their short and long-term health,

might be having adverse effects on their short and long-term health. Just bad luck, really. It's the kind of thing you can only learn by trial and error, isn't it? Slamming your testicles in a car door until you actually do it, you don't know for sure whether or not it will genuinely hurt. That's funny, cos the error in that trial would be trying to slam your balls in the door and missing. We've all done it.

I've found if you're relaxed when they go in the doors... Rosie, here's another headline for you. Ultra-processed food and drinks such as sausages and gin are excellent. Sadly, that didn't end there. I think they are excellent, but then, you know, I'm German, so we think processed meat is great for your health. If you eat enough of it, you're cured. That was great.

Honestly, that was one of the worst jokes I've ever heard. I like when they're called reconstituted meats and they're saying that they're not good for you, but everyone knew that. The word reconstituted, no-one's in a restaurant being asked how they'd like their steak going, oh, reconstituted, please. Just to be clear, I would like it to be constituted,

then unconstitute that, then get it constituted again, please. I look down the list of all the ultra-processed foods and it's everything that I eat all day, every day. It's things like yoghurt and bread. Bread, I know is it just the type of bread well I think specifically mass produced kind of sliced

I don't know if the slicing makes it worse if you paid less than four pounds for the loaf that bread battery bread it's never seen the outdoors just lives in this little metal box and then they put it in a plastic bag and that's its entire life.

The sad thing is, often when bread sees the outside world for the first time, it's immediately eaten by a duck. Run! Be free! Yeah! This was found out as well because they got two twins and then gave them different diets. Two.

So four people. Feeling pretty foolish about how I said two twins. I think I'm just going to be quiet for the rest of it. Ian, what did they do to the twins? Yeah, what did they do? They gave them different diets. OK. It's just good to see a return to experimenting on twins.

They've been given a free ride for too long. Yes, scientific research. The headline ended, ultra-processed food and drinks such as sausages and gin are excellent at making you less healthy. Eating processed meat products is now becoming as socially marginalised as smoking, leading to concerns that people will soon be sneaking out of the office, huddling together in special shelters for a cheeky hot dog

until someone invents an e-sausage and it all becomes fine again. This can go to Ian and Camilla. The headline that should have ended where I end it is this. Great Britain sets new national record. How did that headline go on? The highest temperature in a McDonald's apple pie.

No, it's not that. Any guesses? I think this is... We've been a bit naughty in the last couple of years. I think we have higher rates of STDs. Yes. New national record. The STD story. My favourite story. In particular, it's syphilis, isn't it?

And gonorrhoea. Which is quite old school. Apparently there's a strain of gonorrhoea which is resistant to antibiotics. Is it super gonorrhoea? I'm really fascinated by it. Have you never tried it? I think we're the people who have this.

Of course I haven't tried it. To be fair, we were promised that we'd be world beating and it was Boris who made that promise and he did more than his fair share in those stats. It's sad news that genital warts have gone down. Is that balance?

Yeah, that's balance. I'm representing the STD community now. If it carried on at this rate, in five years we'll see no more genital warts. And you wouldn't have had your money on them going before pandas. Please gamble responsibly. Right, at the end of that round,

the scores are seven points all, which means we have a tiebreaker. It's going to be quite hard to get a result on this, because this tiebreaker is as we're going off air for three months until September, what is going to happen in the next three months? Who wants to go first on this? Ian?

I think we're going to create the perfect artificial intelligence. It will get elected to lead the Conservative Party and then immediately resign. Didn't we already do that? Any other suggestions of what's going to happen in the next three months? I think everything will be fine. Well, I can only tell you, incorrect. I was wondering how we were going to win this tie, but...

That means Ian and Camilla have won. The BBC principal tells me that over the next three months, the Conservatives will promise a free roast chicken for everyone in the country under the age of 25, so they can get a wishbone and do something that might at least have a vague chance of improving their future. It also tells that over the next three months, a three-year pilot scheme will find that three-year-olds

should not be pilots. And the BBC will merge with Radio Saudi Arabia. Something for all golf fans. I think the disappointment with the Saudi Arabian takeover of golf is that Peter Alice, the great golf commentator, sadly died a little while ago, and so we never got to find out how he would commentate on a public execution.

Yes, so our winners this week are Ian and Camilla. Thank you very much for listening to the series. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Goodbye. Goodbye. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman, and additional material was written by Alice Frazier, Mark Granger, Caroline Mabey, and Kate Dennett. The producer was Sam Holmes, and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Thank you.