Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz: Ep 1. Space, Steel and Strikes

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Zoe Lyons, Mark Steel, Athena Kugblenu and Hugo Rifkind to unpack bin workers strikes in Birmingham, pop stars popping to the stars, talks of tariffs, steeling oneself in Scunthorpe, and how Toby took his carvery one step too far.Written by Andy Zaltzman.With additional material by: Mike Shephard, Christina Riggs, Eve Delaney and Ben Pope. Producer: Rajiv Karia Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman Production Coordinator: Beanna Olding Sound Editor: Marc WillcoxA BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello. At the end of the last series of the News Quiz six weeks ago, I made a pledge to myself that every time something happened in world news that was annoying, ludicrous, unnecessary and or distressing, I would keep myself calm by spending an hour learning how to juggle chainsaws and practising my impression of Mark Steele. On the minor side, I haven't slept for six weeks. But on the plus side... CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I'm Andy Zortsman, and welcome to the new series of The News Quiz.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Welcome to The News Quiz. I am Andy Zoltzman. Our teams this week, we have Team Blast Furnace against Team Blast Off. On Team Furnace, we have Athena Koblenu and Zoe Lyons. Team Off, Mark Steele and Hugo Rifkind. Right, and our first question can go to Mark and Hugo. It's a missing word question. The answer is the name of one of our four panellists today. So this is the headline.

Government steps in to preserve... ..as vital national resource. What's the missing word? A, steel. B, lions. C, Athena, I assume meaning the Parthenon marbles from the celebratory retired former Greek goddesses temple in Athens. Or D. Hugo Rifkind. What is the answer there?

Well, this is of course another wonderful story of the success of privatisation. And there are so many, it's been such a success all round. People love the train companies, don't they, because you go to the station for a return from London to Manchester and they say that'll be £8,950, so it'll be cheaper to buy a hovercraft and get Beyonce to drive it, and then you get on the train and realise that that money doesn't even entitle you to a seat or to an open buffet or indeed to a train. Or there's the water companies that don't even have to provide the water because the water is already there, all they have to do is get it into your tap.

But they can't manage that without dumping millions of tonnes of human waste into it. So it's like going to the bakers and they say, oh no, we don't bake any bread, you bring in the bread and then we'll take turns to have a dump on it. LAUGHTER Or... APPLAUSE Or there's the gas companies that charge £80,000 a day for gas

and say it's not our fault, it's because of the side effects of the Franco-Prussian War. Nothing we can do about it. And now it's British Steel. And of course the people who've owned it, various companies, they go, we can't afford to keep running it. And then what happens with the steel is that it goes through a cycle where it's losing money. And so the government says, well, let's nationalise it, because it's only fair to share all the losses out amongst all the people in the country. And then it starts to make money, and they go, now we're going to sell it to a major company. Because it's only fair that half a dozen huge

billionaire shareholders take all the profits so that they've got all the wealth out of it, so it goes bankrupt, so they sell it off and we can share out the losses again. Is that the answer? What I've loved this week, Andy, is how much we've learned about steel and furnaces. I know a lot more about blast furnaces. I did. The main thing I've learned about them is if you switch off a furnace, you can't switch it on again, like trust in a marriage. I've also learned what you've got to do is if you don't want it to break when you turn it off you've got to do something called the salamander tap. Salamander tap is when you basically you tap you drill a hole into the bottom of

it to get all the molten stuff out because otherwise you end up with this sort of immovable slag that ruins everything like a really bad hen night. Apparently the Chinese wanted to do the salamander tap but the fear was they'd get it wrong on purpose meaning they'd be breaking the furnaces. So we've had to get hold of all this coke to keep them going because if you don't end up feeding it coke it ends up totally totally broken. Also like a really bad hen night. Those furnaces are really old now as well aren't they?

They were built in the sort of 40s or 50s I think, and they're just having to have them replaced with more efficient electrical furnaces, or just replace them with a couple of air fryers, because that seems quite popular at the moment. Well, in order to keep the furnaces going, something very rare happened, Zoe and Athina. Can you tell me what happened on a Saturday for only the sixth time since the Second World War? Oh, I know this. Jehovah's Witnesses took the day off and let us have a lie-in and it was amazing. They recalled Parliament. Yes. They had to come back off their hollybobs.

Yeah, I mean, it's quite an extreme event. They're saying only six times since the Second World War that the Commons has been recalled to sit on a Saturday, so six times since World War Two, that puts it the same number of times in that time period as a football manager has agreed with a refereeing decision against his own team. And six ahead of the number of times a government breeding program has successfully bred a pantomime horse with an actual horse. So ongoing efforts to try and make the Grand National funnier. But um... They were so pleased with themselves.

It's because they're getting time and a half. Politically for the Labour government, Hugo, it's quite a weird sort of cognitive distance about a Labour government doing the kind of thing a Labour government would traditionally do. Yeah, no one saw that coming. Right. Yeah. Preserving jobs, nationalising stuff, it's very ret... Well, it's sort of nuts at the moment because you've got the main people who want to, like, nationalise steel

and everything else is reform. They basically want to nationalise everything except for the NHS, which they want to sell, which is kind of... it's all very much the wrong way around. Right. Oh, he was amazing, wasn't he, Farge? I support naturalisation, always have done. What? And then do you see when he said to the steelworks he said I myself once worked in metals. He was a commodities broker, he sold. That's not the same. You weren't working in the steelworks. I love working in the steelworks. It gets a bit hot, but there's nothing like a bit of molten steel to liven up my day. What else is he going to have been? I worked on the bins for five years.

Another quick... Another quick question related to this Zoe and Athena, can you tell me the odd one out from these classic British brands and institutions? Harvey Nichols, Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, Lotus Cars, Wentworth Golf Club, Clark Shoes and Wedgwood China? The only one of those I have any knowledge of is Clark Shoes, of course, being the owner of quite a considerable number of comfortable yet sensible shoes. Harvey Nichols is the only one that doesn't sell the second word in the name because they don't sell Nichols. It's about metals again.

Where's wharves sell wanderers? For every match we get a load of nomads and we sell them off. Off course six at home. Trouble is they won't stay in the same room, they keep going on and on. Close but not right, well it's not close actually. The answer is Wedgwood China, which is the only one that does not have an owner from China. It's owned by a Finnish company, all the others are either fully or largely owned by Chinese

companies. So, I mean what is left? Is there anything that's left? Nothing left. I mean, who could have foreseen this happening, us selling off our biggest commodities to communist China? I mean, some would say, sort of deliberately trying to turn off the furnaces, so that we'd have to buy their cheaper Chinese steel, because the arse has fallen out of the Chinese property market.

I mean, I'm just speculating, but it does seem like that's what was sort of on their minds, doesn't it? Well, so the company that owns Scunthorpe, it does make quite a lot of steel in China. I think Scunthorpe made something like half a percent of all the steel it made. But people do think it's like a Chinese ploy to basically buy British things, to buy them and ruin them so that they just no longer work anymore. Like so far I think they've bought the ITV player and the conservative party. Yeah loads of stuff. There's also this thing where like a lot of Chinese companies want to turn these places into environmentally friendly places right so apparently if you turn these blast furnaces

into ones that can create steel more in a more environmentally friendly way this is a good thing but they take 80% less labor so you have to make redundancies. Now on the surface you can think that's a terrible thing. People won't work, but people can be retrained. They can get other jobs. Humans can't breathe nitrogen. So there's an opportunity here maybe to retrain staff whilst making that more environmentally friendly. Just anyone who owns this company now in Britain, they could do that. That would be a good idea. Yeah, so if any of our listeners do own a blast furnace, please. Yeah.

And also, this is the kind of defeatist attitude, saying that we can't breathe nitrogen. Well, we can try. What's holding this country back? We can try. I mean, there's quite a lot of methane, too, that comes out of this furnace. Having discovered that I'm recently lactose intolerant, I can tell you, actually, you can tolerate quite a high level

of methane. It's for years. For years. I mean, the budgie's dead, but never like that. It's so bright and to be tolerant of everything except for lactose. Isn't it? Yes, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds

has hinted that the government is set to nationalise British Steel, the not-actually-British company that doesn't want to make steel in Britain anymore. A classic modern story. After negotiations with the Chinese Jingya Group, who currently own British Steel but can't really be arsed with it anymore, after those negotiations broke down, Parliament was recalled from its spring recess, celebrating Easter in the most traditional way possible,

by coming back early and talking for a bit then disappearing off again whilst people wondered if something miraculous had genuinely happened. People will still be bickering about it in 2,000 years, mark my lapsed Jewish words. Experts have estimated that unless things change within 36 and a bit years the entire UK manufacturing sector will consist of a single old couple in a shed in the Lake District knitting voodoo dolls of David Cameron. Right, and another State of the Nation question, Zoe and Athena. It's just rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Absolutely all over the place, total garbage. Not just reviews of my stand-up shows from early in my career, but also comments made in which British city recently? Well, it's got to be Birmingham, hasn't it?

They've stopped emptying the bins. I tend to follow a pretty good rule of thumb when it comes to whether a worker is essential or not. If you don't go to work and we all get the plague, you are an essential worker. I heard somebody talking on the radio the other day, there was a very busy rat catcher he was having, he said, I'm having to stop doing me insect work because the rat stuff's really taken off. He said some of them are the size of kittens. I thought, but they are the size of kittens. I haven't but they are the size of kittens.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't encountered a rat for a while, but the last time I had, it was pretty much the size of a kitten. I wanted them to say, they're sort of the size of horses and we've saddled them up and used them to drag the carts to the dump. They're getting really, like, gentrified, these rats, because generally they've got an abundance of rubbish to eat, right? So you'd think they're just eating the rubbish.

But one guy was on the news because a rat ate the electrics in his Mercedes. because generally they've got an abundance of rubbish to eat, right, so you'd think they're just eating the rubbish. But one guy was on the news because a rat ate the electrics in his Mercedes. Like the electric cables. And I was like, la-di-da! You've got all the rubbish in the world you can eat, and you're eating a luxury car? Yeah, yeah. Do his eyelids go up and down automatically now? They've got anarchist class war rats up there. I'm a bit obsessed with bins. I've got a right thing about bins because where we live we have communal bins and people love to leave things by bins and it's um I'm on tour at

the moment and one of the questions I ask the audience is how many bins they've got. I know it's really enlightening stuff but Chipping Norton five bins. Five bins. Five bins? I know and I asked them what was like, what's the fifth one for? And I worked out it's for discarded gilets. LAUGHTER But they've got the army there now, haven't they? God, you know people moan about the noise that bin men make normally just when they're going...

WHISTLE ..at seven in the morning. They complain about it when it's the army, wouldn't they? LAUGHTER Number 73, put the green recycling box out now! Yeah, the ongoing impasse in the Birmingham bin strike has seen the city adorned with over 20,000 tonnes

of uncollected rubbish and festooned with rats the size of rats. Latest projections have suggested that if things are not sorted out, a rat will win a by-election in a Birmingham constituency at some point during this Parliament. Meanwhile news just reached us this evening that Birmingham City were forced to play with a giant rat on the left side of midfield in their match today after an Aston Villa supporting

pest control officer refused to remove the rodent from the St Andrews pitch. The rat contributed an assist with a perfectly weighted through ball before being sent off for urinating on the penalty spot threatening to get the referee bubonic plague. And at the end of that round Zoe and Athena have five, Mark and Hugo have four. Moving from the state of Britain to the state of the entire planet. This can go to Mark and Hugo. What according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen no longer exists? The West as we know it.

Yes, the West. Yes. This is, you know, as the Trump induced global maelstrom of mayhem continues to unfold. Do you agree with this Mark, as the West just ended? I think that the West probably never did quite exist, did it? The West existed, come on. That's what neoliberalism is. It's the West imposing values onto the rest of the world. I think Ursula's just been a bit of a drama queen

because Budweiser's going to be a bit more expensive. I mean, the West is this highly influential concept has just been a bit of a drama queen because Budwise is going to be a bit more expensive. The rest is this highly influential concept that has spread all kinds of ideas about religion and commerce and democracy for like I guess almost millennia so it's going to take more than like a tax on high fructose corn syrup for all of that to crumble otherwise if that's all it took I wish they'd done it before you know. I mean since we last recorded we've had the Trump tariff mayhem. Have you enjoyed that Hugo? You must have talked about it quite a bit. Well yeah I mean it's very interesting how it's relating to Britain because the philosophy here of the government seems to be that Donald Trump is lashing out all sorts of people and

we need to put ourselves in a position where he can't lash out at us and that position is up his arse. What we could have done and we had a chance last time Trump was president and I bet the Canadians regret they didn't think of this was when he was down in Mexico building his wall the Canadians could have built one their side Then we could have put a roof over the old country Starman didn't think of that JD Vance the man who puts the vice into vice president Said that Britain is in line for what? Trade deal yes massive massive trade deal, but it's weird, it's like we keep talking about this trade deal we're supposed to do with America where we buy loads of their

stuff, but we don't really want any of their stuff because their cars are sort of massive and use more fuel than British steel and can't turn corners and stuff. And they've got chicken washed in chlorine and hormone injected beef and Brits don't want it. And it's weird because the White House is getting really shirty about how dare anyone say that our food is unhealthy but they've also got a health secretary who keeps saying their food is really unhealthy. They don't like RFK junior and he's got a worm in his brain and he once ate a dog but he's right about that. We've all been there.

Yeah I mean the unhealthy American food. Someone told me this week, you know what Donald Trump's regular order from McDonald's is? This isn't even a joke, it's just horrifying. It's two quarter-pandas with cheese, two filet-o-fish, and a chocolate shake. Right.

No fries? That is outrageous. Anyone knows when you order a filet-o-fish, you're waiting for like 20 minutes. How much time does that man have? Well he spends that time eating the other two quarter pounds of cheese. With a bit of heart disease sprinkled on the top. That's incredible.

How is he so thin? How is he still alive then? And so bouncing about like he is? Because he's preserved. He is 99.9% processed food. And everybody knows if you put a burger in a cupboard for 80 years, it won't change. That's all he is, is a burger with a bit of hay on top. He's a Tracy Em in installation. Yes, this is the news that in global terms the sun is apparently setting both in and on the West amidst the fallout from Trump's cigarette end casually flicked into the petrol-filled

paddling pool of international trade. Of course, you don't need to be a rocket economist to know that tariff-based trade wars don't always work out well. And with the USA and China now locked in a fevered bout of tit-for-tat, eye eye, scrotum for a scrotum revenge tariffing, everyone else is nervously waiting to see what happens. Where will the splats land each morning on the giant world map on the floor of the White House pigeon coop that is the brain center of Trumpian trade policy? Of course, if you wanted a viable and sensible plan for an equitable global economic system, Donald Trump is probably just outside the top 8 billion people in the world that you

know. Maybe around the 8.1 billionth mark, just above Vladimir Putin, and just alongside the likes of Peter Andre, me and Homer Simpson. Prank Vice President JD Vance says Britain stands a good chance to get a decent trade deal because, ah, who cares what the because is, the goodness of the chance and the latest reason for it will have changed by the time you hear this even if you're in the studio audience here today because sound waves are not quick enough to keep up with news in the Trumpian era. And it's quite hard to sort of keep calm in the Trumpian news world and my kids often say say to me, just try and ignore it

for a bit. But do you know what I find? It's quite hard to ignore Donald Trump, even if you try to avoid it. It's like trying to ignore a non-house-trained baby hippopotamus that has been strung up on a special winch above your dining table at Christmas dinner, having been fed a series of undercooked pork chimichangas.

It's just so hard to completely put it out of your mind. At the end of our world round the scores are now seven points all. Right, we now have a special space round coming your way. This can go to Zoe and Athena. Scientists have long known that in space no one can hear you scream. But this week we discovered that in space people can hear you making what sound? It would have been, oh god it was awful, it would have been the sound of Katy Perry singing a Louis Armstrong song. Sorry, it's a bit of sick came up, sorry. Watching it actually just made my toes curl it was like watching I've always hated hen parties and this just looked like the worst one on the

planet they all got into their sort of designer jumpsuits that Power Rangers and then they all got into a massive rocket designed by Ann Summers I think that vibrated itself up to this stratosphere to rim space I'm only surprised somebody didn't open a bottle of Prosecco while they were up there. Are we surprised it was only an 11 minute ride though? That was gonna be. But the fact that they call themselves, this is the women on Jeff Bezos' rocket, the fact that they call themselves crew as well. They weren't crew, they were hand luggage is what they were. It did look extremely phallic the rocket, it's true.

But if you're gonna make a rocket that looks that phallic as Jeff Bezos did, you wonder slightly at the psychology of having the end come off. You know, it's really alarming. And then when it, and then it sort of floats down on this parachute and it lands and you see them all come out and I was thinking when that happened, it's like that's not the first time that Katy Perry has emerged from the embrace of a massive bell end. Because she was married to Russell Brand. LAUGHTER

Oh, just... And then she come back and did the thing of, like, what have you learned while you're up there? I've learned to love myself and that we all have to love each other. Now, if Neil Armstrong was still alive, he'd be thinking, oh, no, I blew it with, oh, this is one small step for a man and one giant leap for a car.

What I should have said is, as I'm getting onto the moon, I realise I am beautiful. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE I did kind of love it, the whole thing. I thought it was really good in sort of news terms. It wasn't just Katy Perry, there was a bunch of other people. Lauren Sanchez, you know, who's Jeff Bezos' somewhat enhanced fiance, can I call her?

And it's amazing to see like all of her define gravity rather than just the usual bits. You know, there are conspiracy theories that didn't happen already. Really fast work, yeah. Cause when they landed, the door opened from the inside. And there's this theory that like spaceships never do that in case you'd like accidentally open them when you're up or something So people are saying no didn't really happen

It was faked if it was going to ever be the case that someone accidentally opened the spaceship door while it was in space That would have been the time it would have happened I just want to get a selfie. So I mean Mark, I'll tell you you're the British Katy Perry in terms of your status in the creative arts in this country. Are you gunning for a space trip? Well I don't know, would a British one work? A British rocket would just get to the edge of space and just as you were thinking, oh my god, this is amazing, I'm looking out at the edge of the atmosphere, there'd be an announcement. If you see something that doesn't look like...

LAUGHTER ..please alert NASA immediately. See it, say it, astronaut it. LAUGHTER Yes, the latest Jeff Bezos sponsored mission to hashtag not really space lasted 11 minutes and yes we are just receiving a confirmation that you do not count as an astronaut if you're only off the ground for 11 minutes glad to clear that up for everyone there are concerns now that Katy Perry's journey

to space could spark a pop space race which now inevitably seems set to culminate in Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift wrestling on the surface of Mars for ownership of the universe. Since we're talking about pop music, it's a special question for people who are fans of spouses of members of the Beatles and trees. So what this week might have made your oak go oh no? week might have made your oak go oh no touch me I'm real this was the oak tree on the Toby carvery yes park that was felled in Enfield it was a 500 year old oak tree and some birdie made a boo boo they claimed it was diseased and almost dead what it was was coming out of winter I've been confused of being

diseased and almost dead in March but by April I'm looking a lot pucker and yes they felt it took people's horror this This is a bigger deal than we realised. This is actually my part of London. I live here and I can assure you, that tree was all we had. Like, our house values are just plummeting right now. Like, the tree's gone, what are we going to do? I actually think it's a conspiracy. I think someone from Croydon did it.

They had a guy from the Woodland Trust saying, it's really bad, it's a really healthy tree. Although he was saying it after it had been chopped down, which is exactly the sort of denial I'd have if I was lying in bits in the car park of a Toby Carvery. Yes, this is Oakgate, the Toby Carvery scandal, an arboreal murder mystery that had people stumped this week. Chop was very much off the menu at Toby Carvery, whose owners apologised for the slaying of the professional tree, which was described as being around 500 years old, more than six foot four inches tall, and of one fixed abode. The owners of the

chain saw their reputation ruined by these senseless acts, and charting this tragic story, a new tree crime podcast will soon be available on BBC Science. A film of the tree slaying is also set to be made and it's rumoured we're just hearing right now that it will be directed by Hollywood filmmaking superstar Tim Burton. Right, the scores are now nine points all, which takes us to our final tiebreaker round. We've saved the biggest news story of the week for our last story. So this is the big finale of the news quiz. It doesn't generally deal with technical legal rulings about the precise meaning of words in specific

pieces of legislation, but we follow where the news takes us. So here goes our tie break question. The UK Supreme Court this week ruled that the meanings of the terms woman and sex specifically as used in the wording of the Equality Act 2010 refer to biology and do not extend to cover transgender women, the ruining not only supported women's rights based on biological sex but also emphasised that under the Act transgender people have clear legal protections against discrimination and harassment. Delivering the judgement, Supreme Court Judge Lord Hodg said, We counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our

society at the expense of another. It is not, at which point everyone interpreted the judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. Hey, it's the 2020s, it's just how we roll. Thus was the complex and nuanced 88-page judgment reduced, ironically, to a binary win-lose scenario. Anyway, the question is this. Whilst the full implications of the ruling are yet to become fully clear, will I, for example, as a biological male, be legally obliged to check whether trans men who were born female but have lived as male for decades and had full gender reassignment surgery, whether they're using a urinal that is rightfully mine.

The question is, after this judicial ruling on a delicate sensitive subject that generally erupts into a volcano of rancour, whenever and however you discuss it, what... BELL RINGS And we are out of time. APPLAUSE The correct answer was W. Woman begins with the letter W.

This question is therefore a draw. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Taking part in the news quiz were Mark Steele, Zoe Lyons, Athena Kublenu and Hugo Rithkin. In the chair was me, Andy Zaltzman. And additional material was written by Mike Sheppard, Christina Riggs, Ben Polk and Eve Delaney. The producer was Rajiv Kharia and it was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. I think I've got that pretty much bang on. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. And we're back for a brand new series, series 9 where we're covering all sorts of things from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France. We're looking at the arts and crafts movement and the life of Sojourner Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age. Loads of different stuff. It's a fantastic series, it's funny, we get great historians, we get great comedians. So if you want to listen to Your Dead to Me, listen first on BBC Sounds.