Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - Friday 23rd April 2021

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Andy Zaltman presents a look back at the week's headlines with panellists Andrew Maxwell, Athena Kugblenu, Anne McElvoy and Chris McCausland.This week super leagues, super texts and a super example of someone being told to get out of a pub.Written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Mike Shephard, Rajiv Karia and Jenan Younis.Producer: Richard Morris A BBC Studios Production

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Welcome to the News Quiz. We would like to apologise to our long-standing or legacy fans for our failed attempt to form a breakaway European super radio station with Woman's Hour, The Shipping Forecast, Test Match Special, Farming Today and Tottenham Hotspur.

As five long-running and successful Radio 4 shows, plus Tottenham Hotspur, we acknowledge... ..that we did not consider that our fans would rather see us taking on old rivals like Front Row and The Archers rather than European giants such as Los Discos de la Isla Desierta from Spain and Italy's Mi Dispiace, Non ne ho un clue. And we also acknowledge that we must not be seen

to close the door to new shows to make their way up the pyramid from local radio all the way to primetime Radio 4, like Yesterday and Bogner and the Aberystwyth Hour. So welcome to another scrupulously fair edition of the News Quiz. Hello, I'm Andy Zoltan. Welcome to the St George's Day News Quiz Special. Let's meet the teams for this week. We have Real Madbid against Atletico Getrid. On the Real team, we have Athena Koblenu and Andrew Maxwell. CHEERING

And for Atletico Getrid, it's Chris McCausland and from The Economist, Anne McElvoy. And our first question this week, this goes to both teams. What revolution will not be televised, or indeed happen at all, after the multi-billionaire revolutionaries chickened out of the revolution at the first sign of trouble? This is football, Andy, isn't it? Correct, Chris.

I mean, football on the news, Chris, it feels a little bit like the Queen having a doner kebab, this, doesn't it? Birthday's a birthday, you treat yourself. First of all, can I just ask how you're feeling, Andy, about lowering yourself into the gutter to talk about a sport that's done in under two hours and that you can play in the rain? Anything that lasts less than a day, I'm not really in favour of.

Well, I think you've nailed it all in the intro to the show, to be honest. It's the European Super League, which was a phenomenally bad idea, which lasted 48 hours, maybe. Yes, correct. And did it affect your club? We were in the centre of the storm. I'm a Liverpool fan.

It affected my club. It affected five other English teams, which are the best teams, in total six of the best teams in Europe, Andy, three of which have never won a European Cup. One of them hasn't won an English League title since before the Beatles were a thing.

But you know, they're creme de la creme. Andrew, are you a football fan? I'm a huge football fan. But more importantly, I'm a rugby league fan. And it's been a terrible, weird week for English rugby league fans because that's also called the Super League.

For the last four days, people from St Helens have been going on to Twitter to say, what's wrong with the Super League now? What's exactly wrong with the Super League? It's Rugby League, 13 men a team, fast-paced, scintillating rugby. 12 different clubs, each

one of them with their own junction off the same motorway. That's a real Super League. That's a real Super League. That's a real Super League. You're competing for glory against a town you could actually hear their bins being taken out. But it's just generally, I mean, come on,

this just gives you an idea. It's very rarely do us mortals have any idea of the mindset of billionaires. But this has given us the mindset of billionaires. It's like, you know what I mean? The view from the private jet, you can see far, but you can't see clearly, lads. These are billionaires who, by their nature, are centre-right people, fund centre-right parties, but they've been shown to have less of an appetite for competition than the average Joe soap in the streets. If you're not interested in football, let me give you an idea.

This Super League idea is like Ireland waking up one day to find out they've put bubbles in Guinness. to find out they've put bubbles in Guinness. Anne, I mean, you're right for the economists. I mean, politically and economically, it seemed suddenly politicians weighed it in. It seemed that suddenly greed and the free markets weren't such a good thing. How do you see it politically, this thing? Well, the way it struck me,

I was spending too many years of my life concerned with breakaway movements britain and europe bad tempers withdrawal agreements this one was great because it was all the same it just happened in two days remember those of us at the economist and beyond who stood down at that soggy green at Westminster waiting for something called the meaningful vote to pass to decide whether or not we were going to get out of the EU. And now you realise it's really easy. You just set up something called a Super League, call it European,

make sure France and Germany aren't in it. It's not us super, is it, really? It's the sort of Asda Super League. So, you know, whether it's the free market or just the fans or whether it's just something that a lot of us didn't have time to understand because, thankfully, it's all over now, so we don't need to. It's great. Athena, I know you are a trainee billionaire.

How do you see the behaviour of these hyper-wealthy individuals? Well, you're absolutely right to call me a trainee because I investigated the European Super League and I thought it made total sense. They just made one mistake. What they should have done, right, was they should have made a breakaway league but not play football. It should have just been like another sport.

You know, I would have put forward master chef right i would see i would want to see byron and chelsea like in the master chef kitchen all of them 22 of them in the kitchen um making souffles chocolate fondants all the ice cream set i mean that is tuesday night and just imagine it man you man. You could have music and the branding and then you could have like kits, like aprons. You could sell the aprons, right? So the football kit shirts.

And you can see on soufflés, it's a very good recipe for footballers because like footballers, they can go down very quickly indeed. You won't see any of that play acting in the Super League, I can tell you that. Florentino Perez, the head of Real Madrid, said that the European Super League was created to save football.

Now, I mean, it's not entirely clear how. I mean, that's a bit like, you know, great-uncle Marmaduke's tiger skin, gimp mask and jockstrap were saving wildlife. Could any of you see any actual logic behind it? Well, yes, of course. So if you raise enough tigers, it creates a market for the tiger skin jockstraps. At the moment, there's no economic value put on the tigers, so they are

killed willy-nilly. Whereas if you create a decent market for what your Uncle Marmaduke has known all along, that putting your bits and pieces into the skin of a tiger is the most comfortable way to enjoy the weekend. It's just... Anne, back me up here.

You're from The Economist. That's how the market works. I was just going to say, I wasn't warned about the Uncle Marmaduke thing before I agreed to come on. It's always like this. This is indeed the story of the European Super League, which did not affect the team I support, because they play ice hockey, not football.

They're not run by a dubious foreign billionaire. They're run, very well I should add, by Dawn and Graham from up the road. So it's a different thing for me as a sports fan. And it was a fascinating story because it takes something pretty special to find the point at which football will finally utter its moral and financial safe word. But the European Super League managed it this week. A cartel of 11 of Europe's most successful football clubs

plus Tottenham Hotspur went behind everyone's backs before then stabbing themselves in the front as they launched and crash-landed. One Manchester City fan said it came as a huge shock. He never thought in all his years wearing an Etihad shirt, watching the Barclays Premier League on Sky Sports that the beautiful game could be sabotaged by corporate avarice. And Britain as a whole was furious. Politicians waded in. They put their free market, greed as good principles

on the back burner just this once because we in Britain, we have finally found our limits. The moral Rubicon, you cannot cross in this country. You can have your mass corporate tax evasion, your political corruption, your crony capitalism.

You can have child poverty, food banks, corrosive social inequality. You can underfund schools, health and social capitalism. You can have child poverty, food banks, corrosive social inequality. You can underfund schools, health and social care. You can treat our disabled people like dirt, sell off our national assets to anyone who wants them, saddle our children and our grandchildren with debt, violate our democratic processes and institutions.

And we can and will broadly live with all of that. But football? No way! No way! Not in this country. Some things are sacred. And the score at the end of that round, well, let's score it in goals. It's 1-0 to Atletico and to Chris and Athena.

Sorry, to Chris and Anne. There was a quick transfer there while I was looking. Moving on now, this question can go to Team Atletico, to Anne and Chris. Who was thrown out of the pub this week for not being disorderly enough? Can I have that one? Please do. On my political turf, there's Keir Starmer getting out and about, and goes to a pub in Bath,

and that seems a fairly safe territory for politicians. But no, he ends up in the least hospitable hostelry in the West Country. And the landlord, shall we say, has got strong views on the Covid question. And the leader of the opposition's views don't entirely align with the views of the landlord in the pub. So he says he can't come in and there's a bit of barracking. And then a bodyguard who looks remarkably like a tougher version of Keir Starmer. I think there's a bit of a cloning that's gone on. It's like Keir Starmer who went to a worse school.

He turns up and there's a real kind of fracas. And then I had a quick look on the website afterwards and it says, welcome to our lovely pub in our friendly city. And I took a photo of Keir Starmer back out on the street. Just the poor guy, leader of the party, who's just gone out looking for some votes and some love and some beer. That was it.

But he was famous for a bit longer than Keir has been, usually. Apparently, it's even more... I don't really have anything on this. This is just pure gossip. This is between us guys. It turns out... It turns out that he wasn't randomly walking around pubs. He'd actually...

Keir Starmer had been invited to that pub by one of the other landlords. And, I know, crazy landlord hadn't been told about it, so he wasn't in what they say these days is the loop. So that's... He was probably transferring a lot of his emotions about his sense of betrayal from his business partner as much as his anger at Keir Starmer's policies,

which, as we know, are we don't know. Well, there's only one solution for him there. He needs to form a breakaway pub, right? That's not a new pub. Down the road. Only serving the elite 12 drinks. Plus Tottenham Hotspur. Plus Tottenham Hotspur. Plus Tottenham Hotspur.

This came at the end of Starmer's first year in charge of Labour. Anne, how would you rate his first year in charge? What could he do better? He could sort of be there, couldn't he? He sometimes looks a bit embarrassed to be leading the Labour Party. And I suppose about half of the party has still got the Jeremy Corbyn posters up next to the Che Guevara. Now Keir wants to keep those people

and obviously there's no manoeuvring for him to the right, because Boris Johnson seems to have hoovered that up and so much so that he's even in favour of the North now, Boris. So there's not much room. So Kier, I think, might be struggling a little bit

outside the N1 postcode. He did go to the pub and that went well, didn't it? He's been accused of not being bold enough, hasn't he, Keir Starmer? And, you know, it's one year anniversary and he couldn't even decide whether he wanted a Colin or Cuthbert Caterpillar celebration cake. You had to bring it up, didn't you? Yes, this is the story of Keir Starmer,

who finally achieved something that millions of ordinary Britons can actually identify with. He was thrown out of a pub. An angry pub landlord in Bath chatted, get out of my pub at Starmer, saying the Labour leader had failed to provide strong enough opposition during the Covid crisis. Now, obviously, Starmer is not the first person to be chucked out of a pub,

accused of being incoherent and not having clear vision, but he managed to do it while stone-cold sober, which is quite impressive in its own way. Starmer is facing increasing grumblings about his leadership style, which, by coincidence, is also stone-cold sober. And in a difficult first year, he's proven to be not so much an iron fist in a velvet glove as a sausage fist in a toilet paper glove.

And... And this incident did rather highlight that, despite his official Sir tag, Keir Starmer is obviously not a real knight, because a real knight would have been back within the hour in full armour on a horse, demanding a duel to settle the impugning of his honour. Moving across

the political divide, a multiple choice question now for Team Real Madvid, to Athena and Andrew. Boris Johnson claimed this week to have acted with honesty and integrity in what? Was it A, sending text to a Singapore-based billionaire promising to sort out a tax issue?

Was it B, splurging £2.6 million on a government propaganda room when a 60-quid green screen would have done? Was it C, having an affair in his marital home with a woman who received public money and failing to declare the relationship as a potential conflict of interest? Or was it D, his primary school nativity play in which he played an unusually enthusiastic King Herod and nothing else since?

So what did he claim to have acted with honesty and integrity? These options all sound very out of character for our leader. Are you... Are you reading from the right set of answers? Because it all sounds... I'm flummoxed. I'm really baffled here. Baffled. Can you narrow it down, Andrew, to one of those options?

He's definitely been texting a fella. Yep. He's been texting back and forward with the Hoover man. he's been texting back and forward with the Hoover Man. A lot of people are very upset with Dyson. That's his real name. But everybody calls him, whenever you mention him, you know, Dyson.

And they go, I don't know. The Hoover Man. You're all right. No matter how many times he's put his name all over his hoovers, everybody's just like, ah, the Hoover Man. Anyway, the Hoover Man said that he was willing to build ventilators, which in many ways are lung hoovers, aren't they? But he was only willing to help out the country he was born, educated, raised in and has been good enough to give him a passport all these years,

as long as he didn't have to pay any more tax. Because I don't want you to know this about Dyson, the Hoover man. He's a bollocks. See, I think it's a bit unfair, a little bit unfair on James Dyson, because he was actually looking for his employees not to be taxed twice, not him. It was one of those great Boris schemes, wasn't it? It was going to happen, and it didn't happen.

Nobody got taxed at all, I suppose, as a result. But if it had worked, would the patients be picking up nicely? You're getting a point. You're getting a point for that. Can you imagine how good a Dyson ventilator would be? The Hoovers have got cyclone technology. A Dyson ventilator would have, like, hurricane technology and you'd have to strap your head to a pole to stop internal decapitation.

And it would tear the teeth from your gums and blast them into the pit of your stomach and fill you with more oxygen than you've ever had in your life in under three minutes. It would be an incredible device. Athena, have you ever texted the Prime Minister directly to get him to do something for you? Yeah, all the time.

Oh, good. It's a billionaire thing. Are we... Yeah. Obviously, I haven't. And I find it remarkable that that's what you have to do to get the Prime Minister

to do what you want. Just text them. Don't email. Don't put a question into the Commons. Send them a text message. If we just said, oh, we stopped deporting people

because they came in the 50s legally by text, they would have stopped. Amazing. Amazing. We had no idea. We started a petition. We started a petition, Andy.

What, 100,000 people, and all we had to do was get them on WhatsApp, send them a little voice note. So we've learnt our lesson. We've learnt our lesson there. Because of Andrew's insistence on the Hoover Man, I've just got the Hoover Man can going round my head to the Candyman can.

Who can make the ventilators? The Hoover Man can. The correct answer to the question, what did he claim to have acted with honesty and integrity with regard to, was in fact the affair with Jennifer R. Currie. He claimed he'd acted with honesty and integrity, prompting confusion and tears in the words beginning with H and I team at the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Dyson story was fascinating. Under questioning about leaked text messages with billionaire businessman James Dyson, Johnson said he made no apology for moving heaven and earth to acquire ventilators offered by Dyson. Well, many words have changed meanings. Language evolves, and that is, in fact, modern 21st century speak for send a couple of texts from which nothing transpires.

But still, it's moving heaven and earth. This all occurred during the tragically inept early months of the crisis. Let's think back to those early days of the crisis. The only way Johnson could possibly be said to have moved heaven and earth was if heaven and earth were his nicknames for his buttocks. And he moved them so that they were not sitting on a chair in five consecutive meetings of the Cobra Emergency Committee. At the end of that round, Atletico get rid,

have three, and Rail Madbid still on nought. Nil. Nil, sorry, it's football, isn't it? Nil. It's 3-0 to Atletico at the end of that. Let's move on to the next question. This can go to both teams. In the aftermath of what event in America did Fox News host Tucker Carlson warn of, quotes, an attack on civilisation?

It's just got to be Derek Chauvin, I think. That's how you say his surname. Being found guilty on three counts of murder. Correct. Which was the appropriate result, I believe. The jury, they said it took the jury an hour to come up with a decision. That's not true. It took them nine minutes, actually.

And the other 51 minutes saying, is he guilty? Great. Right, let's decide if bears defecate in the woods. That would be a nice thing to discuss. It triggered an extraordinary kind of time, I guess, just around the world, like an extraordinary time of conversations and stuff. to discuss for the rest of the hour it triggered an extraordinary kind of time I guess just around the world

like an extraordinary time of conversations and stuff I was really intrigued by what people were saying about historic racism you know how

we actually had racism for a long time people have been racist Mr Churchill was racist and lots of people came out and they said oh you know he was racist

but everyone was racist back then which I thought was extraordinary because that's that's how you defend like mullets and shoulder pads um like generally really a really bad excuse for racism and just just for the record i don't think my dad was racist i don't think he was

i think it was other people so um so not quite everyone but yeah it's just extraordinary time for america and like i said globally, it's just extraordinary time for America and, like I said, globally. And it's given people still opportunities to say strange things, like your example on Fox News. Andrew, you're a Tucker Carlson fan. But he's on Fox News. Like, you know, it's quite the race to the bottom there.

He's just the craziest badger in the chicken coop. But the sad reflection on America, it's that famous quote. You know, it's Rupert Murdoch invented Fox News. Rupert Murdoch found a niche in the market. 50% of America. The idea there's even a conversation that there's racism in America, it was built on racism. There wouldn't be an America without racism. Apple pie gets all the credit, but it was the slavery that did it.

Yes, this week a jury found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. And, you know, things have not been going too well historically when the smooth running of justice is stop-the-press, front-page headline news. Justice is supposed to be blind, but in America, it has too often merely been hiding its eyes behind those special high-performance sports sunglasses

that increase the contrast between colours. Let's move on to the potential end of the world. It was Earth Day on Thursday the 22nd of April. This week this question is tied into that. What has the world finally remembered to try to prevent?

The end of the world. Correct, yes. I just went out on a limb and guessed that the answer was in the question. Yeah, it was very much in the question. This is all global warming stuff, isn't it? With, you know, everyone's setting new targets for... I don't think anyone's hit a target yet, but people are setting new targets, new, more adventurous targets.

It's all to do with reducing emissions and percentages based on, what was it, we're going to reduce carbon emissions by 78% and then they kind of add on based on 1990 values, which almost sounds like the small print, doesn't it? Like if you're going to say, yeah, I'm going to cut down my alcohol intake by 78% based on what I was drinking in 1990. What was that last bit? No, not it, not it. How old were you in 1990, Chris? I was 13, mate. I wasn't drinking much. There's a summit, isn't there, at the moment?

President Biden held a summit, so Boris Johnson went along. In fairness, Boris Johnson has been sort of greening himself up a bit, but he then gave a statement. And as you know, these translated into about 40 languages that go simultaneously. And Boris Johnson said, what this isn't, said, is extreme green, expensive bunny hugging. Not that there's anything wrong with bunny hugging. And those of us who've sat through these kind of summit translations and sometimes had to do you know listen to them simultaneous translation is like how is this all going out in portuguese in terms of what we can do as individuals because it can feel in the grand scheme of things that

anything we do as individuals does feel a bit like urinating into an erupting volcano in that it makes us feel better about ourselves any waz does but it's not really doing much to prevent the overall eruption this is what we've got to do this is very important when you choose your life partner okay the most important question is how do you deal with a thermostat because i didn't ask my partner i didn't all right did you know it goes past 25 i didn't know it did that i didn't know i came downstairs one day and i was like why who broke the thermostat it's at a funny angle the thing that points that the number supposed to be it's not pointing at 20 anymore it's pointing at 27 i thought it was just fixed at 20 i didn't know it had to move i thought it was decoration yes this is indeed uh well it's been earth day this week the valentine's day of environmental

pledges the usa and the eu have stated new targets for emissions reductions the uk has also promised to drop it by 78% compared to 1990 levels after Boris Johnson received a text message from an unborn future billionaire saying, Please send help. Regarding Boris Johnson's pledge, Labour said the government had to match rhetoric with reality, which rather misses the whole point of rhetoric. That takes us to the end of this week's news quiz. The final scores.

Rail Madbid, one. Atletico Getrid, five. It's a massive win in the derby. Thank you very much to our panellists this week, Anne McElvoy and Chris McCausland and Athena Koblenu and Andrew Maxwell. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Taking part in the News Quiz were Andrew Maxwell, Anne McElvoy,

Athena Koblenu and Chris McCausland. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material was written by Alice Fraser, Jen and Eunice, Mike Sheppard and Rajiv Kharia. The producer was Richard Morris and it was a BBC Studios production.