Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - Friday 4th June 2021

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Andy Zaltzman presents a look back at the week's headlines with guests Andrew Maxwell, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Alex Massie and Ria Lina.It's the last episode in the series and Andy FINALLY becomes the first News Quiz host to present the programme from the BBC Test Match Special commentary box at Lords.Written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Alice Fraser, Max Davis and Tasha Dhanraj.Producer: Richard Morris Production Coordinator: Cherlynn Andrew-Wilfred Sound Editor: Marc WillcoxA BBC Studios Production

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman. If you are listening in Portugal, please note that you are now required to turn off this programme and destroy your radio. The usual Portuguese language of the show will now be broadcast in Australian, whilst the Indian edition of the show will be delivered in Ancient Greek.

For everyone else, welcome to the final news quiz of this series. Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman. This week I'm recording the show from the commentary box at Lord's Cricket Ground. Which makes this the first comedy news programme to be broadcast from Lord's since WG Grace guest-hosted Mock the Wigs from this very spot in 1884. And we start this week with a very amusing misprint. Twice-divorced man gets married in a Catholic cathedral.

I can't believe I got through the sub-editors. Your teams for this week. We have Team All Over versus Team All Over the Shop. On Team All Over, it's Kiri Pritchard-McLean and, from The Times, Alex Massey. it's Kiri Pritchard-McLean and from The Times, Alex Massey. And on team all over the shop, it's Andrew Maxwell and Ria Lina.

And your first question this week, going to both teams, is who will not be appearing in any advertisements for L'Oreal any time soon after the government decided they are not worth it? Is this Kevin Collins? It is, yes. The government's

coronavirus education czar, which is a hell of a title, he was asked to come up with a series of recommendations for what to do in education in England over the next couple of years, working on the theory that a lot of kids have missed a lot of school and perhaps there should be some consideration given to letting them catch up. And so he came up with a series of measures amounting to one point five billion pounds. So a fairly trivial difference.

And Mr. Collins, being a miserable kind of person, decided this wasn't good enough and has resigned. Correct. In Umbridge. Yes. Umbridge, of course, is the setting for the radio so-called The Urchers. So he suggested 15 billion and the government, well, they just took zero off it. So, I mean, they've just taken nothing away from it, essentially, technically, mathematically.

They just sort of moved the point a little. Yes. Well, you can't argue with that, can you? I think he described it, or it might be someone else described the amount of money as a damp squib. Yes. Which is also the shade of lipstick I'm wearing at the moment. Because they think after the last couple of years that pupils need about 100 hours of teaching

to catch up from everything they've lost because of the coronavirus, which is quite a lot, isn't it? To go, right, 100 hours, what have we missed in that 100 hours? So I reckon there's going to be about 40 minutes of them just shouting, there's a dog in the playground. And at least two hours of just typing boobies on a calculator and then we'll be sort of caught up it's the equivalent of three test matches really andy all right okay you're putting in terms i can understand i mean you know recently you know matt hancock obviously

has been getting a lot of attention for his performance in this you know ministry of all the talents um and you can just sort of get the sense that gavin williamson wants to pop up and remind everyone that you know he's still very much here you know um he says that the government's proposals do involve a quantum of money um which is one of the more disappointing Bond movies. You know, that amounted to, I think, about £22 per child in primary schools in England, which should get the job done. Gavin Williams thought it was a lot of money. He said as a Yorkshireman, he thought it was quite a hefty amount and would have a direct impact on children.

But the only way that's going to have a direct impact on children is if you turn it into two pound coins and literally drop it on them from a height. It did make me think that. I saw that as well, Kerry, that they referred to it as a damp squib. And it does make you think you never hear of any other type of squib.

They're always damp. I think it's the same way nobody ever asks for a single whammy. Surely once in a while people are like, gee, I want a whammy, but I don't think I could do a double. There's quite a lot of evidence to suggest that longer school days don't actually help things at all and they don't actually get more work done.

So I think that half an hour extra is very clearly for the parents and not the children. Amen! Just 30 minutes longer. Keep them. Keep them longer. Keep them in the summer.

Kiri, you are so right because I love my children, but I did not have my children to see that much of my children. Is there an argument? There's an extra half hour a day to get this extra 100 hours. Why not just do the 100 hours in one go? Just straight through. What's that? Four 24-hour blocks and then four hours and, you know,

survival of the fittest. I think they'll all come out stronger at the other end. Why can't we just skip at all the exams and this sort of nonsense and pretending that's fair or just when it's clearly not and it's been money doped by the ruling elite way into the, you know,

even before these children are born. But kids, if they respond to honesty, if teachers just went, all right, be honest, who's smart and who's thick? Kind of self-assessment. Yeah, exactly. Come on.

Do you know, I think that's a really good idea because, you know, they're planning on spending this money on tutoring hours. They said, oh, we're going to put in all this money to tutor children, but I worked it out and they're actually only budgeting £10 an hour for each tutor, which I'm sorry, those are crappy tutors, right?

That's not a good tutor. You're paying for a GCSE student, maybe an A-level student at the most. And I'm sorry, are you going to trust someone to tutor your child in history who is so young they think Arab Spring is a type of water? As a child free woman, I just sort of didn't get the fuss over homeschooling and how hard it was and how gruelling it was. Because I kept thinking, families managed before kids went to school, that was fine. But then I remembered, of course they managed before

because their children were either up a chimney or dying of cholera and they keep quite quiet when that's happening. What you're suggesting is going back to the up a chimney option in a world of central heating. is going back to the upper chimney option in a world of central heating. Listen, mate. I'll have them go up a drainpipe. I'm not fussy about what they go up,

just as long as they're going up it. Don't cut that out and use that in isolation and get me cancelled, please. In Kevin Collins' article when he explained his resignation, he wrote that the Dutch government's recovery plan is worth £2,500 a child. The US is worth the equivalent of £1,600 per pupil. What is the average amount of money going to each child in England?

Do any of you know that? Is it like two Freddo bars worth? That is correct. Yes, well done. I mean, there are Freddo bars that cost £155 each. But still, that's only £310 per pupil. I mean, is the average Dutch child worth eight times more than the average English child? I haven't checked eBay for a while.

Well, they're three times as tall. I mean, isn't that a rare example of the question to which the answer is yes? I guess there's two ways of looking at that. Either we're underfunding our children's education, or we're getting an absolute bargain compared to the Dutch and the Americans.

The way to look at it is the Dutch invest in their children. They have a world-class education system. Primary, secondary, and then tertiary education. It's absolutely second to none. But our kids are right laugh. You know what I mean?

Nobody's ever gone, hey, you're going to love it. The Dutch are coming. Yes, this is the story of the education recovery starterar, Sir Kevin Collins, who showed that he'd been paying attention to his history classes at school by thinking about what usually happens to czars and resigning just in time. Sir Kevin's resignation followed the government's announcement this week of an education catch-up plan promising £1.4 billion extra over three years,

including £1 billion for 100 million hours of tutoring, £250 million for teacher training and development, and the other £150 million is going to a buddy of Matt Hancock's who said he's got some spare pencils the kids can have. Hedgeteachers criticise the proposals as a damp squib and hugely disappointing,

which I believe is polite fancy talk for an abdication of government responsibility and a betrayal of a generation. Education remains a big issue, and some have suggested that in the aftermath of COVID, the government will go back to educational basics and renewing schools' focus on the three R's, illiteracy and innumeracy. At the end of our education round, it's two points all. It's lovely for me to be doing this at Lords.

I've been here for Test Match Special, where I actually have to keep genuine score with real numbers. Can I ask a cricket question as long as you've never seen a game? How long do the players have to do Test Matches before they can do real matches? Ria's team have been deducted 25 points. Might have got away with it when Sandy Toksvig was in charge, but not since Miles and I have been doing it.

Now, right. Moving on. Another question for both teams. Why this week was no news, good news? Oh, this weekend, all the statisticians in the entire country actually took the weekend off, so technically nobody died. That's correct. Yes, the first time there'd been no deaths reported since July of last year from COVID. I should put that, but that's fairly crucial to that.

First time since July last year that there was no COVID deaths reported in a day. But there's still a lot of tension about the releasing of lockdown. Alex, Scotland seems to be at the start of a third wave, so you're getting a go on it slightly before England. Do you think this is going to prove as popular as the poll tax,

which had a similar trial scheme? Yeah, well know we're beyond the walls so we're still waiting for summer and in so uh yes well there was good news for glasgow this week they went from level three to level two but there was bad news for uh edinburgh and other parts of the central belt who had hoped to move from level two to level one uh but they remain in level two which means in edinburgh people are allowed to to hug um although because it's edinburgh mercifully there hasn't been much evidence of people taking advantage of these strange little days and because in level one you're allowed to meet more people than you would like even if there

weren't a pandemic um and you can have a much more expensive wedding. I'm on Anglesey, the island at the top of Wales, which is obviously very beautiful. So unfortunately, we are smack bang right in the middle of our third wave of scousers. What's the difference between third-wave scousers and third-wave feminists? I can't remember how that is. Well, I'm hoping that this third-wave Covid is like third-wave feminism

and the virus is just going to release loads of great punk music. That's what I'm hoping for. I get that people are scared because it feels like this calm-before-the-storm situation because I think as a country, we've all got that feeling of like, you know, when a massive hangover is in the post, but it hasn't hit yet. You know, when things relaxed and we started having picnics again and then going to beer gardens and then, you know, like licking each other's faces that eventually we'd have to deal with the repercussions. that eventually we'd have to deal with the repercussions. Britain reported zero Covid deaths for the first time since July last year,

back in those innocent times, and we still needed to check at least once more to be sure whether encouraging the spread of the virus was a good idea or not a good idea. Outbreaks of the newly renamed Delta variant in schools in Bristol led to warnings that schoolchildren risk becoming, quote, the canary in the coal mine. And that's yet more bad news for our beleaguered school kids. History suggests that being anything in a coal mine under a conservative government is a high risk strategy. Moving on to another COVID question. Why can't you beat a beta? What could be dealt a delta?

What could land a lambda? And why could Sigma avoid stigma? Is this not the story that they're changing the names of the variants? Correct. Apparently it's the World Health Organization

and the UN and NATO and a few others have decided that not calling the variants by where they first cropped up because that might be mean on people. So the Kent one and then the South African one and the Indian

one and they're all going to be named after letters in the Greek alphabet because they don't want to put stigma on those places. But they're happy to dump it on the Greeks. Claim it all on the places. But they're happy to dump it on the Greeks. Blame it all on the Greeks. Is that not what we all learned from 2008? It was the Greeks' fault.

You know, this really irritates me. If you don't know, I actually was a virologist before I was a comedian. And you know what? People aren't stupid. And I wish they would stop treating us as such. There already exists established nomenclature systems

for the naming and tracking of these variants. Like, for example, the Indian, which is known as B.1.6172 or G.4.5.B.1.6172 or G.4.5.2.R.V.3 or 21AS.478K. But now we got to remember Delta. 78K, but now we've got to remember Delta. Yes, the WHO has to name variants of COVID after the Greek alphabet rather than the country of origin.

The Indian variant has been renamed the Delta variant as part of the World Health Organization's goal of making all COVID strains sound more like books by Andy McNabb. Aside from this story representing Peak Radio 4, we do have to ask is this going to work or is this just pie in the xy?

Besides, they can't row back on the idea now or it will be out for nothing. That will really eat away at them. Good stuff to cap a good section of the show. And that's two points that I owe to team all over the show. Minus 23 points. Right.

The score is now 111 for two. Oh, no, sorry. I'm reading the wrong score. It's four to team all over, eight to team all over the shot. Next question now. Which twice-divorced man turned out not to have been divorced if you put him in a magic divorce-ignoring church? Any guesses? Any guesses, anyone?

It was described as a stealth wedding. This is Prime Minister Johnson and his good lady got married in Westminster Cathedral, a Catholic cathedral. He's a fella, if you've never heard of him before, he's been divorced a couple of times and there's other stuff I could tell you. Family show, Andrew. Family show. ever heard of him before. He's been divorced a couple of times and there's other stuff I could tell you. Family show, Andrew.

Family show. He's already divorced twice. The Catholic Church has put people who are in dreadful marriages through hell for literally a millennia, not letting them get divorced. Then he comes along and gets to get married after two divorces in the National Catholic Cathedral.

Let me tell you, when I see the apostolic nuncio on the fairway, there's going to be some words. It's being rebranded. There's some people saying that this shows how the Catholic Church is more modern because Boris is twice divorced. But I think a quicker way of doing that would be to allow same-sex marriage. It was very last minute, though, wasn't it? It was last minute. It was really secret. It was so secret that, in fact, the party donors who paid for it didn't even know that it was happening. party donors who paid for it didn't even know that it was happening. I mean, I suppose all marriages are a triumph of hope over reality, but this one perhaps more so than the most. I mean, Johnson's the first prime minister to be married in office since Lord

Liverpool got hitched in 1822. And no one since then has matched Lord Liverpool's 14 years in office. So I'm sure many listeners are looking forward to the next 12 years of Boris in Downing Street. Listen, just because so we don't get done over with lefty bias on the show... Let's just say he's a bloody good laugh. Isn't he fun? Not like that care whatever his name is.

He's a public prosecutor. He's no fun. Whereas Boris Johnson's fun. He's never combed his hair. How fun is that? I have to say, though, the Westminster Cathedral, I'm sure you've all been in it. It's an absolute triumph of ecclesiastical architecture

from the late Victorian period, taking most of its delicate cues from the Eastern Church. I believe it's largely based on Hagia Sophia in what is now Istanbul. So if any of that appeals to you, get along there and get married. Andrew Maxwell, you truly are the human Wikipedia. Did you know Google calls me up on the landline asking for answers? Yes, after last week's unedifying endoscopy

into the bowels of the Johnson regime, that was Dominic Cummings' show-and-tell session before the House of Commons Select Committee, a happier story for the Prime Minister, winner of this year's hit TV show, The Masked Catholic. No-one would have guessed it was him. He got married to his latest fiancée, Carrie Simmons, in a secretly planned wedding atding at the Westminster Cathedral.

It was another classic loop-the-loophole manoeuvre by the impressively aerobatic moral stuntman Boris Johnson, and many Catholics are confused and appalled. Personally, as a neutral, as a second-generation lapsed Jew, I'm just sad that this has brought an end to an unbroken 2,000-year scandal-free run for the Catholic Church. an unbroken 2,000-year scandal-free run for the Catholic Church. After a two-day micro-honeymoon,

the Catholicly married Johnsons will not have a full honeymoon until the summer of 2022, which is when the suddenly Catholic Boris Johnsons first go in the confession booth, which started just as we went on air, is predicted to finish. The score is now, let's call it, seven points to nine, and I'm not telling you who to. And we move on now. Moving on now, let's give this question to team all over the shop,

to Ria and Andrew. Who is going to be allowed an extra what as a special treat to reward them for an alarmingly declining national birth rate. We can answer our own questions. Not in China, you can't. Apparently, there aren't enough Chinese people in the world. This was discovered recently. And so apparently China has a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman.

I don't know what 0.3 of a child looks like. Yeah, there aren't enough children in China. So they are now allowed to have three children, which most women don't want anyway. But that's China. It means now that potentially the Chinese could have their own version of the Bee Gees. We can build a better world. Right? But sadly, not the Coors.

And it'll be a cold day in hell when they get their own Osmonds. It is important to know that this is a limit. It's not a dictate. You don't have to have three kids because I know sometimes in China it's a little unclear,

but like a married couple in their 70s don't suddenly have to scramble about for Viagra and a surrogate. It's not a must. It's a choice that the government is allowing people to make, like voting in Hong Kong. China has announced it will allow couples to have up to three children after census data showed a steep decline in birth rates. And decline in birth rates across the globe has given rise to the theory that sperm have somehow gained access to media news

sources, had a look and collectively said no thanks. Moving up to Scotland now with the scores at 10 points all this can go to Alex's team, to team all over, Alex and Kiri, what has been found for the first time ever in Scotland?

Drawings. I mean, actual proper drawings. Technically, these are carvings of deer that have been discovered in a Neolithic burial chamber in Argyll. It's the Sistine Chapel of Neolithic burial chambers. No-one had previously thought to look at the ceiling, which is where the carvings are. And they're very excited about these because they're 4,000 to 5,000 years old.

That's correct, yes. This is what I love about this story is they're cave carvings. How Scottish is that? Everywhere else in the world, it's a cave painting, you know? It's just a Neolithic man somewhere in what is now Italy, you know? We live such a brief life and the animals mean so much to us. Let's paint them

and celebrate their beauty and importance. Not in Scotland. Where you going, Tam, with that recently sharpened hand tool? I'm just going into that cave and I'm going to stab it until it looks like a deer but do they though?

do they look like deers? I mean I've looked at the pictures if that's what animals looked like back then like thank god for evolution to just neaten them up a bit you know what I mean? I mean are they cave carvings? is it just staring at clouds and seeing shapes? you know what i mean i mean are they cave carvings is it just staring at clouds

and seeing shapes you know no definitely whenever i see an article like this i get really excited and then i see a picture about what they're talking about and it's sort of like i'm reacting to my mate showing me a picture of her baby and how cute it is and i'm like oh yeah I guess if I sort of squint, I can see it. Just because you don't have them in Wales or England or Ireland. There's just a politics of envy and begrudgery. It's disgusting. Is this a boost for independence, Alex, that has proved that Scottish people can do their own rock art?

Our own primitive rock carvings, yes. I mean, well, what day is it? I mean, you know, it's like one of these decision trees. You know, did the sun come up this morning? Case for independence is strengthened. Did the sun fail to come up this morning? Well, the case for independence is immeasurably strengthened. We won't be able to see, but we will be free.

Prehistoric animal carvings thought to be thousands of years old have been found in Argyle in Scotland. They include images of deers, which scientists believe were drawn to encourage Neolithic people to slow down to under 30 miles an hour when riding a saber-toothed tiger. Other theories are that it's a police incident cave, early photo fits or carving fits as they were known,

of suspects in a drive-by antlering. An archaeologist studying cave art across Europe has now this week revealed results of decades of intensive study into the images of animals and humans found in caves which date back up to tens of thousands of years. Professor Pileon Graffard announced, these pictures, which give us a fascinating link into our distant prehistories of species, are, with all due respect, absolutely rubbish.

For the most part, they're just the kind of half-assed scrawlings most of us could do in our sleep. Our theory, therefore, is that the caves where these artworks were found were most likely some kind of preschool nursery or kindergarten art club. Seriously, most five-year-olds would be embarrassed by this shit. I don't care how prehistoric you were. Right, with the scores tantalisingly tied at 13 points all, we come to the final question of the series. Always good to end any series on a cliffhanger.

So here is our cliffhanger question. Should the relaxation of lockdowns be delayed? Tune in in September for the answer. That brings us to the end of this series. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks to our

panellists this week, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Alex Massey, Ria Lina and Andrew Maxwell. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Thank you for listening. See you later in the year. Taking part in the news quiz were Alex Massey, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Andrew Maxwell and Ria Lina. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman

and additional material was written by Alice Fraser, Max Davis and Tia Lina. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material was written by Alice Fraser, Max Davis and Tasha Danraj. The producer was Richard Morris and it was a BBC Studios production. Thank you.