Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The Now Show - 14th April

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Steve Punt. With me are Kiara Goldsmith, Luke Kemner, Alex Keeley, Ahir Shah and Rachel Parris. And this is... That's your cue, Mr President.

My what? Your cue, the now show. The now what? Yeah, yeah, but louder. Oh, the now what? Thank you. Yes, this week, the US President visited Ireland on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement

with the government hopeful the problems of the Northern Ireland Protocol are now in the past, thanks to the so-called Windsor Framework, where goods leaving Northern Ireland are checked, personally, by a member of the Windsor family. Excuse me, what kind of potatoes are these? Jersey Royals. Oh, take them straight through, I think we're related.

Joe Biden is particularly keen to emphasise his Irish roots, telling whoever asks him... I am the great-grandson of the Bluets of County Mayo and the Finnegans of County Louth. Although no-one's ever fathomed why a man notorious for his gaffes should want to actually remind everyone that he comes from a family actually called Bluet. In 2015, he made a joke at an event with the then-president of Ireland

where he told the media... Anyone wearing orange, you're not welcome in. He was just checking no-one from the Liberal Democrats was trying to sneak through. Last year, he said at a St Patrick's Day event... I may be Irish, but I'm not stupid. You see? Blew It. And on Wednesday, he managed to confuse

the All Blacks with the Black and Tans. Blew it. And on Wednesday, he managed to confuse the all-blacks with the black and tans. Blew it again. The thing is, American presidents traditionally love talking about their Celtic roots. In US politics, Irishness operates on the same principle as homeopathy. The more diluted it is, the more potent it becomes. It's not always Ireland, of course. Donald Trump's mother came from Scotland,

from a little village on the Isle of Lewis, something he clearly cared a lot about. I love Scotland land. My dear mother, whose name I forget, came from the beautiful island of John Lewis. And that is why I want to build a golf course there. Because they guarantee that if I can build it cheaper somewhere else, they'll give me my money back.

Now, underneath all this, peace in Ireland is an issue Biden does care very deeply about. He was a senator at the time of the Good Friday Agreement and a junior congressman at the time of Good Friday. There's also the controversy over his decision not to attend the coronation, even though everyone who attended the funeral got a free re-entry within 12 months voucher.

Various papers reported this week that the ceremony, which is being organised in literally half of the 16 months it took to organise the last coronation, is running into problems, including, according to the Daily Mirror... Rehearsals for the ceremony reportedly ran over time. So it's not like the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to say... I'm afraid we need to hurry.

We've got another coronation in at 12.30. And the Mirror also claimed that... Key outfits for senior members of the royal family, including the Princess of Wales, Princess Royal and Duchess of Edinburgh, have still not been decided. That's nothing. As soon as he heard Harry was coming, William now wants to wear a T-shirt reading,

I'm with stupid. Other claims include... Procession route still not agreed on. Seriously, it's 2023. That is the easiest problem in the world to solve. In 25 yards, at the next geometric, gothic, medieval abbey, you have reached your destination.

It is true, though. The Mirror suggests that there are rows over the Coronation Route, with planners opting against a larger procession to keep policing costs down. If it's just about keeping costs down, they could go Green Park to Westminster on the Jubilee line. They're both over 60. It wouldn't cost anything.

Hopefully, with all those crowds due on the streets, at least the junior doctor strike will be over by May 6th. So far, the negotiations have gone... We want 35%. We're offering five. But we... Five. No more than five. It's all bluff, of course,

and it's a bad idea to try and bluff doctors because they regularly ask people how many units of alcohol they drink a week. And they know very well that five means about 30. Interestingly, the government have waited until the four-day strike is well over to stage their national emergency alarm test. I don't know if you've seen about this. As the official spokesperson put it, on Sunday 23rd at three, everyone with a

mobile phone or tablet is going to get a test alarm consisting of 10 seconds of sound and vibration designed to alert people to extreme events or attacks, except in prisons where it's designed to alert guards as to exactly where you've hidden your Nokia 3310. Now the alarm noise varies according to age group as to what will cause the most reaction. For baby boomers it's... Putin's pushed the button! Run! But for Generation Z, it's... Ah! The landline's ringing! What do I do? So now, please welcome back to the show, Ahishar. Thank you very much.

As we're recording, junior doctors are on strike across England. First, it's important to remember that a junior doctor is just any doctor below consultant level. You can be a junior doctor and be quite highly experienced, right? It's not like the medical equivalent of a provisional driver's licence. When you hear about junior doctors, it's not like they've still got spots any more than a GP practice needs to have a few more tries before they really nail it.

Now, I am not a junior doctor. I just look like one. For listeners, I am a British Indian man, so I also look like a prime minister. Also, early doors, before anyone listening to this goes, oh, the junior doctor strike is just an England story, this wave of strike action could yet go UK-wide. In Scotland, junior doctors are being balloted on strike action

with the ballot closing on 5th May. Some of you might be thinking, oh, that's a bit close to the elections for local councils, but Scottish local elections aren't happening until 2027. Or, as new SNP leader Humza Yousaf would say, Scottish local elections aren't happening until 2027. Yes, get in! Thanks, Humza. And negotiations around pay and conditions are ongoing in Wales and Northern Ireland. Basically, the money issue is an issue everywhere. It's such an issue that this current strike was backed by 98% of junior doctors balloted by the British

Medical Association, about half of junior doctors overall, right? 98% is genuinely remarkable. I know the NHS has an international workforce, but they can't all be French. workforce, but they can't all be French. The worry is, however, that many NHS staff are looking to become Australian. Now, this is a big deal, both for us and for Australia. For a long time, Australia has sort of been a byword for tough immigration policies. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure Australia had the world's first Australian-style points-based system. Either them or Austria, it's one of the two. But they're very keen on our junior doctors and nurses. You see, over here, starting salary for a junior doctor is about 30 grand.

In Australia, it's double that. It's interesting. For quite a while now, the UK has tried to plug staffing shortfalls in the NHS by hiring doctors and nurses from countries like India, the Philippines, Nigeria, places with worse staff-to-patient ratios and more strained healthcare systems than we have, but whose medical professionals can make more money here. It's wild to think that now, on the other side of the world, someone may in all seriousness say...

Given the struggles in their own health care system, I'm just not sure it's ethical to be actively recruiting Brits. Staffing shortfalls in this country have been exacerbated since 2008, when, as reported in the British Medical Journal, there was a vote to... Restrict the number of places at medical schools. Alongside... A complete ban on opening new medical schools.

Yeah, right, and that was voted for by... Delegates at the annual British Medical Association conference. Awkward! Fortunately, that's the only time in this country's history when people have voted for something that, in retrospect, seems woefully misconceived. Whatever your perspective on the BMA as a union, I think everyone wants medical professionals to be paid well.

There's just disagreement over what well means. Strikes by nurses, paramedics and junior doctors have all, perhaps surprisingly, been met with majority support from the general public. But this makes sense to me, right? In my experience, most medical professionals I've met don't just see it as a job, they see it as a calling.

Something that you are, not just something that you do. And we all benefit from that and when we take it for granted, we do so at our own peril. Personally, I don't want to wake up after an operation and find myself going, So, how did it go? Well, I'm going to level with you. My landlord's putting the rent up 20% and I got worried. And long story short, I took out the wrong ball. If you're in your late 20s or early 30s, skilled, educated, maybe thinking about starting a family, I can see why doubling

your money in Oz sounds pretty attractive. Listen, I'm biased, right? One of my best mates is a junior doctor. He's a surgeon in an NHS hospital. He's 32 years old, he's highly qualified, he's in a long-term relationship, but the only reason he can even dream about maybe buying a house and having kids in Britain right now

is that his girlfriend is a dentist. And tooth money is proper money. Honestly, I don't know if any of you have been to a dentist recently, but in my experience, it goes something like this. Mr Shah, lovely to meet you. Open wide, please. I can confirm that you do indeed have teeth. What? That'll be £300, please. Honestly, the only

place selling more expensive photos of open mouth than the dentist is Alton Towers. So what does the British Medical Association want? Well, they mainly want to restore pay to 2008 levels. The BMA says restoring pay to those levels would take a 35% increase. Health Secretary Steve Barclay has said that this is unreasonable and let's not be about the bush. 35% is loads. It'd cost over a billion quid and the government isn't willing to give junior doctors that unless they can take payment in the form of unusable PPE. unless they can take payment in the form of unusable PPE. The BMA came up with the 35% figure by calculating the impact of inflation

according to something called the Retail Price Index, or RPI. Some people have criticised this, saying RPI is an outdated measure. This is kind of understandable, given RPI is based on what's known as a basket of goods and not, like most of us have nowadays, a tote bag of crap. I don't know how to fix this problem. But if Australia is offering 100% pay rise and all we can muster are three-year-old claps and bashed pans, we shouldn't be surprised to see more young people who we can scarcely afford to lose instead voting with their feet.

Remember, there is only one three-letter institution in this country that can get away with paying people considerably less than market rate, and you're listening to it. Talking of which, Elon Musk gave an interview to the BBC this week, which came about largely because he didn't know the difference between government-funded and publicly funded. So, in effect, the whole thing was a fact-checking exercise, as so much news increasingly is. News sites now seem to take up half their space, fact-checking news from non-news sites, pretending to offer news, or fake news sites offering news that isn't news.

And it's reached the point where this week the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Ternus, announced the creation of... A forensic journalism hub dedicated to fact-checking and verifying news. So that's the way it's going. Soon the nightly bulletin could just be a sort of current affairs edition of Would I Lie To You?

US headlines now, and Donald Trump claimed today that courtroom officials in Manhattan began crying when he was charged because they couldn't bear to see their country reduced to this. What do you think, David Mitchell? I think that's a lie.

Yes, so do I. Lee does as well. So do you think, David Mitchell? I think that's a lie. Yes, so do I. Lee does as well. So, Mr President, what's the answer? That is actually true. No, I can't. Oh my God. Only kidding, it's a lie. A good one, but the bit about me being the first man on the moon, that was true.

It is increasingly necessary, though, with deepfake technology and other forms of elaborate trickery, it's very easy these days to create misleading media content. Hi, I'm Hugh Dennis. And, you know, I don't think it's going to stop. The Now Show? It's uncanny, ladies and gentlemen. What qualifies as a fact is even disputed.

There was an argument this week about Labour's use of statistics in so-called attack ads, which have, to put it mildly, divided supporters. A leaked email from a UK Labour official read... We are going to be ruthless in showing how 13 years of Tory government has broken our systems and held everyone back. And while some criticise the tactic, though, Keir Starmer has doubled down in a move that has surprised all onlookers.

Here we see a display unlike any we have seen before. Completely out of character for this species, the top dog appears forthright and unwavering. It seems the leader of this weak, unedited, unverifiable content, and the statistics are pretty clear, if you believe statistics. Only 16% of 24 to 35-year-olds read a printed newspaper, compared to over 50% of those over 75 and the other 50% would read it if they could find the right glasses. According to some sources over

70% of people who read newspapers now are guests doing the look ahead to tomorrow's newspapers on news programs and of course the switch to online news sources has been going on for at least two decades now, but the pandemic does seem to have speeded it up enormously. The reach of traditional newspapers fell from 47% of the population in 2020 to just 38% last year. That's a huge drop in a very short time. And thinking back to 2020, there are various possible reasons.

One... I'm not going to the shops at the moment, so I can't buy a paper. Two... I can buy a paper, but it'll be about the bloody pandemic, and I don't want to hear any more about it. And three... I normally read the papers in the cafe or the library, but I don't want to touch things other people have touched at the moment.

Yes, which was possibly a good thing for the newspaper industry, because nobody wanted to see the headline, I caught Covid from the Daily Mail, except the Daily Express, who had it ready to run for over 18 months. But whatever the reason, the decline of print spells bad news for a number of businesses. Fish and chip shops, for example, who now have to wrap cotton chips in yesterday's Amazon packaging. It's not just consuming news, of course, it's also producing it.

We all walk round with a broadcast-quality digital camera in our pocket nowadays, and we're citizen journalists, which sounds pretty grand, almost noble, but essentially means people whose first response to human tragedy is to get their phone out. It's a bit like that famous poem. If you can keep your head When all about you are losing theirs

And blaming it on you If you can hit record when others doubt you And get a shot of their doubting too If you can frame and keep their shot from wobbling And keep it running till disaster's done You'll have it up on TikTok in a minute And which is more You'll have it up on TikTok in a minute. And which is more, you'll sell the rights, my son.

Now, you're probably sitting there thinking, oh, I wish I knew more about the French pension crisis. Well, you're in luck. Please welcome back to the show, Alex Keeley. Good evening, or should I say bonsoir, as tonight I'm going to be shifting focus across the channel and talking about French politics and pensions, but obviously in English, because otherwise it's just going to be three minutes of me telling you how many brothers and sisters I have, what I like to do at the weekends, and then describing my typical day.

To be fair, during the pandemic, I actually relearned French for two weeks before I quit in theory, because one of the most important phrases in French still seems to be, Où est la bibliothèque? I've been to France a couple of times, I've actually never needed to ask for directions to the Bible disco. That's not something I've needed to...

I'm sure many of you are like me, blinded by the shiny lights of British and American political chaos and only occasionally turning your view back over the channel about once every five years to go, and how's France doing? Oh, every bin in Paris is on fire. Okay, cool. But of course, French politics does matter. France has the planet's seventh largest GDP and its world-leading exports include cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and cheeses that smell like the bathroom of a P&O ferry after a particularly rough crossing. France, together with Germany, makes up the primary axis of the European Union.

The EU would not survive a Frexit. You think U2 is chugging along without Bono in the edge? Oh, we're paying £110 to watch Adam Clayton and Larry Mullin Jr. play some tracks off the new album while we grow up. We came to see U2, not them two. Macron's answer to the challenge of the far right has been modernisation. In his first term, he vowed to get telecoms companies to improve rural internet and increase the coverage of super fast broadband in the countryside. And I'm sure we can all agree that that is awful. The countryside isn't allowed fast internet. That's not for them.

The city's made the internet because it's appalling, right? It's got light pollution, noise pollution, air pollution. It's this sort of toxic, dystopian nightmare. And good Wi-Fi is our little treat for tolerating that existence, right? Like, if any of you live somewhere where at night you can go outside, look up, and you can actually see the stars, you don't get to watch Squid Game in 4K. Like you can watch porn, but it's a gif. That's how you have to consume that. Basically, you can escape to the chateau or you can stream an episode of Escape to the Chateau. It's not both. But as well as infrastructure, Macron has been battling over various employment

reforms. The flagship change, which has seen waves of strikes rock France and more than a million protesters take to the streets, is the raising of the state pension age from 62 to 64. Macron would argue that rising life expectancy means people have to work longer to pay for a longer retirement, as is the case all over the world. Well, nearly all over. Britain has cleverly avoided this problem.

Our pension age was meant to rise from 66 to 68 by the end of the 2030s, but, according to Financial Times, thanks to COVID and an underfunded, backlogged NHS, British life expectancy projections have declined so much that the hike has been scrapped. Which is like being delighted you no longer have to pay home insurance because you lost your house in the divorce. It's technically true, but you're missing the bigger picture, bigger picture. And there are a lot of arguments against raising the pension

age. For a start, it'll ruin action movies. You know, 15 minutes into the film, the cop's partner is tragically killed just two days before retirement. And that serves the cop's motivation. He wasn't just my partner. He was like a brother. Now gunned down in cold blood two days before retirement. If I have to crawl into every crack house and sewer in this godforsaken city to smoke out the criminal delinquents who did this and avenge my partner, I will. Whereas if you raise the retirement age, the hero's reaction will be, Well, he had a good run. He was 78.

The French economist Thomas Piketty, a pronunciation that is correct and yet I still disagree with, has argued that pension reforms are unfair. Piketty rose to fame in 2014 when he wrote the 700-page economics bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, a book which I've finally finished reading the Wikipedia entry for. The 20 billion euros that Macron is touting the reforms will generate, argues Bichetti,

will largely be coming out the pockets of the working class, forcing people in quite gruelling and physically demanding professions to toil well into their 60s. And those professions already have lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes compared to richer, middle-class university graduates. But this is all symptomatic of a larger problem of Macron's presidency. He came into office promising a new way of doing things, big structural changes, and yet a lot of his taxes and his reforms seem to be hurting the working and lower middle classes rather than asking the wealthiest and healthiest to chip in more. And Macron, who no longer has a parliamentary majority, has used constitutional trickery and the powerful French presidency to push these reforms

through. It's undermining democracy, and some people wonder whether it might even, given the country's long history of constitutional upheaval, see the collapse of France's Fifth Republic. Presumably the next one will be called the Sixth Republic underscore final underscore final final underscore print this one dot pdf. A recent new statesman piece drawing on a decades-long survey of 10 000 people's usage of time shows that we all have less free time and what time we do have is increasingly fragmented by technology and the demands of work so retirement particularly that golden relatively healthy decade of your 60s was one of the last refuges of the good life and free time in our modern world and it's strange that a country france where its most famous novel is marcel proust's in search of lost time a la recherche de temps perdu has a president who's trying to

make the french people perdu even more top That was Alex Keelan. So this week, we finally learnt that Meghan is not coming to the coronation. And on this basis, we've asked her audience what social invitations they have avoided and what was their excuse. I like this one because it has a sort of brutal ring of truth about it. What invitations have you avoided?

Son's second birthday. What was your excuse? He was too young to know. We went to the Edinburgh Fringe. Avoided the Naturist Club annual general meeting. Your excuse? I had nothing to wear. What social invitations have you avoided?

My son's wedding. What was your excuse? Well, he didn't need his forest season ticket that day, so I thought I'd use it. And they lost. So, thank you for those. Now, if you've been inspired by listening to Alex to want to go to France and find out more about the pension crisis,

don't forget that the queue at Dover went on right through the Easter weekend and, in fact, our correspondent, Rachel Parris, is still there now. Rachel, how are things looking? The wheels on the bus do not go round They are quiet, stationary and still There are bluebirds over the white cliffs. And they're crapping on the windowsill. Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.

Beside the back seat of seat B. Coach C of crawly luxury. Easter. In a seat on a coach in a queue in a port in Dover Easter put C9 in recline for oaklet wine and a 60 birth motor

somewhere stationary adjacent to the coast is the place where I want to eat my lamb roast how blessed are we to celebrate in a queue stretching halfway to Margate.

Easter. I'm glad we never reached the boat, for this is just what we hoped for and more. No working toilet, no aircon, no food. Happy Easter. Praise the Lord. Yes, we wanted to be in Paris, but we were wrong. It we wanted to be in Paris But we were wrong

It's nicer to be in a bottleneck Six miles long Forget the Eiffel Tower Nigel hasn't had a shower now for four days That's a record We were anticipating the romance of France But Kent is even nicer given half the chance And Nigel only packed one change of pants

So it really feels like spring Easter Here so long going strong this vehicular conga is a party Party Tim and Jean have got the look if we're stuck here we might throw in our car keys We've been here so long, I'm finding Nigel interesting. We've been here so long, France has finally finished protesting. We've been here so long, we've written the sequel to Les Mis.

It's just as long and brutal, and it's about, well, this. I dreamed I didn't need a wing That tenor lady came in handy Easter and all the days all around it All round it's a resounding success No mistakes were made and we don't regret our choices It's not because of what you think, there's no dissenting voices Blinkers on, fingers in ears, eat an egg off Nigel

Happy Easter to us APPLAUSE You've been listening to The Now Show, starring Steve Punk, Ciara Goldsmith, Luke Kempner, Alex Keeley and Ahir Shah. The song was written and performed by Rachel Parris. The show was written by the cast, with additional material from Hugh Dennis, Laura Major, Mike Shepard, David Duncan and Kate Dennett.

The producer was Sasha Bobak, and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Hello, my name's Michelle D'Souza. And I'm Laura Smith. And we have a new podcast from BBC Radio 4. Bang On It is a weekly podcast where we curate, recommend, cherry pick through the week and just go, have a look at that.

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