Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The Now Show - 19th November ft Ria Lina, Josh Pugh and Beardyman

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches in front of a remote audience - and all from their own home!Joining them from a safe distance is Ria Lina taking on back-seat scientists, Josh Pugh pondering on dinosaur discoveries, and Beardyman playing us out with a jazzy ode to staying calm.Voice Actors: Luke Kempner and Natasha Hodgson Producer: Rajiv Karia Production Co-Ordinator: Sarah SharpeBBC Studios Production

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Steve Punt. And I'm Hugh Dennis. With us are Rialina, Josh Pugh, Natasha Hodgson, Luke Kempner and Beardy Man. And this is... The Now Show!

Ah, thank you. Thank you very much. So, just 12 years and four elections after it was first announced, the Yorkshire leg of HS2 is to be cancelled. Which will come as a great disappointment to the management of Yorkshire Cricket Club, many of whom will be desperate to leave the county at high speed. The government, however, say that they are spending lots of money on transport schemes

and that they are sticking firmly to their slogan... Build back, bet now on whether it will ever happen. Upgrading, of course, is certainly necessary. Our rail network is frequently described as Victorian infrastructure, partly because much of it was built in the 1840s and partly because when it comes to trains, the public will say... Please, sir, can we have some more? And the government will look at them and shout...

More! ..like it's a completely unreasonable request, even though we're supposed to be discouraging car use. Certainly East Yorkshire is not going to get a branch of HS2, although according to the government's busiest department, the Ministry of Excuses for U-turns, it's to do with speeding things up. Which does have some logic. Britain famously takes decades to build anything, and the longer things take, the bigger the chance they're outdated before they're finished. London's Crossrail began construction in 2009 to relieve

overcrowding on the tube network. A task now accomplished for free by the pandemic, which has cut 30% off passenger numbers from two years ago. Brexit has also happened during construction, which the planners cleverly anticipated by ensuring that Crossrail doesn't connect to Eurostar anyway, or HS2 for that matter, ensuring that by the year 2050 you still won't be able to get from Manchester to Paris without changing onto a stretch of the Northern Line built in 1907. When it comes to the difference between transport vision and the reality, Mind the Gap. Then, this week, we learned that inflation is now over 4%, so all those papers that write headlines like...

Millennials can't afford a house because they spend all their money on avocados. ..can now write a new headline. Millennials can't afford avocados. Whatever the reason, though, cost or time, the longer journeys are leads will delight some people, including crime writers, who'll have much more time to make their plots work.

One of you on this train committed murder, and I intend to tell you. Ah, merd, we are in Leeds already. I will reveal the solution while we dine at Uppercross Baguettes. But the cancellation will come as a disappointment to East Yorkshire's business community and also to any of Yorkshire's young witches and wizards hoping to reach King's Cross in time for the Hogwarts Express.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, perhaps they could celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter films by streamlining the appallingly inefficient Hogwarts transport arrangements, where they send an owl to Yorkshire to tell you to go to London to catch a train to Scotland. Oh, Albus, however will we start the sorting ceremony? Half the Northern children aren't here. Ah, yes, Minerva. I've received word they're stuck in London on Platform 9 ¾. It was supposed to be Platform 10,

but they cancelled it before it was finished. It is a blow, though, to levelling up, whatever levelling up means. There are various theories on this. The most convincing being that it's a phrase coined by Rishi Sunak for when he puts on his special shoes with the lifts in to make him look taller. Technology, of course, may prove to be the answer. The Department of Transport are working on a new, cheaper alternative to high-speed rail, teaming up with Mark Zuckerberg to develop a metaverse

in which, via a headset, they can imagine that they're on a faster train. At this rate, HS2 is going to have fewer stops than Adele's tour and will charge about the same for tickets. But, hey, you never know. Christmas is coming. This year, give them a Hornby HS2 train set. Order now for delivery in 2035, if at all. And at six times the price on the box. Offer applies only as far as crew and is subject to change.

Houses and public rights of way may disappear, although golf courses will probably be fine. Offer applies only as far as crew and is subject to change. Houses and public rights of way may disappear, although golf courses will probably be fine, except in Labour constituencies, where they're gone to. Batteries, controllers and leads not included. However, the eastern connection to the Birmingham branch is not to be entirely abandoned. The high-speed line will go to an East Midlands hub from where passengers will transfer to a high-speed replacement bus service

using Britain's new network of smart motorways. If you're wondering what is smart about a smart motorway, they continuously monitor traffic, they adapt their capacity to reflect traffic conditions and provide information to drivers. For example, you can ask them, How do I get to Birmingham? And they will say,

Frankly, I would get the train if I were you. Now, with her ode to the backseat scientist, we're going to take a backseat ourselves and hand you over to Rialina. Hi. We all remember clapping for the NHS on Thursday nights, right? Well, I'd like to propose that we bring that back, but this time for all the people that have become scientific experts in the last 18 months, or as I like to call them, the backseat scientists.

I'm referring to the pick-and-mix fanatics who like to do their own research, picking and mixing facts to suit their narrative from which to drive conversation and public opinion. The backseat scientist. Or the BS scientist, if you will. Now, BS, may I call you that? If you feel you're not getting enough credit for doing your own research well we real scientists know what that feels like. We know how hard it is to do research when you have lab facilities, admin staff and funding. So how you're doing objective hypothesis testing,

data collection, and analysis with just your laptops and whatever you can find in your mother's basement is amazing. I mean, back in my day, we used to have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a peer to review our work. Nowadays, you can just turn it into a meme and share it in the WhatsApp group. Incredible! But if you backseat scientists have proven anything,

it's that the internet is all we ever needed to make true scientific headway into massively complex issues. And, just like sat-nav to the black cabbie, render my three-degree certificates nothing more than roof insulation. If only someone could run out to the M25 and let those protesters know the problem has been solved. We can just use the educated self-esteem to keep Britain warm. I'm actually slightly embarrassed when I think of all the time we've wasted in science, coming up with an hypothesis, doing objective research, analyzing the data and then drawing conclusions when we could have just come up with a conclusion and doing objective research, analyzing the data, and then drawing conclusions, when we could have just come up with a conclusion and then found evidence to back it up.

If only confirmation bias was allowed when I was writing my thesis, I could have been a doctor by lunch and had my own show on GB News by dinner. If anything, pseudoscience is underrated it deserves more respect i mean it sounds really good if someone said they had a degree in pseudoscience you would be impressed especially if your degree was in something like sociology after all if it wasn't for pseudoscience, we wouldn't have pseudocrem. I want to say, just as you aren't getting enough credit for some of your work, we scientists sometimes get too much credit.

I mean, the lab leak theory, for example. The idea that the SARS-2 coronavirus might actually be a man-made biological weapon created by one of my colleagues to destroy the world? Ha! I wish! If scientists were beavering away trying to come up with the perfect biological weapon, why release this one? How did that meeting go? Here at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan! What does it say about me that I'm Asian and I still feel

more comfortable giving the CEO of the Institute a German accent rather than a Chinese one? Anyway, the arbitrary deadline of November 2019 has arrived. What viruses have we developed to wreak havoc on our enemies? Well, this virus targets gingers. What's the point? So does the sun. Well, this virus targets gingers. What's the point? So does the sun. Next. Well, this coronavirus targets the elderly, type 2 diabetics and those with dangerously high BMIs.

So it leaves the young, the healthy and the able to fight? Yes, but those that are left get COVID toe. That's the money to the vet market. One of the arguments against the vaccine that keeps getting repeated is... Oh, well, we've been fundraising for cancer since the 80s and there's still no vaccine for cancer. How is there suddenly a vaccine for this? Well, OK, cancer is not a virus.

Well, actually, sorry, a few cancers are caused by viruses, like HPV causes cervical cancer. Oh, wait, we do have a vaccine for that. How did that not come up in your Google search, huh? Is it because you're using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo because Google's too

mainstream for you? Well, you know what? You in your back seat can duck-duck off. Here's that clap I promised you while you do it. Thank you so much, folks. Thank you. Realina there. Now, the media are facing a crisis at the moment. They're beginning to realise, to their horror, that they may have to live without a Covid scare story every day. Yes, and you can sense the anguish as they face the loss of all those clicks.

All through October, they seem to be saying rates were rising, and then they switch to saying rates are rising in Europe, and this week they're on to bird flu instead. There's a new strain of bird flu which they think comes from swans. I'm not worried. If coronavirus was caused by someone eating an infected bat, then there's only one person in Britain who's allowed to eat swans. And I am pretty sure that they're off the menu at the moment,

so that's not that scary either. No, for many people, COVID by now is like Britain's Got Talent. Whenever they hear about it, they just think... Is that still going? And this worries the government, partly because of a prospect of a spike over Christmas, but mainly because they might lose their excuse to call televised press conferences

and have to go back to actually announcing things in Parliament. Last week went so badly for Number 10 that this week they called a Covid press conference in order for the Prime Minister to do nothing at all. I have summoned the gentlemen and ladies of the Fourth Estate in order to announce an announcement in which I am announcing that I will not have to announce any announcements this Christmas and that the festivities may be announcement free and avoid of any announcements. So I urge and indeed encourage you to have your booster and thus boosted. You will be helping to make sure that this is the case and that I can avoid yet another U-turn. Or as the Romans spelled it, V-turn. So remember,

U-turn. Or, as the Romans spelled it, V-turn. So, remember... LAUGHTER Remember, level up, build back booster and get Brexit done. Again, but this time properly. LAUGHTER Did it really need a press conference to remind us to get vaccinated? Well, possibly.

To prove there is literally nothing that people can't be offended by. Tesco's Christmas advert has somehow managed to annoy some viewers because of a little joke about Santa Claus getting held up at immigration and having to show he's had his jabs. Social media was divided. Some people announcing they were boycotting Tesco, other people announcing they were switching to Tesco so they could avoid the kind of announcing they were boycotting Tesco, other people announcing they were switching to Tesco

so they could avoid the kind of people who were boycotting it. Anti-vax types should just be glad that the ad didn't go with its original strapline. Tesco. Every needle helps. In any case, the advert is technically correct. Yeah. Santa Claus would be coming from Finland, which, according to the gov.uk website, means he would be required to have an EUDCC,

or Digital Covid Certificate, which would be carried on the phone, and if he didn't have one, he'd have to quarantine for ten days in an approved hotel, so nobody would get their presents until January 3rd. so nobody would get their presents until January 3rd. The bigger mystery to me is why Santa is arriving via an airport in the first place. What the boycotters should be concerned about is what's happened to his sleigh.

If Tesco really wanted to upset the British public, then never mind Santa being vaccinated, wait till they see his reindeer in a custom shed at Heathrow undergoing James Herriot-style cavity searches. But the result of it all is that Santa and all his team of reindeer, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Booster, Moderna, Pfizer, Astra and Tenneco, should be safe and on time. But there are still a few things Santa has to worry about for Christmas, though.

For a start, labour shortages at the toy factory, where during lockdown, half the elves decided they wanted different employment arrangements. Hi-ho, hi-ho, to work from home we go. From our living rooms we roll on to. Hi-ho, hi-ho. To work from home we go From our living rooms we roll on to High ho, high ho But as an inconvenience for Santa, this is nothing compared to the dangers of flying over Russian airspace or even worse, Belarus airspace. Landing in Poland, finding four sacks are now full of asylum seekers.

And worst of all for us, Santa's scheduled first UK stop is to deliver toys to the children of Northern Ireland. You don't understand. I have to deliver these presents to the whole country. I'm sorry, but Lapland is in the EU and unfortunately Liz Truss didn't prioritise it for a trade deal. This Lodmure Slayer

going in that warehouse for six weeks. Hang on, are those sausages? Oh no. Whoa! Sorry pal, this search is mandatory. Gee, thanks Tesco. Other countries

are also struggling to get reluctant citizens to the clinic. And they're not all anti-vax. Some of them are trypanophobics. Others apparently haven't had time, which is very unfortunate. If you don't have time to be inoculated against a life-threatening disease, I would suggest your work-life balance needs adjusting. But it is the same everywhere. Yeah, in Austria this week, citizens were offered a voucher for up to 30 minutes in a brothel with a lady of their choice

if they got vaccinated. They tried the carrot, now they're trying the stick, which usually costs extra. Many places are offering money off, vouchers, lottery tickets, taxi rides or just plain cash. In the US, according to the National Governors Association... Participating Connecticut restaurants will offer complimentary drinks to vaccinated patrons beginning May 19.

Yeah, you're recommended not to drink for two weeks post-jab to help your immune system, so that is a smart deal for anti-vax types. See, I got my vaccine, but then I make sure it don't work. The Republican candidate for governor there. In Delaware, they're really going for it. Delawareans 12 to 17 who receive a vaccine in Delaware will be entered into a raffle for a full scholarship to a Delaware university. That is a deal. Can Indiana match that? in Delaware will be entered into a raffle for a full scholarship to a Delaware university.

That is a deal. Can Indiana match that? Anyone who gets vaccinated at specially designated sites will receive a box of Girl Scout cookies. No, Indiana can't match that. What are Illinois offering? One draw for two round-trip tickets to anywhere American Airlines flies. They fly to Indiana. You could get a box of Girl Scout cookies. Fortunately, some places have a bit more imagination in what they're offering. In Sonnenberg, southern Germany... Oh, free sausages! But it's not working.

Cases in Germany are through the roof. In the Philippines... Cow raffle! Cow raffle. I think that was the Philippines. It might have been on the archers. Of course, not everywhere, though, is going with the carrot. Some places are going with the stick.

In Pakistan, you get the vaccine or they cut your mobile phone off. Which is a bit unfair since if you change your mind, you can't call to make an appointment. I bet they don't get Kevin Bacon to tell you that. Gotta tell you about this great offer. You get zero minutes of calls,

zero texts and zero data. All on the nation's favourite not work. Yes, always end with a pun. Thank you. And now, making his debut on the Now Show, please welcome Josh Pugh. Thank you, everybody.

We mentioned earlier scientists and touched on the discoveries they're making. I read a story this week where scientists have discovered a Britsonius simondi, which is a breed of dinosaur which apparently lived on the Isle of Wight. That's right, scientists have discovered a breed of dinosaur. Move on. Forget it. It's been 125 million years. Let's leave it now. Let's move on. Forget it. It's been 125 million years. Let's leave it now. Let's move on.

That is like, you're at home, you've lost your passport, your flatmate runs in, oh, don't worry, I've found this box of mini-discs. Not helpful. They've gone. I honestly feel like scientists have been faffing around for too long, working on the wrong stuff, putting their energy into the wrong things. 48-hour deodorant.

Who wasn't willing to put deodorant on every day? We don't need it. I'm not having a go, because that's a job I could never do. It's way too much responsibility for me. I couldn't do a job with high risk. But, like, Prime Minister, I'm not a political person at all. You know, my friend said to me recently, Josh, what would you do if you were Prime Minister for the day?

I was like, Prime Minister for the day? Probably not a lot, to be honest. Not much I can do in a day, is I? I'd probably get there, get my login sorted for the computer. Have lunch. Maybe get an early finish, if I can. I would never be the Prime Minister.

I don't think the accommodation you get is good enough. That's my reason. I've got to run the country and I get a terrace house. That is not fair. My dad's a scaffolder. He's got more outdoor space

than the Prime Minister of England. That's wrong to me. Look at the President of America. They've got the Palatial White House. Glorious. Boris Johnson hasn't even got off-road parking. 10 Downing Street, no side access. How's that work?

You don't see this on the news, but on bin day, the Home Secretary has to bring the wheelie bins through the house. I struggled, and I'll be honest, I struggled to keep up with the news because I don't like to be on the internet. A lot of strange people, there's people on the internet who will go into your social media,

take your profile pictures and use it to set up fake dating accounts. Never happened to me. I must have good passwords or something. But... It happened. I was have good passwords or something. But it happened. I was surfing the web recently, surfing all over the web. And I discovered somebody had been using my wife's photographs on their dating profile. Not cool. Also using her first

name, her surname, her email address and her location. So just be careful, please. She's actually having to go now and meet these blokes and explain to them that it isn't her. And they're not getting in. She's having to stay overnight. So just be careful, please, because I don't want you to get stung how I am. It's been a mad time. It really has. When the first lockdown came, performers, comedians, we lost our work overnight. But I knew I'd be OK, right? Because I'm one of these guys who does mad stuff for money.

Do you know what I mean? We all know one guy who does mad stuff for money. That's me, man. My friend was like, Josh, I dare you to work at an office full time. And I just did it. I mean, I don't care, that's just what I'm like, but... In all honesty, I felt pretty redundant

the last 18 months, because people say, you know, stand-up comedy's brave. And it is brave. I am brave. But doctors, they're brave, aren't they? Doctors are brave. Braver than doctors, though, St John's Ambulance they? Doctors are brave. Braver than doctors, though, St John's Ambulance. Those guys are brave. To give medical advice with no knowledge or training whatsoever...

LAUGHTER ..that takes real guts. Listen, it's easy to be brave for seven years at medical school behind you. Try blagging it under a gazebo at a village freight, OK? LAUGHTER You try pronouncing someone dead out of the sound of a tombola. It's not easy. If I was making a league table

of bravery, at the bottom, it'd be scientists in 2021 discovering dinosaurs. Just above that, it'd be doctors. Above that, St John's Ambulance. Above that, comedians who don't read the news doing a topical comedy show on Radio 4. My name's Josh Beard. Thanks for listening. See you again.

Now, you may have seen this week that a book was returned to a library in Fife 73 years overdue. So we thought we would ask all of you out there whether there was anything you'd lent out and never got back. A Parker pen that was given to me for my 16th birthday. I'm now 52 and I still think of that lovely silver-coloured pen. I'm now 52 and I still think of that lovely silver-coloured pen. I lent one of my nephews my childhood collection of 300 very rare Smurfs. I never got them back and a few years later a group of mates on my WhatsApp group

to set up PPE companies. That's for Matt in West Suffolk, everybody. So, thank you very much for sharing those hate-filled screeds with us. And that's almost the end of tonight's show. But first, have you ever wished that the Rat Pack were still here to sing smoothly to us about these troubled times? Well, your wish is sort of granted.

Playing us out this week, it's Beardy Man! Everything's fine My love Everything's fine There's My love, everything's fine There's no need to be anxious and worried all of the time It ain't corruption

Oh, what a way to construe it all It's just business As usual, protest and I'll jail ya So everything's fine Oh, everything's fine My sweet Everything's fine We've got non-binding targets

Now we'll save the planet in time Oh yes we, we will. It will be beautiful when London lies beneath the waves. It'll make up for those reefs that we didn't save up to ten years. But protesting, yes, everything's fine. Everything's fine, my darling. Everything's fine, my darling

Everything's fine Corona's in the past You don't need to wear your mask all the time Oh, the ice shelf's not on the brink of being slurry Another species gone extinct Don't worry They do that all the time Carry on ignoring the signs Civilization's not on the line

Calm down, honey Ain't this apocalypse funny? Never Google parasitic human face mites They live under the skin Ain't this apocalypse funny? Never Google parasitic human face mites. They live under the skin in the pores of your face. You can't get them out and I'm going to burn my face up with a blowtorch. Everything's fine. You've been listening to The Now Show, starring Steve Puntz, Hugh Dennis, Ria Lena,

Josh Pugh, Natasha Hodgson and Luke Kempner. The song was written and performed by Beardy Man. The show was written by the cast with additional material from Alex Keeley, Reema Ahmed, Alfie Packham and Tasha Danraj. The producer was Rajiv Kurrier and it was a BBC Studios production.