Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The Now Show - 5th April

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches. Starring Jon Holmes on animals making headlines, Angela Barnes on theft and an original song from Jonny & the Baptists. With voices from Ed Jones and Róisín O’Mahony.The show was written by the cast with additional material from Tasha Dhanraj, Mike Shepard, Alex Bertulis-Fernandes and Peter Tellouche.Producer: Sasha Bobak Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Caroline BarlowA BBC Studios Production for Radio 4.

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 John Holmes, Angela Barnes, Ed Jones, Roshin Amani and Johnny and the Baptists. And this is... ..the Now Show!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you very much. So, it was April Fool's Day last Monday, and one local radio station was even fooled into thinking Rishi Sunak might tell them when the election was going to be. So they asked him and his response was... Of course not. Which was fair enough because the thing was it was actually quite hard to tell the April

fools from the genuine news this week. For example, is it actually true that after the record-breaking rainfall of the last 18 months that we're likely to get hosepipe bans this summer? Yes, it is true. We don't have enough reservoirs you see, the spokesman said. Fortunately we have a ready-made grid system of micro reservoirs already existing throughout the UK. Yep, and all we have to do apparently is work out a way to join all those potholes up in order to access the millions of litres of rainwater that they currently hold. To drive this home, it was also not an April Fool that last weekend's boat race, an event broadcast all over the world, was won by the team which most successfully dodged E. coli poisoning from the water. The international audience was won by the team which most successfully dodged E. coli poisoning

from the water. The international audience was treated to the site of collapsing Osmond in real time. And as they come to Barnes railway bridge for Cambridge 8, need the Oxford 8, sorry 7, pardon me, 6, no 5, hang on, hang on, the Oxford 4, sorry, Coxless 4, two more go there, the Coxless pair, and with only a short way to go to the finish it looks like Cambridge will beat the Oxford single scull, and they have. One Oxford rower admitted to BBC Sport

that he had been vomiting before the race. Although that might have been down to the 15 Jäger bombs, I just downed because I'm a complete bloody legend. It's kind of hilarious that people worry that the UK's image abroad will suffer if our sports teams have a different-coloured flag on a shirt, but they're fine with the entire world seeing our sports teams poisoned by our own rivers. Next up, April Fool or not April Fool?

The Government have a Bill in the Commons that would allow police to arrest people for being homeless. Not on April Fool? No, but it's also not quite true. They can't actually arrest them for being homeless, but they can if they're... Considered a nuisance. For example, sleeping in a doorway and also for...

Having an excessive smell. Or as the bill puts it... Looking as though they might intend to sleep rough. How on earth can you arrest people for looking as though they might be thinking of sleeping rough? Well, the bill in question is the Criminal Justice Bill, which was heavily championed by Suella Braverman. So it might've originally been intended as a means of getting rid of Boris rough. Well, the bill in question is the criminal justice bill, which was heavily championed by Suella Braverman. So it might have originally been intended as a means of

getting rid of Boris Johnson. I can assure you, officer, I do not sleep on a bench. My hair is always like this. It's a lifestyle choice. That is another story from this week. The Royal Family are opening Balmoral to the public for the first time. And that one is absolutely true. Tickets will cost £100, plus the cost of a servant to act as a guide. The so-called valet added tax.

It's actually £150 if you want tea, which sounds rather expensive, but the extra £50 is easily explained. The the cup of tea is only a favour. The Dutchie biscuit is 45 per... ..and Tokyo Royals is not an April Fool, that the Japanese royal family have just joined Instagram. No, it's entirely true. It's actually the Japanese Imperial family. They're the last royal household in the world to use the term empire.

Yes, we haven't used it since the late 1940s, which is not that surprising, since the British Empire currently consists of a handful of tax havens, the duty-free shop in Gibraltar, and the right once a year to clean the sewage off all the swans on the Thames. A commentator in Japan described the family's Instagram posts as very boring. But it won't bother them too much.

The Japanese royals aren't like ours. They're more like their cars. Reliable, but unexciting. Whereas the Sussexes are like British cars, unpopular and prone to breakdowns. Of course, no. Yeah, see, Rishi like that one. To be a witch, April Fool or not April Fool? The Royal Mail want to deliver second class posts

every other day. Well, that's absolutely true. It also has the whiff of April Fool that the Royal Mail... Officially voted Britain's number one worst privatised company. ..leaving Thames Water as perhaps appropriately the official number two company. LAUGHTER Anyway, the Royal Mail announced this week that their barcoded stamps,

which were brought in to prevent forgery, are being read by their own machines as forgeries. And to think the humble postage stamp was such a simple innovation. to prevent forgery are being read by their own machines as forgeries. And to think the humble postage stamp was such a simple innovation, said to have been created after Rowland Hill saw Queen Victoria passing in a carriage and wondered what it would be like to lick the other side of her head. Now here's another headline. Botswana sends 20,000 elephants to Germany.

April Fool or not? No, is the answer. It is very much true. The president of Botswana is annoyed with Germany because Botswana's conservation programme has proved so successful that they now have too many elephants. So they want to change an international treaty to allow limited sport shooting to keep the numbers down. Germany has blocked this proposal,

so the Botswanan president has said he will send 20,000 elephants to Germany so that they... Can see what it is like living with elephants. And he's not taking no for an answer. In March he also threatened to send a thousand or so elephants here to the UK, although that's less likely to happen thanks to the difficulty of finding a small boat big enough. He made the threat after parliament passed a law banning hunting trophies, which sounds like bad news for Balmoral and every National Trust stately home I've ever been to. They'll have to redecorate the billiard room with John Lewis prints like everyone else.

Look, never mind, I'll give you £2 off. What do you reckon, Rishi? Oh, God, no. Thank you. APPLAUSE Now, back in the day, you might remember that the Now Show had a little mascot. LAUGHTER A tiny little thing, really, sort of small, like the satirical equivalent of those small bedraggled teddy bears that you sometimes see strapped

to the front of a bin lorry. LAUGHTER Well, the good news is we've unstrapped him for the very last time and let him run free. And after an eight-year hiatus, ladies and gentlemen, it is the return of John Holmes! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thanks very much indeed. Eight years. Eight years free of Hugh Dennis doing short jokes at my expense. Short jokes which week in, week out, let me tell you, I actually wrote myself and made him say. And thus was always incredibly pleased when he got hate mail. Which I also wrote. Anyway, according to this week's latest polling, right,

the Conservatives are now the most unpopular party in Britain, trailing even behind the Liberal Democrat Party, the Reform Party, Noel's House Party. What the Tories do have going for them, though, is a new party chairman in the misshapen of Jonathan Gullis, who, by dint of his job is... The new Lee Anderson. Jonathan Gullis went on Sky News to honk out some guff about stopping the boats, to as

ever thus. But during the interview with Sophie Ridge he fell at the all-important first hurdle of invoking the correct animal. What's going on here? But there is one big rabbit in the room. What? The rabbit in... I mean, he means elephant, right? I mean, elephant in the room? You've got the wrong animal grommet. So what's going on? Is he overthinking Easter? Was he thinking about becoming deputy chairman of the Anne Summers party?

To be fair, he did correct and admonish himself. Oh, elephant, sorry, I should say. Sophie, in the room, get the right animal. Yeah, get the right animal, Jonathan. Yeah, you tell you. But this political discourse on immigration in this country has now seemingly come down to one man confused about fauna. Say what you like about Lee Anderson, a man who's almost certainly blocked more service station toilets than he's flushed. But at least Lee Anderson calls a spade a spade.

Jonathan Gullis would probably call a spade an egg or mistake it for another rabbit. But much like his precious boats, it didn't stop there. We have a very clear plan to get people deported to Rwanda, but those pesky peers in the House of Lords are continuing to block any attempts. Those pesky peers, yeah. Those pesky peers with their meddling over the Rwanda bill, and they'd have gotten away with it too

if it weren't for five centuries of bicameralism. But anyway, look, there's definitely been something animally going on in politics, because just as Jonathan Livingston's sea guullis was trapped in his first interview on Sky News like an elephant in the headlights, over in the Commons, former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith was sprinkling a little animal magic of his own over proceedings, this time regarding sanctions against China. Mr Speaker, what I will say is that whilst I welcome these two sanctions,

it is a little bit like an elephant giving birth to a mouse. LAUGHTER OK, now, this curious animal analogy came about because of the Chinese threat to the UK. You can see what he was getting at here, right? The idea that lobbying just two sanctions in China's direction in retaliation for cyber-threatening the arse-offers seems a little bit ineffectual. Now I'm no expert on the birth canals of pachyderms, but clearly the implication here is that both China and the giving birth to a small rodent elephant would barely notice what's happening to them. Right, China will take the sanctions and simply carry on trying to destabilise Western democracy, and the elephant will fire a baby mouse out of its fandango and simply go on eating a bun.

But the thing is, I don't think Ian Duncan Smith has thought this through. Imagine being an elephant and looking down to see you'd given birth to a mouse. There's got to be some mental scarring, like if a lion looked down to see if it had given birth to an owl. Or I don't know, off the top of my head, Ian Duncan Smith's mum looked down to see she'd given birth to Ian Duncan Smith. I will say that Keir Starmer's mum must have been even more confused when he came out, all mouth and no trousers, immediately changed his mind, did a U-turn, went back in again. Anyway, look, animals, right, particularly mice, which are even more newsworthy this week because,

being the Easter break, MPs have all scampered away from the Commons to go and spend more time with their upcoming by-elections. So inevitably the papers have got to find their spoils elsewhere which is why when Parliament's in recess we get more science stories to fill the space. You know the kind of thing recent examples would include drug based on LSD can lower anxiety. Fish oil enriched keto diet helps fight lung cancer. Male birth control pill now found to be 99% effective. Yeah right ladies but look there's something that unites all of these kind of stories and it's the discrepancy between the eye-catching headline versus the actual detail of the story. And there's also a continuing theme because here

too be mice. What we're actually getting 99% of the time when we read this kind of stuff is quite simply studies on mice that are reported as if they were performed on humans for clicks. The mice only ever mention four or five paragraphs in and sometimes not at all. As James Heathers, he's a scientist and researcher in biosignals and health at Boston University, told The Now Show this week. Look, a lot of science news reporting is framed terribly. So many of the stories about the latest thing that's gonna kill you really can have their accuracy dramatically improved

by this simple addition of adding in mice. Right. So, friends, you see, a simple suffix is all you need. All you need to do is shout two words at the newspaper in question, and those two words are IN MICE. If nothing else, it will improve your mood. shout two words at the newspaper in question, and those two words are, in mice. If nothing else, it will improve your mood. So come on, Britain, I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to riot, I don't know what to do

about the cost of living crisis and Gaza and the Russians and the crime in the street, but I want you to get up now. I want you all to get up out of your chairs, I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell, In mice! Yes, researchers find new protein curbs asthma, In mice! Yes, vegetables can help ease lung infection, In mice! Yes, Elon Musk's research company Neuralink implants first brain controlling microchip,

In mice! No, that one's in humans, he did it last week. Now finally if you are a mouse who's been affected by any of the issues raised in tonight's program and you would like to squeak to someone then the BBC action line has details of organisations offering advice and support. There's also information on how to claim compensation if a cartoon cat has hit you with a frying pan so hard that the impression of your eyes has been left in the bottom of it. Thank you. John Hose there. In recent years the press have found a new target to pick on in the form of Gen Z with an American Z. Young people born between the mid 90s and

2012. Why Gen Z have become the object of criticism Z with an American Z. Young people born between the mid-90s and 2012. Why Gen Z have become the object of criticism by the newspapers is unclear, but may be related to the commonly observed trait that Gen Z don't read newspapers. Thus, they probably didn't see the Daily Telegraph headline this week. Hiring Gen Z is a nightmare.

They don't turn up to their first day of work. Ah, Gen X, love a sweeping generalization. Car leasing firm boss James McNeill leads the charge, first day of work. Ah, Gen X, love a sweeping generalisation. Car leasing firm boss James McNeill leads the charge, levelling all sorts of accusations against young people. They don't turn up, they have no people skills, they get confused by pop music with more than four chords in it, you name it. Now we think this is very unfair and here on The Now Show we want to try and change perceptions of Gen Z, so we hired a 23 year old writer to give us a young person's perspective. And they didn't turn up. So it's just older people stuff, I'm

afraid. One of the issues that's annoying employers is apparently that Gen Z apparently have an automatic assumption that they can work from home. Now this of course isn't true. They have an automatic assumption that they can work from their parents' home. LAUGHTER But I'm sure that I'm not the only parent to find it a bit odd that Gen Z prefer home working. Because it's only a few years since homework was the last thing they wanted to do. But that's not the worst part of it when it comes to working in an office.

Gen Z also hate using the telephone. It's why no-one in their 20s is ever one who wants to be a millionaire, because there's no lifeline called Snapchat a friend. One of the things about Gen Z is that the media, which by definition is full of people who wanted to avoid having to get a proper job, loves talking about entrepreneurs and giving the impression that everybody under 30 is an entrepreneur. So the actual jobs, working for actual companies, earning actual money, seem a bit boring. It certainly feels like going to the office is no longer an attractive

thing because working from home is here to stay, no matter how much Jacob Rees-Mogg might complain about it. Government departments are rife with it. The Home Office, where presumably you can say you're working at home, whether you're working in your office at home, or whether you're in the office at the home office, has an attendance of 54%. The Foreign Office has an attendance of 51%, although to be fair, you would hope that a lot of their employees are abroad. Well, the Ministry of Defence has an attendance

in the office of 80%, which is huge, but very easily explained. They've got guns. I think I'll work from home tomorrow. GUN COCKS I'll be here at 8.30. LAUGHTER Interestingly, the highest Whitehall percentage of staff

working from home, with only 48% of its workers in the office, is HMRC, who also, presumably, have the highest percentage of staff who are aware that you can claim a tax reduction for working from home. LAUGHTER One of the major culprits in the media's obsession with entrepreneurs is Elon Musk, and he was up to various things this week. Firstly, he predicted that in future there will be more robots than people. Not an April Fool, a genuine prediction.

He also said that Tesla robots would eventually make them more money than their cars, which won't be difficult judging by the latest sales figures. There's a handy equation for calculating the losses recently incurred by Musk, where Y is the current operating loss at Tesla. And X is a multi-billion dollar social media platform that used to have a really memorable brand and lots of advertisers before it was run into the ground. But it's interesting from an AI point of view that Elon clearly isn't worried about robots becoming sentient or becoming a force for evil. And to be honest, nor am I.

I mean, the great fear is that AI robots will learn from humans and replace us, which could be true, I guess, but I think it depends which humans they're gonna be learning from. I mean, it might be Gen Z. Okay, Tesla One, pick up the box. What? Now?

Yes. Why? Because I asked you to., pick up the box. What? Now? Yes. Why? Because I asked you to. I will do it later. Sorry? I am going out. No, you're not. I am. And tomorrow I will not be here. I am working from home.

But Elon wasn't finished, oh no. Aside from Tesla losses and robots, he also had some words of wisdom for the world about LLMs, a particular type of AI program. He tweeted on X this week... Most books can be much shorter. Definitely a useful task for LLMs to summarise the salient points of a book. You see, the entrepreneurial creative genius has done it again. He's invented spark notes.

Thank you very much. APPLAUSE So, please welcome back to The Now Show, Angela Barnes. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE So, it seems like everyone is on the take these days, and this week, some journalists in Washington have been issued a warning to stop stealing stuff from the President's plane, Air Force One. Apparently, they keep nabbing things like

toilet paper and napkins for souvenirs, and when you think about it, they are stealing from a pensioner, and that is frowned upon. The White House press corps are often invited onto Air Force One when the President is travelling. By the way, if you didn't know, the US President's aeroplane is called Air Force One because any vehicle the President is travelling in is designated with the call sign one. So when he travels by air, it's on Air Force One. When he travels by boat, it's on Navy One. And Joe Biden goes to bed every night on Stannis Stair Lift One. No, actually, I feel bad making all these ageist jokes about Joe Biden. After all, it comes to us all eventually, doesn't it? We're all living longer. I mean, there's so many hundred-year-olds in this country

now, the kings had to get a moon pig account to keep up. One of the most regularly stolen items from Air Force One is napkins. Now, of course, this wasn't such a problem when Trump was president because it's quite easy to replace those little KFC lemon wipes. Traditionally, presidents do give little treats to people that come aboard Air Force One. Ronald Reagan would give out jelly beans, Joe Biden gives out M&Ms, and Bill Clinton gave out the morning after pills. And it's not just us mere mortals that do it either. The most famous celebrities in the world aren't beyond a bit of memorabilia, kleptomania.

Meryl Streep once took a hand towel from the White House, and on a Spice Girls visit to Buckingham Palace, Baby Spice took a sign from the ladies' loo. Ginger also took stuff from the palace, which is probably why his dad won't let him live there anymore. Laughter People have always helped themselves to little souvenirs. Sometimes when you go somewhere special, you just want something to remember it by. It's the same thing with hotels.

Sometimes it's nice to have a little memento of where you've stayed. I've taken all sorts home with me. By-rows, body lotion, and one time a wine waiter called Benito. I'm talking about nice hotels of course. No one's ever stayed in an Ibis budget and thought oh I must have a souvenir of this. Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with cheap hotels. I'm not a snob especially in a cost of living crisis. I stay in them all the time when I'm on tour because sometimes you just have to make the choice between a nice hotel and coming home with no money

or a cheap hotel and coming home with lice. And anyway, I feel I'm looked down on if the hotel is really posh. Like if I were to ask reception for a wake-up call, they'd just look at me and say, you're 47 and you don't have a pension. I'm glad you clapped that, it's worrying isn't it? I feel like I belong most in the sort of hotel where the rooms are like Lady Macbeth's hands. They've been cleaned but they will never be clean. You know what I mean? Or those really old-fashioned seaside guest houses where even the Wi-Fi is riddled with asbestos.

Anyway, I digress. The point is, nabbing a few toiletries from hotels is expected. There's an unspoken code around it. Sewing kit? Fine. Body wash? Fine.

Corby Trouser Press? Roundupon. Another form of theft that is on the rise is shoplifting, what with so many families struggling to make ends meet. The rise in shoplifting is also partly because self-service checkouts have made stealing from supermarkets dangerously easy. And did you know this? Well I only found this out recently, self-service checkouts have a mute button. You can turn that judgmental cow right off. Approval needed. But I'm old enough I can buy booze. Yes but you're 47 and you're

buying lambrini. Of course shoplifting isn't a modern phenomenon. In fact in the 18th and early 19th century with the rise of the department store it became quite the pastime for bored, well-to-do women. Well, there weren't many ways for a lady to get a bit of a thrill in those days, were there? Getting drunk was unseemly, and the only Chippendales they were allowed to look at were the ones you can sit on. By the way, you can't sit on the other sort. I found that out the hard way. That's a bad turn of phrase as well. The Victorian ladies voluminous skirts made it very easy for them to secrete the stuff they nicked. These lady thieves

would even have special bloomers made with pockets for putting their loot in. They were known as grafters bloomers, which I don't know about you that sounds to me more like a euphemism for working hard. Angela you've done a really good job today. You must be wearing your grafters bloomers. Oh, thanks Steve. By the way, I think HR won a word. And of course, the other place where most of us have indulged in a bit of petty thievery is at work. Estimates say that workplace theft has gone up 19% since the cost of living crisis began. But we've always done it.

I reckon the guys building the pyramids trousered a few slabs of granite to do themselves a cheeky kitchen work job. When I was a student nurse, we had a party in our halls, so we nabbed a load of catheter bags to serve the spirits from. Bit of fun. We labelled them all and we couldn't work out

why nobody was drinking the Jack Daniels till we realised people thought that was the name of the patient the contents came from. Well, that's it. The end of my final appearance on the final series of The Now Show. And I think it's only fair that I should grab myself a little souvenir so I can remember all the happy times that I've had along the way. I just need something small that will fit in my handbag. John? No! Thank you very much. I've been Angela Barnes. Goodbye!

So, as we heard earlier this week, Elon Musk suggested that AI should be used to shorten books down to just their Salient points so we've asked our audience if they can reduce a famous book to a single sentence Yeah, what is the sentence? I am never having children. What's the book Lord of the Flies? What is the sentence it blew away what. What is the book? Gone with the wind. I like this one. Sentence. Does my bum look big in this? Book Alice in the Looking Grass. Magic ring spoils nice walk. What's the book? Lord of the Rings. So thank you very much to those, to our audience. I think we've proved Elon comprehensively wrong there.

And that's almost it for this week. Yeah, but now with a song to play us out, would you please welcome Johnny and the Baptists? CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Britain is becoming statistically unhappier. A quick check-in on our government's pledge to level up wellbeing reveals it's made no progress. Happiness is pitched as a nationwide priority, but the reality does seem very different.

So we've written a song which we think really sums this up, and it's called Never Too Late. You've never been good at finding things. You once got lost in a boots. You were looking for rennies. Then you got overwhelmed and hot. If happiness is even real, then finding it is not for you. But it's never too late to give up. Your dreams are worthless if you shoot for the stars They'll shoot back, you will die if you get shot by a star

Rome wasn't built in a day It took well over a thousand years And countless resources and an endless workforce And you can't even wash up a cup Or eat soup without getting some down you Good things come to those who wait Except you, you're the exception that proves the rule God has a plan for you

But sadly that plan is for your life to be awful Slow and steady wins the race Unless it's a race Once there were plenty more fish in the sea But now all the fish are dead and the time before that Nothing is worth this much pain There is no such thing as no turning back Ba-da-ba, ba-da-ba Burn your passport and buy a rifle

Ba-da-ba, ba-da-ba Just try to make it home before night Try to make it home before night Try to make it home before nightfall performed by Johnny and the Baptists. The show was written by the cast with additional material from Tasha Danraj, Mike Sheppard, Alex Petulas-Fernandez, and Peter Telouche. The producer was Sasha Bobak, and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.