Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz - 2nd February

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Andy Zaltzman quizzes the news. Providing all the answers are Simon Evans, Ria Lina, Alasdair Beckett-King, and Anushka Asthana.In this episode Andy and the panel will be discussing if Power-Sharing will prove to be Power-Caring, and whether anyone anywhere has ever thought of googling "Is it possible to back up WhatsApp messages?”Written by Andy ZaltzmanWith additional material by: Cody Dahler, Alice Fraser, Jade Gebbie, and Adam Greene.Producer: Sam Holmes Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Co-ordinator: Sarah Nicholls Sound Editor: Marc WillcoxA BBC Studios Production for Radio 4

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. Before we start this week's news quiz, I'm just having my good friend Elon Musk implant a microchip into my brain. Thanks to Musk's revolutionary new brain chip I can now get all the news in the world pumped directly into my frontal cortex. European leader of a government. Milder air. Ah! Ah! Ah! They think who's a secret agent? The third world war is coming soon. Should

Lawrence Fox hunting be legalised? I don't know. I could start a theme tune while I scoop this out with a spoon. Welcome to the News Quiz. I am Andy Zaltzman, just back from Washington DC, where I had to testify to a US Senate hearing about the impact that topical radio quiz shows can have on transport ministers. Our team's this week in a week in which we've heard a lot about WhatsApp messages and devastating local council funding situation,

we have Team Deleted against Team Depleted. On Team Deleted, we have Simon Evans and, from ITV News, Anushka Asthana. And on Team Depleted, we have Rialina and Alistair Beckett-King. Simon and Anushka can take the first question. Seven tests. Sounds like my dream way to spend 35 days. But what has passed whose seven tests this week? That sounds like news, Anushka.

You take that. A tweaked Northern Ireland deal has passed the DUP's seven tests. Correct. And it means that they're going to go back into government, which they've been out of for a long time, and that has meant that Northern Ireland has not had a functioning government for a long time. And, in fact, when we were doing this story the other day,

I asked a producer I was working with to just get me some examples of other countries that had had political instability, and they got me a list and it was like Iraq, Somalia, Sudan. And then there was Belgium. And I was like, what? What happened in Belgium? But it turns out Belgium has had years of having a not functioning government in the past. But actually Northern Ireland trumps them all. It was like over 700 days in two chunks, which has been very, very bad for public services in Northern Ireland.

So it's a good thing that they finally agreed to the deal. Yeah. I applaud this kind of compromising attitude. I don't know what the seven tests are. Are they like the seven habits of highly effective people? Begin with the end in mind and all that? I don't know. Well, you've basically created a porous border now with Southern Ireland. You're supposed to be osmosis. You're supposed to move on to the next stage.

And instead it's just staying there, hovering in this, frankly, unsatisfactory, you know, no-man's land. We don't want it anymore. It should have united, it should have healed, but it won't. On the other hand, going without government for two years seems to me an entirely properly optimal situation. You talk about it being destabilised, like Iraq or Syria or whatever, but it's clearly not, it's a cultural thing, isn't it? And actually, probably government, for every problem it it solves it creates five new ones

and going without it for five years might well lead to it being abolished altogether I suspect. Right. What, a utopian future? Yeah. They've not had government for four out of the last seven years and in that time there have been strikes by civil servants, teachers, bus drivers, train

drivers, care workers, health and education workers police staff. In real terms weekly earnings in Northern Ireland have decreased by 4%. The unemployment rate from September to November 2023 was estimated at about 2.4%, which actually, we've seen a lot of that here in England as well. So I actually wonder what Rishi must be feeling like right now, knowing that his government has been as effective as having no government. government has been as effective as having no government. I am embarrassed by how little we in the mainland UK understand about Northern Irish politics. For me, it's like the Silmarillion. I'm vaguely aware that it exists, but don't ask me any questions. I know it's there. I know it's not working like it's supposed to. It's like the ITV hub, but I can't really explain it. When I was a

kid, I always got confused between Gerry Adams and Gerry Halliwell, because they both lip-synced a lot in the 90s. If you are struggling, Gerry Halliwell is the one wearing the Union Jack dress. Gerry Adams wouldn't have done that. It just goes to show we've got the, there's a red lane and a green lane across the Irish Sea. It's called the Windsor Accord, I think. It's named after the Royal Family because it's about how the rules apply

sometimes. You've got the red lane, which is for EU goods. You've got the green lane, which is for UK goods. You've got the yellow brick road, which is for your lions, your tigers, your bears. You've got purple lane for Prince and rainbow road for Mario Karts. So, I mean, under the terms of the agreement, Northern Ireland will have access to both the UK and EU markets, which is certainly an exciting trial scheme.

And if it works, I guess it might be something that Scotland, Wales and England might also like to try at some point in the future or even past. I mean, how do you think this will all pan out? Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. Of course, it is a tentative approach to seeing whether EU membership might be a good idea at some point. I mean, at the moment, obviously, for political reasons,

no party is willing to countenance that, but sooner or later, all the old people will be dead, and that can be opened up for discussion again, I suppose. Dear BBC. And do you think, what, government's taking two years off? Is that the way forward for all politics, do you think? I think it would work genuinely perfectly well if every new government had at least a year

before it was allowed to introduce any new legislation and basically everyone just got to know each other. A bit like Freshers' Week, but expand it a little bit, you know. And, you know, just settle in a little bit more. Every new government feels it has to assert itself. Well, I say every new government. At the moment, Labour's distinction is mainly that it's going to be doing all the same policies

with a slightly less diverse cabinet, isn't it? I'm not sure. I think politicians are already posh and insufferable enough. I think the last thing we want to do is send them on a gap year. I mean, just on your point about joining the single market, as they're doing in Northern Ireland, obviously the reason they won't do that for the rest of the UK is because then you can't control immigration.

And as you can see, the figures have done really well on that. There's something that I found hilarious in all of this. Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, said this week that he had struggled to get information about Northern Ireland and to learn about it and that he was now at GCSE level. I was like, you're the Northern Ireland secretary? And he said, maybe if he keeps going, he'll get to Masters level.

And I do think, like, don't they think harder about who they might put in as Northern Ireland secretary? It reminded me of when, like, Karen Bradley was Northern Ireland Secretary, the MP for Staffordshire Moorlands, and it turned out she'd never been to Northern Ireland before. And she actually made a comment at one point to say one thing she hadn't known when she got into the job was that unionists were not very likely to vote for nationalist parties

and vice versa. I was like, wow, that is another level. Right. That's not GCSE level, that. No, she was more like, yeah, key stage one. Yes, Northern Ireland is set to be plugged back in after the DUP agreed to return to the Assembly. After two years of political deadlock, Geoffrey Donaldson announced that he would agree

to the UK government's latest trading deal between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The deal follows years of political deadlock. Geoffrey Donaldson announced that he would agree to the UK government's latest trading deal between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The deal follows years of disagreement over post-Brexit trade, provoked by the startling discovery by archaeologists that the United Kingdom actually has a land border with the European Union, something that no-one could possibly have known in advance. The result, apparently, is that Northern Ireland will now benefit

from the trade deals that the UK government strikes with the rest of the world. So strap in Northern Ireland for an unstoppable deluge of global bounty. Now for those who missed it, the Northern Ireland Protocol was designed to keep Northern Ireland in the EU single market and avoid the need for a hard

border with the Republic by instead having a wet border somewhere in the sea between Great Britain and the island of Ireland, or a homeopathic border that advocates say has barely a trace of the original border left but still works exactly the same, or an imaginary fairy border that stops working whenever someone somewhere says they don't believe in

Brexit. So at least we've moved beyond that. Next week's news is being recorded in Belfast, so we will have full exclusive updates on how it's going. Right, moving on now with a score of two points to Team Deleted and one point to Team Depleted. Ria and Alistair can take this one. Who this week had not got the message about keeping their messages?

I think that would be Nicola Sturgeon, and it wasn't that she didn't get the message, it just wasn't retained. Ah, yes. So apparently she promised back in 2021 that everyone would be able to get her WhatsApp messages and then, you know, fast forward to the COVID inquiry and they couldn't quite find them.

I don't know where they looked. Had they tried outside her mother-in-law's house? They've had luck there before. But yeah, so Nicola Sturgeon was just in the COVID inquiry and she's been questioned about all the WhatsApp messages that it turns out that they would nightly delete. It was like a bedtime ritual to delete their WhatsApp messages. I don't understand why there's so much hoo-ha

about the WhatsApp messages that we can't find. Just ask the Chinese. They have a backup of all of them. I can't be impartial about Nicola Sturgeon because my mum is Scottish and she has the same hair about Nicola Sturgeon because my mum is Scottish and she has the same hair as Nicola Sturgeon. So when I see Nicola Sturgeon, I just think of my mum. And to see her at the COVID inquiry becoming emotional,

I was moved by it unexpectedly. I think I see in her something that I see in my mum and other women who are at that point in their life. You know, you've worked so hard for so long. You've put everyone else first. And there comes a point in your life when you think, you know what, it's time to do something for me. And if she's anything like my mum, what she's going to do is

redecorate the bathroom with a nautical theme. I'm talking seashells. I'm talking blue tiles with a wavy top. I'm talking a little miniature ship's wheel too small to have plausibly been part of a seagoing vessel. Good look to her, I say. A nice lady. She reminds me of my mum.

What do you want me to say? Can I recommend a bit of driftwood? Ooh! Just to sort of, you know, reflect her career. She admitted that she wished that she hadn't been First Minister of Scotland during the pandemic.

Do you have any similar regrets? Well, you know, long so do we all. You know, that's just how the chips fall. I don't expect it was exactly what Boris Johnson had in mind when he achieved that breathtaking majority in December 2009. Let's be honest, for anyone who is sort of right of centre, or by Radio 4 standards, Hitler... LAUGHTER

..we had to put up with an unbearable amount of moralising cant from the Scots and from the SMM, from all kinds of left-wing journalists like Ian Dunt and Will Hutton. Oh, Nicola Sturgeon has demonstrated true class and honour. What an elevated example of a politician who can withdraw at the perfect time. And she and Jacinda Ardern are such exemplars.

And they turn, she's just as bad as all the rest of them she's just because it's on the scale of a motor home rather than a decent sort of corruption scan she was barely out of office for a fortnight before there was a police tent on her lawn and it's just been I have enjoyed it frankly and I'm not I'm tired of pretending I don't and the only thing I think is a shame is that after Salmon and Sturgeon, they have abandoned the fish protocol. But, no, they've gone for Hamza Yusuf, formerly Cat Stevens, and how that is working out for them,

I am not impressed with him either and I think devolution has been a mistake. So what should be done? What should be done? Directive on that. Invade. Invade, right. You're going to get full long chanks on it, aren't you?

I think to be fair to her, she didn't pick the pandemic, and that was part of the inquiry. She didn't want to be First Minister during a pandemic. It wasn't the big political fight that she had hoped for. She wanted war with England. That's what she wanted. That's what she was prepared for. And I get that. She hated for. She wanted war with England. That's what she wanted. That's what she was prepared for. And I get that, you know,

she hated that she was bubbled with England. She wanted to be bubbled with Spain. That's tough. You know, when you picked your bubble right at the beginning of the pandemic and you went, oh, not you, wrong friend. One thing I would say about her crying, I think this is about Boris Johnson as well.

It just is a moment of humanity. Can you imagine being a political leader at that moment that something like that hit the country? It is and was a huge thing for them. And I think we should all just at least acknowledge that they are human, because politicians get so much flack these days. It's never been like this before.

I mean, we've got an MP leaving because he literally can't cope with a number of death threats. And sometimes things are hard. And I think we should have a little bit of humanity sometimes. That's a very good point. But I should say, for the sake of BBC balance, that not all politicians are human. Probably time to move on. We will have full exclusive coverage of the rest of the Covid inquiry. We're now 15 months since the first preliminary public hearing in October 2022, meaning that the inquiry is now approaching the psychologically

crucial 1% completed stage. So at the end of that round, the scores are three to team deleted and also three to team depleted. Our next question is a bonus question, quite literally a bonus question. This can go to Simon and Anushka.

According to a source within the Labour Party, what will be really unpopular with exactly the sort of voters we need to win over? Having a banker's bonus cap? Correct. I don't know if she said it herself, but this is about Rachel Reeves deciding that they would not reinstate a cap that would mean that bankers couldn't get bonuses

more than two times their salary. Correct. The capping the banker's salary is not something that we understand in terms of whether they deserve it or whether they're worth it. It's in order to disincentivise the level of reckless abandon with which they gambled us into an enormous financial crisis in 2008 on the hope of achieving those bonuses. And Reeve said something which I did think was quite worrying.

She said those caps were introduced after the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 in order to mitigate the tendency towards reckless gambling. That has all gone now, and so we can remove... I mean, do you have no idea how these kind of mechanisms... That's exactly why it's gone, you know. Have you heard of Chesterton's fence? Never take down a fence without working out why it was put up in the first place.

It's a really basic rule in life and politics and everything, and that seems to be in the office. You discovered that when you found out your neighbours were naturists, didn't you? Yeah. But it also seems to me evident that most people in this country just despise bankers because they're like wizards. They don't seem to know quite how they make all this money. They don't seem to add anything very useful to the economy.

They just somehow sum it up. they don't seem to know quite how they make all this money, they don't seem to add anything very useful to the economy, they just somehow sum it up. And probably the cap they should wear should be a literal cap. If you made bankers just wear one so they would be identifiable on public transport, for instance, and you were allowed to spit at them or just poke them in the ribs, that would probably ease a lot of the tension between bankers and the rest of society rather than capping their salaries.

I think that would probably be a more workable solution. I've recently spent quite a lot of time with Keir Starmer because I was making a documentary for ITV's Tonight programme and I asked him quite a lot about this because I had seen that he'd come from a much more lefty background and I said to him, do you agree with Blair when he says he has no burning ambition to make David Beckham, as it was then, less rich. And Keir Starmer said, yeah, I agree with that. And I said, but do you want to take more money off the super rich and redistribute it to the poor? And he said, no, that's not how I want to grow the economy.

And they've clearly made a decision. We have to show the country that we are open for business and that we want people to come here. And I think they're trying to capitalise on the idea that they have changed minds of business people. Some people would say it's quite weird when you're 20 points ahead in the polls to do what looks like quite a low-risk strategy. Some people describe it like carrying a Ming vase across a marble floor, Labour is just trying not to slip. Like, their kind of most senior strategists get furious if they ever see anyone getting giddy or excited about poll leads. They say to kind of shadow cabinet people,

your emotions should go in the opposite direction of the polls. The better the lead, the more sad and angry you should be. Yeah. It's like 1997, but without the optimism. And then the slogan is, things can only get similar. But it's an interesting situation because, you know, Labour's probably going to win the next election and it's going to be the first government to keep all of its promises by breaking all of them before the vote happens.

Yes, this week Labour has been trying to carry out the trickiest of political balancing acts. The art of politics is, of course, that you have to try to disappoint some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you need to try not to disappoint all of the people all of the time. Labour has gone about that this week with various economic pledges. Bankers, worried about suffering a slight detumescence

of their economically priapic bonuses under a future Labour government, were swinging from the scandal arborists this week as Shadow Chancellor Rachel Rees revealed that the party has no plans to reinstate a cap on those bonuses. Labour had criticised the Conservative government for removing the cap during a cost-of-living crisis, so after Rees' announcement, many in the party were reportedly left feeling like the audience

at the new Peppa Pig live stage show, Sausage Time. In other words, confused, disappointed and slightly appalled. So at the end of that round, the scores are five to team deleted and six to team depleted. Moving across the political divide, the Prime Minister braved the This Morning Sofa this week and revealed that for a 36-hour period every week, he takes a break from doing what? I think it's from being rich. He does poor, doesn't he?

Like, he doesn't eat for 36 hours, and he calls it doing poor. LAUGHTER I was very confused by this story, because I just read Rishi Sunak fast, and I thought, but he's only got little legs. I think, from what I understand, he's fasting because it's a challenge for him,

because he really likes fizzy drinks and sweets. He's got a real sweet tooth, which I probably wouldn't have said if I was trying to beat the allegations that I was actually a schoolboy who became prime minister licking an enchanted lollipop it is interesting how it used to be like a sign of poverty that you went without food but it is genuinely a sort of flex by the rich now isn't it I'm so wealthy that I can simply choose not to eat for a bit as a sort of lifestyle choice and it reminds me about 10 or 15 years ago,

there was a brief fad for barefoot running. I don't know if you remember this. There was a book about how good it was for you not to run in padded, spongy soles and so on. And all the major brands like Nike and Adidas launched barefoot running shoes. In order to catch in on this, literally, and successfully, because that's how stupid people are.

I've got a feeling they're going to do the same thing with fasting. There's catching on. It's becoming a fashionable thing among the wealthy. There will soon be, like, restaurants, but for fasting, and you will go and... What can I not get you this evening? Well, I was thinking I might not have the salmon, but I didn't have the salmon last night, so...

I quite like to not have the Chateaubriand, but two people have to not have the Chateaubriand, but two people have to not have that. Would you mind that? Yes, Richard Sunak shared his dieting tips on this morning, inspiring other political leaders to try to get themselves onto popular TV shows to share their life hacks. On Monday, in fact, we're just hearing that Russian boss Vladimir Putin is set to go on Loose Women

to give his distinctive take on this spring's fashion. And the leader of the Houthi rebels is going to be sitting down with Jermaine Jenus on The One Show to give us his recommendations for the perfect family holiday. Moving on, Ria and Alistair can take this one. Now, money, the well-known financial medium of exchange, can buy many things. Apricots, for example.

Horses. More money. Behind-the-scenes influence with the Cabinet. A permanently surprised look on your face. The entire sport of golf. A thriving arts sector. And copies of David Cameron's forthcoming book, Solving the Middle East. How just showing up and drawing a line on a map whilst being overtly British

doesn't seem to be working as a foreign policy anymore. But money can't buy everything. And onto the list of things money simply cannot buy. What will soon be joining love, happiness and a tiny elephant the size of a rugby ball who can solve puzzles and will sleep next to you on cold nights? I have tried everywhere. Is it democracy?

Is it a teenage boy who remembers to flush the toilet after he uses the toilet? Is it tolerance to a royal couple who quit the firm but keep their titles but can't quite figure out how to live on the 100 million they made from Netflix? It's all of those. Great. And for everything else, there's MasterCard. All correct answers, but not the one I've got written here. What will money soon not be able to buy? Can I chip in? Yes.

And still, this is vaping. Correct. This is disposable vapes, which were intended to allow people to escape from the dangers of smoking combustibles, but have instead apparently only merely lured young people into the pleasures of enjoying nicotine and are now thought to be a gateway platform rather than help it,

which is all nonsense, absolute nonsense. Vaping devices should be encouraged. There's nothing wrong with vaping. Nicotine has been at the heart of most of the great artistic and political movements of the last 300 years. The fact that we can now do it without having to confront cancer is an absolute miracle. It's a fantastic thing.

These killjoys, they're quite happy with 12-year-olds in the Congo scraping lithium out of a rocky mountainside with a plastic spoon so they can't stage an uprising with a metal implement, but they won't allow a 12-year-old to have a harmless vape behind the bicycle shed in a delicious minty bubblegum aroma. Absolute miserable swine.

And only Liz Truss is standing up for it. And also, Rishi Sunak at the same time is proposing a measure which is so authoritarian, even New Zealand have rode back on it. Namely, that after a certain age, you'll never be able to buy tobacco and 35-year-olds will be lingering around outside newsagents in the hope that a 40-year-old will appear and agree to buy something. Farcical. Do you know, on the second part of what you were talking about,

phasing out smoking, Liz Truss basically said it's unconservative to do this. But I had some polling this week which looked at the views of Conservative voters about the smoking ban. You wouldn't believe it. They absolutely love it. Because they hate kids. They hate kids in the working

class, and that's who this will hit. Middle class kids and adults can afford to buy reusable vaping devices, you know, these ones that look like a Steely Dan or whatever from the William Burroughs book, but it's the poor that can never, you know, organise their finances to invest in a proper long-term vaping device.

It's horrible class warfare, absolutely undiluted. But do you know, it is really, really popular with all groups, especially Tory voters, then Labour voters. The only group who are a bit less into it, and maybe this is where you are, are Lib Dems. Ah, well, yes. Which, surprisingly... Like Liz Truss, funnily enough.

It is about the kids, isn't it? And that's why Rishi Sunak has gone on Ladbible. No word from Ladcoran so far. Rishi Sunak has spoken to Ladbible and I think he's pitched the tone wrong. If you listen to him speaking, he's

talking like he's on CBeebies. And he's talking about how terrible vaping is and how bad nicotine is for kids. I think he's pitched the tone wrong. If you listen to him speaking, he's talking like he's on CBeebies and he's talking about how terrible vaping is and how bad nicotine is for kids. I think if Rishi Sunak wants to stop kids from vaping, he should have gone on Ladbible vaping, wearing a baseball cap backwards on a green screen surfboard. That would have put them right off. Hello, fellow vapers.

Yo, vaping is radical. So, I mean, these vapes come in sort of fruity flavours often. So, I mean, we talk about it being a gateway to smoking. Could it actually be a gateway to children eating more fruit? I haven't tried that one on my five-year-old, but I might tonight. Just before they're properly banned. It does seem like all the pleasures in life are denied us because, you know, it's like when they brought in Alcopops

and that was obviously to try and get kids drinking again because they'd all switched to MDMA back in the... LAUGHTER The obvious thing, you know, it's kids. Ban kids! If you want to ban anything, just ban kids and we can all once again have nice things, you know, it's kids. Ban kids if you want to ban anything. Just ban kids and we can all once again have nice things, as you put it. Do you know that nicotine doesn't actually make you high? It's just addictive.

That's why people are keen to get rid of it. No, nicotine is great. It's like a cup of tea. It's a nootropic. It both calms you down and makes you more alert. It's an excellent drug. It's right up there with caffeine and, like, dopamine. drug. It's right up there with caffeine and, like, dopamine and...

It is very much the case that vaping has really helped people to give up smoking. And the balance here is to not stop that trend. The thing that they are worried about is that what they didn't mean to do with the kind of massive growth of vaping is get loads of

kids who'd never smoked before starting vaping. And that's why they've done this. Just redo them in broccoli flavour or whatever. And that brings us to the end of this week's News Quiz and Simon and Anushka have won with 10 points. Yes. Ria and Alistair

finish with 9. Just a couple of bits of breaking news reaching us. Saudi Arabia has just bought cash-strapped Croydon Council. Exciting news for everyone there. And, well, after the BBC being criticised for cutting funds for its news coverage, Newsnight is going to be replaced with a 12-minute nightly show in which a sound technician holds up newspaper headlines

and an off-screen janitor either boos or cheers in response. We've not given up on it entirely. Thank you very much for listening. I've been Andy Zaltzman. Goodbye. Taking part in the news quiz were Simon Evans, Ria Lena, Alistair Beckett-King and Anoushka Ashtana. In the chair was Andy Zaltzman and additional material

was written by Cody Darla, Alice Fraser and Adam Green. The producer was Sam Holmes and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Hello, I'm Dr Michael Moseley and in my BBC Radio 4 podcast, Just One Thing, I'm investigating some quick, simple, and surprising ways to improve your health and life. So which will you try? Maybe some green tea to boost your brain power.

Time's up. Or doing the plank to lower your blood pressure. How about snacking smartly? Delicious. To benefit your heart pressure. How about snacking smartly? Delicious. To benefit your heart health. So, to benefit your brain and body in ways you might not expect, here's just one thing you can do right now. Subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long.

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