The News Quiz: Ep 5. An Island of Strangers

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Speaker 7 I'm Glenn Washington, the host of Snap Judgment from KQED.

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Speaker 14 Hello, I'm Andy Zaltzman.

Speaker 16 Due to threatened cuts to the BBC World Service budget, all shows across the corporation have been asked to do whatever they can to save money to keep World Service alive.

Speaker 14 So on this week's news quiz, instead of a microphone, I'm using this homemade loudhailer made of rolled-up cardboard.

Speaker 3 My usual pre-show rider of a five-course meal has been replaced with a single sausage

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Speaker 16 There may be sudden jumps in the audio due to our normal editing software being replaced with an old pair of garden sequeturs and some insulation tape

Speaker 17 and covered by nothing but a large potato.

Speaker 18 Also, the theme tune will be played at one and a half times the normal speed, so we don't have to pay the musicians as much.

Speaker 17 Welcome to the news quiz.

Speaker 20 Hello, welcome to the news quiz.

Speaker 23 I'm Andy Zoltzman and other cost-saving BBC measures to help world service.

Speaker 26 Desert Island discs will from here on in be disused shed in the woods out the back of memory services discs,

Speaker 15 whilst interviews with politicians on the Today programme will be replaced by the sound of a hyena and a pelican fighting in a cement mixer.

Speaker 21 Our panelists this week in tribute to what Kier Starmer set out to do with immigration numbers and how people reacted to his efforts, we have Team Clamp Down against Team Damn Clown.

Speaker 20 On Team Clamp, we have Alistair Beckett King and deputy political editor at ITV News, Anushka Astana.

Speaker 31 On Team Clown we have Sarah Barron and Deliso Shaponda.

Speaker 21 And our first question can go to Alistair and Anushka. Keir Starmer announced new plans this week to bring down what?

Speaker 32 Is it the balloon of a laughing child?

Speaker 13 No, understood. His own popularity ratings.

Speaker 12 Okay, wait a second. Is it actually the government because he's trying to be a secret double agent for reform?

Speaker 26 That doesn't seem to be what's going on, but again, not what he's actually announced out loud.

Speaker 13 I know the answer.

Speaker 16 It's immigration. Correct.

Speaker 33 He's planning to bring down immigration to the UK.

Speaker 35 The words immigration to are crucial in that sentence.

Speaker 22 So, I mean, politically, what do you make of the...

Speaker 35 I mean, this is a hot potato that, well, it's not so much a hot potato as a, I don't know, a scalding molten snooker ball that is just slammed into the eye sockets of the nation every time that a political party needs a boost in the opinion poll.

Speaker 38 So what's the political angle on it?

Speaker 13 I mean there is an argument isn't there that the more you talk about it the more people worry about it and it they're never going to be able to do what people want.

Speaker 13 I had some polling this week that said 23% of people want negative net migration and 23% of people want zero net migration and basically they're never going to be able to deliver that.

Speaker 13 So they're talking up something they're not going to be able to deliver. But they were very upset about Reform UK doing so well in the elections and they're trying to respond.

Speaker 13 But some of their MPs are not happy because they think that he has been echoing language like Enoch Powell's. So yeah.

Speaker 39 Also, that seems futile.

Speaker 40 You can't out reform reform.

Speaker 39 It's like, I can't out crazy Kanye. Like, like

Speaker 39 initially when I was coming here, I got a little bit paranoid because I was like, oh no, every time immigration's in the news, they ask me to come on the news.

Speaker 42 I was like, oh no, it's always in the news, right?

Speaker 39 But of course, I am overqualified because I have been everything, right?

Speaker 39 I was a refugee, I've been a migrant, I've become a citizen, and I currently am frustrated with all these foreign comedians coming and taking my job.

Speaker 32 He's been accused of using dog whistles, which are in political terms, a dog whistle is when you say something that sounds innocuous to most people but to a radical subset of your audience is understood in a more extreme way.

Speaker 32 And what Starmer has done, I think, is he's sort of innovated on the idea of a dog whistle and come up with what I would call a whistle.

Speaker 32 Of course, I come from a shepherding family, so in shepherding terms, a dog whistle is a whistle that dogs can hear, but sheep can't, so they don't know what you're planning.

Speaker 32 Now,

Speaker 32 you might say to me, Alistair, why not just get a sheep whistle and tell the sheep what you want them to do?

Speaker 32 Cut the dogs out of the equation. I say, you try that and the sheepdog unions will be all over you.

Speaker 39 Also, I feel like as a writer, I feel very jealous of the speech writer who wrote Kier Starmer's speech because he's clearly writing the speeches for every party.

Speaker 41 He's cornered.

Speaker 32 Unlike Deliso, I'm not an immigrant. I have red hair.
My genes have been knocking around these islands for a very long time.

Speaker 32 But in a way, you know, we all are. You know, the red-headed genes left Africa, pretty sharpish, travelled up.

Speaker 32 Travelled up the west coast of Europe, reached Scotland and thought, that's enough for me, I'll stay here forever.

Speaker 18 That'll do.

Speaker 26 I mean, of course, your roots in this country go back so far that you're actually named after Britain's best-known 12th-century dispute between an Archbishop of Canterbury and a monarch,

Speaker 17 Specket King.

Speaker 39 One thing I'm worried about, though, is they're going to introduce these English standards that everybody who's migrating has to have.

Speaker 39 If other countries reciprocate, every single British migrant is coming back.

Speaker 12 Can I ask, like, does this mean that Theresa May's immigrants go home vans didn't work?

Speaker 27 It does seem that way, yes.

Speaker 12 That's the impression we're starting to get.

Speaker 39 I smuggled a few of my friends in through one of those vans.

Speaker 13 MPs are really upset. Some MPs, not all, are really upset about this language, I would say, more than the policy itself.
And I've had like lots of WhatsApps from people.

Speaker 13 Someone saying, I think this moment will be the undoing of number 10. Never seen such anger in moderate MPs.
It's a values thing.

Speaker 13 One person just sent me, I prefer the old cure, but what they're getting in response from number 10 is we need to meet the public where they are.

Speaker 13 And the polling suggests the public wants immigration to be much lower.

Speaker 13 But it is interesting when you ask people who should we stop coming, and I had a list of them this week: doctors, nurses, engineers, care workers, even bankers.

Speaker 13 Not on any single category do people say stop them coming.

Speaker 13 So I don't know how they think, how we think that immigration will come down.

Speaker 3 I have got it.

Speaker 43 Comedians.

Speaker 41 There must be

Speaker 40 one foreign comedian.

Speaker 14 We didn't have that on our list.

Speaker 34 Yes, Stan was accused of channeling the spirit of prominent 1960s celeb Enoch Powell when he said that Britain risks becoming an island of what?

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 3 Yes, strangers. Oh,

Speaker 20 it's almost like you don't respect this show as a genuine quiz.

Speaker 41 He was just bursting to yell it out.

Speaker 12 So everyone keeps saying this thing like he's echoing Enoch Powell. And I thought, as a recent immigrant myself, I thought he was echoing the voiceover of the Love Island host.

Speaker 12 An island of strangers, hoping to find love.

Speaker 34 Well, it could be a follow-up to Love Island.

Speaker 38 And rather than them starting as strangers and falling in love, they start in love and end up as complete strangers.

Speaker 21 And I think that would fit better with our national psyche, to be honest.

Speaker 12 Also, I feel like all British people want is an island of strangers. Like,

Speaker 12 it would mean you never had to make direct eye contact

Speaker 3 or hug.

Speaker 40 But almost pedantically, it is an island of strangers.

Speaker 41 I don't know everybody.

Speaker 42 I know.

Speaker 39 My problem is my pedantic side always makes me take the wrong side of an argument.

Speaker 39 I could agree with you, but then if you start expressing things that are factually wrong, I switch sides.

Speaker 32 I resent the implication that immigration has made Britain stranger, because Britain has always been very strange.

Speaker 32 You get people in Britain saying, oh, my family goes back 600 years. Well, everyone's does.

Speaker 32 You think my family were invented in the 1970s?

Speaker 13 Downing Street on the Enoch Powell echo. So we definitely didn't mean to echo Enoch Powell.
Nobody had thought of that.

Speaker 13 But they do also admit that they thought hard about that language because it would make the story run for longer.

Speaker 39 But also, I noticed that the very divisive language was right at the beginning, and then in the middle, there was more kind of reasonable things.

Speaker 39 But they know that people have very short attention span, so people only heard the first two minutes.

Speaker 20 So, what was that?

Speaker 21 Also, on the immigration issue, Keir Starmer's efforts to to set up a return hub in Albania have not worked.

Speaker 36 So this was a hub for failed asylum seekers.

Speaker 21 So return hubs, not just a memo Liz Taylor quite often wrote to herself.

Speaker 32 The name of it, Return Hubs, it sounds like you've asked Amazon to run a concentration camp.

Speaker 32 Something slightly disgusting about it.

Speaker 13 I think six months for the process is generous. An expert we spoke to today, because I was making a piece on this issue, said six years.

Speaker 13 Six years before you go to the return hub hub with the country not decided. And it was quite funny to watch Kirstama and the Albanian president.

Speaker 13 Obviously, it was quite embarrassing because Kirstama said he wants these return hubs, and then the Albanian president was like, Yeah, everybody wants us, but no,

Speaker 16 not going to do it.

Speaker 13 And then he had this funny language because they're doing a deal with Italy, and he said, We've gone for a marriage with Italy, but for everyone else, it's just love.

Speaker 32 And if any nation takes marriage seriously, it's Italy.

Speaker 23 Another question.

Speaker 37 Overseas graduates will be forced to return home after 18 months under these new schemes unless they find what?

Speaker 32 Is it the golden scarab of Amenhotep?

Speaker 39 Love with someone.

Speaker 12 Above the necessary income threshold.

Speaker 41 That's exactly what I was thinking.

Speaker 32 Is it a collection of Noel Edmonds' old beards?

Speaker 18 Most people don't realise he actually sheds them like a snake.

Speaker 13 Is it a skilled job?

Speaker 46 A skilled job, correct?

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 39 This is a little insulting, I think, sometimes to a lot of the jobs which they call non-skilled require a lot of skill.

Speaker 39 Like, one of the big ones which is causing a lot of discussion is the care homes. They're going to get rid of the care worker visa and try to get more British people in care.

Speaker 39 I have never seen a British care worker. Like, I went to see a friend of mine, and everybody taking care of him was African.

Speaker 41 I felt homesick.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I don't think of like public-facing, warm customer service as this country's greatest asset.

Speaker 13 There is 131,000 vacancies in the care sector,

Speaker 13 which is obviously why we've had very high immigration. Although there is an argument, isn't there, that so much cheaper labor has been brought into this sector, it's suppressed wages.

Speaker 13 And actually, whenever we've done anything on the care sector, people say to us, we we can earn more money working at the supermarket down the road.

Speaker 13 But I agree with you, it is a skilled job, and it should be treated like that.

Speaker 39 Also, if you paid them more, it would gradually fix itself. But then the problem is, people would have to pay more for it.

Speaker 5 But it's a fact, I think, that the average Premier League left back

Speaker 34 gets paid, I think, something like one and a half thousand times more than the average care worker.

Speaker 5 So for that, you could have 1,500 care workers.

Speaker 26 But the problem is, how do you play 1,500 care workers in a flat back four?

Speaker 32 I graduated from university 20 years ago, and I have never done a day's work since then.

Speaker 32 And frankly, I resent the implication that just because I was born in this country, I have been of any use to anyone.

Speaker 32 I don't see why the taxes of hard-working immigrants should pay for me to sit around pontificating on Radio 4.

Speaker 32 This country has gone to the docks.

Speaker 39 But actually, you point out something quite revolutionary. Why not, instead of deporting the migrants, we deport citizens?

Speaker 20 I think we tried that.

Speaker 3 That was called the empire.

Speaker 46 This proved a little controversial over the years.

Speaker 14 Yes, immigration.

Speaker 23 If there is one issue in politics that does not deal well with the infinite complexities of reality, and there are loads of them, that one issue is immigration.

Speaker 21 Undeterred, however, Prime Minister Kirstama this week became the, I'm going to say, 35th consecutive Prime Minister to pledge to take back control of this nation's borders.

Speaker 22 Can he do better than the previous 34?

Speaker 24 Time will tell.

Speaker 21 The government's white paper laid out eight core measures to reduce net migration, which has peaked at 900,000 per year, several hundred thousand above what it was before Brexit.

Speaker 24 So whilst it has been a difficult time for many industries in this nation, British irony is doing tremendously well.

Speaker 22 Critics from all sides and depths of the political swamp slammed the Prime Minister for saying that Britain risks becoming a nation of strangers.

Speaker 21 Robert Jenrick, the Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary, belly splashed into the debate off the top turnbuckle to claim that we are already a nation of strangers, anxious, evidently, that the Tories should get most of the credit for fracturing national society, rather than letting Starmer waltz in to finish the job and claim it all as his own.

Speaker 22 Others said Starmer was veering into the same kind of linguistic territory that Enoch Powell chundered out in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968.

Speaker 15 But it's quite a big leap from we're not going to know each other very well to rivers of blood.

Speaker 23 But of course we are living in the 21st century, the greatest ever age of hyperbole and exaggeration by far.

Speaker 22 Look, I have a particular interest in this topic because I am the son of an immigrant father who himself was the son of a refugee and also because I'm from the UK which has a well-known history of, shall we say, two-way immigration.

Speaker 47 And I'm a member of a species which has built its success on moving from one place to another pretty much ever since Eve and Adam refugeed the crap out of the Garden of Eden.

Speaker 31 So maybe I'm not objective enough, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount from any political party on what can be done to deal with the main problems in this issue, which are one, a fully dysfunctional planet, and two, the evolutionary glitches in the human brain that mean that if we live somewhere not very nice, for whatever reason, we want to move to somewhere a bit nicer.

Speaker 33 If we just fix those two things, everything else will fall into place.

Speaker 26 But the obviously obvious best way to reduce immigration is to make the UK a much less desirable place to move to, and fair play to successive governments for stepping up to that particular plate.

Speaker 15 At the end of that round, the scores are five to Alistair and Anushka, and three to Deliso and Sarah.

Speaker 39 It's somehow the immigrants get less

Speaker 20 rude.

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Speaker 30 Right, science round now.

Speaker 26 Deliso and Sarah, you can have this question.

Speaker 15 Weight loss drugs could result in people having much longer watts.

Speaker 12 Stretch marks.

Speaker 24 Scientifically true, but not the answer I've got written down.

Speaker 27 Deliso?

Speaker 39 Legs.

Speaker 33 Legs?

Speaker 33 No?

Speaker 3 What's the logic behind it?

Speaker 40 I guess it's an optical illusion.

Speaker 12 Conversations with people who used to treat them as invisible.

Speaker 26 Again, scientifically correct answer.

Speaker 12 The answer is lives.

Speaker 18 Lives, correct.

Speaker 12 So, someone very close to me started Ozempic this week. I'm American.
Everyone's on it.

Speaker 12 And I was happy, therefore, to learn that apparently it makes you like one of the side effects is less likely to have a cardiac event, but also less likely to contract an infectious disease.

Speaker 12 And what was unclear to me, I'm not going anywhere funny with this, and I do want someone to explain this to me, is that just because getting to a smaller weight makes you less susceptible to something like a cardiac event, or is it some other side effect entirely?

Speaker 3 No, I think you're right.

Speaker 39 My brain, when you say cardiac event, doesn't think of a heart attack, I just think of any event involving hearts.

Speaker 41 Okay,

Speaker 12 do you think that we're getting to that part of your personality right now that is very pedantic?

Speaker 39 So, if a surgeon is doing a heart transplant and they drop a heart, that's a cardiac event.

Speaker 44 Don't encourage him!

Speaker 41 All right, fine.

Speaker 23 Don't use it as a chat-up line, though. Don't say I'm having a cardiac event on a date, it just sends out the wrong impressions.

Speaker 26 But I mean, it's quite exciting scientific breakthroughs that these drugs designed for weight loss could end up making us live forever, essentially.

Speaker 32 I think it is a big exaggeration. I don't think weight loss drugs are the reason people are living longer.
I lay the blame squarely on box sets of prestige television.

Speaker 32 There's just too many of them. They're all great.
They're all 10 series long. I think people are living longer just to get to the end of all the quality content

Speaker 32 that is on the streaming services. You've got people in their 90s who haven't started breaking bad.
Come on.

Speaker 32 The thing is, we've got an aging population in this country, and older people need younger people to support them and to work, and we're running out of young people.

Speaker 32 And we could deal with that by, I don't know, allowing students to stay here, like immigrants to maybe stay on and contribute to our society.

Speaker 5 But I think we would prefer to do it by magic.

Speaker 25 You are a very short step away from just becoming a politician spontaneously.

Speaker 32 Please don't put words in my mouth, Andy. Actually, if you'd just let me finish.

Speaker 20 This research has shown that the weight loss drugs that are causing widespread existential panic in the enormous trousers industry could have massive health benefits for everyone, significantly reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes and significantly increasing the risk of saying, I remember when all this was fields, I can't even make out the words.

Speaker 26 And don't worry, my darling great-grandchild, home ownership and career stability is overrated.

Speaker 15 Before we finish our health round, another health story.

Speaker 30 Why might people, sick of waiting to see their GP, choose instead to book a flight to a rainforest and hire a pantomime chimpanzee outfit.

Speaker 27 Anyone?

Speaker 12 Because there was a news story this week that chimpanzees can give each other first aid. Correct.

Speaker 12 And it raised the very interesting question: does this mean Bubbles chose not to resuscitate Michael Jackson?

Speaker 32 I saw an article in the Daily Mail that said a lot of those injured chimpanzees are just faking it to get free tire swings.

Speaker 16 White screen bananas.

Speaker 39 I just saw it as a sign of the far-reaching fingers of big pharma.

Speaker 32 How big is this pharma?

Speaker 12 Maybe it means we could hire them to be care workers.

Speaker 23 Don't say things like that out loud.

Speaker 34 They will become party policy for someone.

Speaker 20 Yes, researchers from Oxford University, sorry, boffins, have discovered that chimps administer first aid to each other.

Speaker 26 The chimps were recorded chewing special leaves, then dabbing them on wounds, as well as performing more advanced human-style medical procedures such as supercutaneous epidermal banana ostomies, that's peeling a banana,

Speaker 22 chimpanzee ECGs,

Speaker 21 and atombroscopies, which is looking around to see if David Attenborough is hanging around with a bloody TV crew again.

Speaker 33 The scientists found that chimps were surprisingly willing to help other chimps, even if they were not related to them, provided that the ill chimp requested help at precisely 8 a.m.

Speaker 31 and not a second later.

Speaker 19 Well at the end of our health round the scores are now seven to Alistair and Anushka, eight to Deliso and Sarah.

Speaker 45 Let's move on to our next round which is a cuts round and to mark these cuts it's a missing syllable round so I'm going to give our panelists a headline from the week's news that has had one syllable cut from it.

Speaker 26 And these are all related to the state of the economy and government cuts.

Speaker 9 So, we'll start with this one.

Speaker 21 This can go to Alistair Ananushka.

Speaker 45 One in four employers plan red undies in the next three months.

Speaker 27 What?

Speaker 20 What is the missing syllable in that headline?

Speaker 11 What?

Speaker 4 Dance?

Speaker 18 Is that a syllable? Ants? Yes, ants.

Speaker 30 Ants, ants. Ants, red undances.

Speaker 26 Redundancies.

Speaker 32 Yeah, that's how we say that word.

Speaker 32 There's a lot of red undancies coming.

Speaker 8 It's gonna be tough.

Speaker 46 I think

Speaker 32 the jobs market is really tough. And when I think about it, loads of jobs that were around when I was a kid don't exist anymore.
Like when I was a kid, local characters were everywhere.

Speaker 32 You could just be a local character.

Speaker 32 You could just grow a blonde moustache, just get a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, pull them up to your armpits, and just stand at a school gates.

Speaker 23 People would say, Yeah, he's a local character.

Speaker 32 And if you did it for long enough, they made you a PE teacher.

Speaker 36 But I mean, politically, the state of the economy, this kind of thing, you know, how do you balance out, say, slightly better growth figures with more concerning employment figures politically?

Speaker 13 Well, Rachel Reeves really, really needed the good growth figures because behind the scenes, Labour MPs are not very happy about the state of things.

Speaker 13 They didn't like what happened with winter fuel payments. They're not happy about welfare changes.

Speaker 13 And actually, the reason for the redundancies, or people think it may be the reason, is the decision to increase employers' national insurance, which actually might be the most controversial of all in the longer run.

Speaker 13 And lots of MPs were not being very nice about the Chancellor. She really, really needed some good news.
And actually, 0.7% growth was better than anyone expected. I think I saw a prediction of 0.6%.

Speaker 29 Let's move on to our next missing syllable headline.

Speaker 31 This can go to Deliso and Sarah.

Speaker 30 Government announces plan to reduce bets on world's poor.

Speaker 21 What is the missing syllable?

Speaker 39 On world's poor. Is this the story that they're cutting like aid?

Speaker 41 Yes.

Speaker 16 Bet, bet, bet.

Speaker 39 But bud, bud, j at.

Speaker 41 Budget. Udj practice.

Speaker 21 Uj is the missing syllable.

Speaker 33 But udjet.

Speaker 27 Hold on.

Speaker 15 I can see this catching on. I can see this getting its own show.

Speaker 41 So

Speaker 26 politically, again, cutting the aid budget always seems to be the first thing against the wall in difficult times.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and you can picture them just being like, yeah, well, they were only going to spend it on drugs. And you're like, yeah, but they were going to be life-saving drugs.

Speaker 39 And also, like, again, this is not funny. This is, I can't believe I'm being forced to make an actual point, right? But it's never actually been foreign aid.

Speaker 39 The better way to look at it is foreign investment, because what you you end up having is like after the interhamway in Rwanda, there was a lot of aid given, and then the country regenerated, and now they're sponsoring Arsenal.

Speaker 41 You see?

Speaker 41 It's a surplus.

Speaker 13 Do you know what? You sound like Kirst Armour in 2021.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's nuts. It's, oh, let's run the government like it's a business.
Let's ride a horse like it's a bike.

Speaker 32 It's a different thing. It it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 32 Uh and we're not on track to hit net zero, we're nowhere near, and the Tories think we should stop trying, and we want to cut foreign aid, and at the same time we want to reduce immigration, and it's not going to work because the planet's getting hotter and the equatorial regions are going to get hotter, and I think we're about to see a rhetorical shift from the right saying climate change isn't real, man-made climate change isn't real, to it is happening, it's too late to stop it, and that's why we have to close the borders, which is a a really good point, I think.

Speaker 15 Let's have one final missing syllable said, Love, Of course, they'd be taking a look.

Speaker 13 Sorry to criticise your game, but ujj is not a syllable.

Speaker 11 Thank you.

Speaker 14 Well, you're not going to like this one because this isn't a missing syllable.

Speaker 22 This is three missing letters in the middle of a word.

Speaker 23 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 26 Either side can take this.

Speaker 30 Government pledges to remove pants from some people with disabilities.

Speaker 14 What are the three missing letters?

Speaker 32 I think that actually is labour policy, isn't it?

Speaker 39 PIP?

Speaker 40 Personal independence.

Speaker 13 You're right, but that's not the word.

Speaker 14 That's not the missing.

Speaker 39 Oh, payments. Yes, yes.

Speaker 42 Payments.

Speaker 38 Why M and E are the missing letters.

Speaker 32 Like Anushka is saying, there has been a negative reaction in the Labour Party about this.

Speaker 32 I think Imran Hussein, the Bradford East MP, said something might scrap these unfair cuts and do the right thing and tax the super rich.

Speaker 32 And you hear a lot from the super rich because it's like they own all the media or something. And

Speaker 32 the super rich are always saying, oh, the far left wants me to pay 95% tax. And it's like, you know, you have to understand, the far left wants you evicted from your homes by Bolshevik gunmen.

Speaker 32 Taxes were the compromise.

Speaker 32 I think you should take the deal, guys.

Speaker 30 Yes, the Department of Work and Pensions has confirmed that the government has no plans to back down from its controversial cuts to disability benefit payments.

Speaker 33 Also, the aid budget is going to be slashed from 0.5 to 0.3%

Speaker 5 of GDP.

Speaker 35 And maybe we just have to accept that we live in different times now, and things like foreign aid and dignity and hope for those with disabilities are just two of the outdated political relics that modern Britain is bravely moving on from, along with other social antiquities that we've gradually shelved from our national priorities during recent years, such as the poor, truth, dignity for the old, public transport in financially inconvenient areas, libraries, a functioning legal system, due process, logic, a manufacturing sector, objectivity, nuance, empathy, Northern Ireland logic, the Ford Defensive Shot, Children, the Future, and most tragically of all, correctly used apostrophes.

Speaker 46 Yeah, well, that is the end of this week's newsquiz, and the final scores.

Speaker 15 It's 10 to Alistair and Anushka, 12 to Deliso and Sarah.

Speaker 43 Yes!

Speaker 9 Thank you for listening to the newsquiz. I've been Andy Zaltzman, goodbye.

Speaker 9 Taking part in the newsquiz were Alistair Beckett King, Sarah Barron, Deliso Shaponda, and Anushka Astana.

Speaker 9 In the chair was me, Andy Zaltzman, and additional material was written by Catherine Brinkworth, Cody Dahla, Samira Samira Banks, and Eve Delaney.

Speaker 9 The producer was Rajiv Karia and it was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

Speaker 10 Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 4 I'm Amanda Yanucci. And I'm Helen Lewis.
A comedy writer and a journalist teaming up like a pair of unkempt and unlikely superheroes.

Speaker 13 Our mission is to decipher political language.

Speaker 4 Stress testing to destruction those used and abused buzzwords and phrases. Finding out what they really mean.

Speaker 40 And looking at whether whether they're meant to deceive us or to distract us or to disturb us.

Speaker 13 And our pledge is to help you spot the tricks of the verbal trade.

Speaker 4 But be warned, this series does feature strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of piffle.

Speaker 10 Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 4 Listen now on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 51 Today on Hey Culligan, reverse to reduce, here's Bob.

Speaker 52 Hey Culligan, I love fresh water, but I got plastic bottles coming out.

Speaker 28 Whoa, Bob, you are not kidding about the bottles.

Speaker 28 But did you know Culligan's reverse osmosis and always-on drinking water systems provide fresh, clean, delicious drinking water and help reduce the equivalent of over 15 billion plastic bottles from landfills worldwide?

Speaker 52 Holy, fresh, environmentally friendly drinking water.

Speaker 11 Am I right?

Speaker 14 Right, Bob.

Speaker 28 And we're already on the way.

Speaker 51 Let us help you out with a free in-home water test from a local Culligan water expert at Culligan.com.

Speaker 53 Sucks!

Speaker 54 The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway. We demand to be home.
Winner, best score. We demand to be seen.
Winner, best book.

Speaker 54 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 39 Suffs!

Speaker 53 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 54 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.