The Naked Week: Ep6. Tariffs, Theme Parks, and Twister.
The Naked Week team are back to place satirical news-tariffs on current events with a mix of correspondents, guests and, occasionally, live animals.
This week we mourn the death of globalisation, take a tour of Keir's new theme park, and play a game of BBC Balance Local Elections Naked Week Joke Twister.
From The Skewer’s Jon Holmes and host Andrew Hunter Murray comes The Naked Week, a fresh way of dressing the week’s news in the altogether and parading it around for everyone to laugh at.
With award-winning writers and a crack team of contemporary satirists - and recorded in front of a live audience - The Naked Week delivers a topical news-nude straight to your ears.
Written by:
Jon Holmes
Katie Sayer
Gareth Ceredig
Sarah Dempster
Jason Hazeley.
Investigations Team:
Cat Neilan
Louis Mian
Freya Shaw
Matt Brown
Guests: Freya Parker and Alicia Fitzgerald.
Production Team: Laura Grimshaw, Tony Churnside, Jerry Peal, Katie Sayer, Phoebe Butler.
Executive Producer: Philip Abrams
Produced and Directed by Jon Holmes
An unusual production for BBC Radio 4
Press play and read along
Transcript
Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.
Speaker 3 Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.
Speaker 3 In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.
Speaker 3 Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4
Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway. We demand to be honest.
Winner, best score.
Speaker 5 We demand to be seen.
Speaker 6 Winner, best book. We demand to be quality.
Speaker 4 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.
Speaker 4 Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.
Speaker 7 BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
Speaker 9 Hello, I'm Andrew Hunter Murray. Welcome to The Naked Week.
Speaker 12 Imagine Channel 4 News if Krishnan Guru Murthy blinked first in a trade war with his own tie.
Speaker 18 This week, after more tariff turbulence, you can criticize him all you like, but at least the US President is bringing back long-lost words.
Speaker 21 Old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term.
Speaker 21 Eggs.
Speaker 9 It's such an old-fashioned term, isn't it?
Speaker 8 Eggs.
Speaker 14 So much more elegant than today's term, hen's ass incubation chamber.
Speaker 13 Also, this week, there was an unexpected boost to the national mood.
Speaker 25 Boris Johnson has been attacked by an ostrich.
Speaker 26 Good.
Speaker 26 Good.
Speaker 27 Would anyone like to hear it?
Speaker 22 Yay!
Speaker 15 Oh, Christ!
Speaker 27 Shit is all right.
Speaker 9 So it's been a fast-moving, ever-changing week, but it's been good to have one thing we can be certain of.
Speaker 24 Eggs-loving Trump will not back down from his tariffs.
Speaker 13 Here he is on Monday.
Speaker 29 Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for negotiation?
Speaker 21 Well, we're not looking at that.
Speaker 30 Not looking at that, not even thinking about it.
Speaker 13 Then he took to social media to drive the message home.
Speaker 31 Here's what he wrote: Don't be weak, don't be stupid, don't be a panican, a new party based on weak and stupid people.
Speaker 18 It says something about how fast this story is moving that we simply don't have time to focus more on the word panican.
Speaker 16 But then the White House press secretary really made sure that we got the message.
Speaker 32 President Trump has a spine of steel, and he will not break and America will not break under his leadership.
Speaker 35 Yes!
Speaker 36 Trump the unbreakable leader.
Speaker 33 So the one thing we could be sure of was that Trump was not going to change his mind on tariffs.
Speaker 13 And by Wednesday night, he made sure we all understood that loud and clear by saying...
Speaker 21 And now I've reversed it.
Speaker 13 At which point in this story, I wonder, do you think Trump's advisors pointed out to him that he owns rather a lot of stock in Wall Street?
Speaker 34 Honestly, what a panic ann.
Speaker 18 Now, before we continue, I'm very sorry to bring the mood down.
Speaker 24 Just as we're getting going, I'm afraid I have some rather sad news.
Speaker 7 Do you think globalization is now over?
Speaker 23 Yeah, it's ended. Globalization, as we've known it for the last number of decades, has come to an end.
Speaker 40 Indeed.
Speaker 13 As foretold by Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones and Chief Weeping Widow to the BBC Laura Kunzberg, it's my solemn duty to confirm the untimely death of globalization.
Speaker 41 Gone too soon.
Speaker 30 So if I could ask those of you now assembled here and those of you listening at home to please stand for the eulogy.
Speaker 42 If you could.
Speaker 26 Please, please do.
Speaker 22 Thank you.
Speaker 10 We are gathered here today to commemorate globalization.
Speaker 14 You brought so much joy into our lives.
Speaker 34 This week, you have made us all Google financial terms like bond yields and unilateral import levies and then accidentally land on a very not safe for work website while searching what is a bear market.
Speaker 43 Maybe that was just me.
Speaker 34 But sadly, your race is now run.
Speaker 43 Cut down in your subprime by a hail of trade tariffs, retaliatory trade tariffs, retaliatory, retaliatory trade tariffs, an increase of tariffs, the freezing of tariffs, a reversal of tariffs, and a critical build-up of emergency.
Speaker 44 The rest is politics podcasts.
Speaker 44 Please be seated.
Speaker 46 Thank you, everybody.
Speaker 7 Yeah, it's not dead, Andy.
Speaker 47 Sorry, what? False alarm.
Speaker 7 Globalization is fine. And you are? Freya Parker, The Naked Weeks False Alarm Globalisation's fine correspondent.
Speaker 26 Hello, Freya. Hello.
Speaker 47 Hi.
Speaker 7 Andy, I swear, I saw Globalisation up and about on Monday afternoon. She looked great.
Speaker 7 And you know who else saw?
Speaker 49 This guy.
Speaker 49 We are also going to work to reduce barriers to trade across the globe, to accelerate trade deals with the rest of the world, and champion the cause of free and open trade right across the globe.
Speaker 7 Admittedly, those all mean the same thing.
Speaker 7 But still, does that sound to you like a man who thinks globalization is dead?
Speaker 34 Well, I mean, no, but hang on, over the weekend it was dead.
Speaker 7 And on the third day,
Speaker 15 it rose again.
Speaker 7 You see?
Speaker 7 It is the season, Andy.
Speaker 7 And it was all thanks to the Labour top brass heading to somewhere near Birmingham, putting clothes pegs on their noses to block out the smell of the bins, and giving a couple of rousing speeches in front of a Jaguar Land Rover assembly line.
Speaker 49 Jaguar Land Rover, our leading exporter of goods. Can I just say a big thank you for making us proud to be British?
Speaker 12 Sorry, is Jaguar Land Rover not 100% owned by an Indian multinational?
Speaker 7 Exactly, Andy.
Speaker 7 Death of globalisation, more like shmeth of shmobilized schmeissen.
Speaker 41 How are you spelling that?
Speaker 26 I don't know.
Speaker 7 I'm not Susie Dent, Andy.
Speaker 6 But you know who is?
Speaker 7
Kia Starmer. Loves his words, does Kia.
He even rolled out some brand new ways of using them this week.
Speaker 49 Here we are, Monday, with you.
Speaker 49 Please read into that a statement of intent, because it is a statement of intent.
Speaker 12 A new entry, a new entry in the labor lexicon.
Speaker 19 We've had pledges, we've had milestones, we've had steps, we've had missions, and now statements of intent.
Speaker 24 I mean, forget cars. Clearly, our most profitable industry is Big Thesaurus.
Speaker 41 Okay, Sunday, globalization was dead.
Speaker 42 Monday, St.
Speaker 18 Kier, Lazarus did back to life.
Speaker 12 But Trump's still trying to crush China in his tiny hands.
Speaker 32 The White House confirming a 104% tariff.
Speaker 45 Breaking news, China has retaliated, announcing an 84% 84% tariff.
Speaker 3 US tariffs on China now total 145%.
Speaker 7 On Friday, China raised tariffs on US goods to 125%.
Speaker 32 China's Commerce Ministry said in part, China will fight to the end.
Speaker 14 China and the US fighting to the end.
Speaker 36 Truly, the Gallagher brothers of geopolitics
Speaker 1 in that they're not worth nearly what they're charging.
Speaker 18 But after a whole week of conflicting reports about the demise of globalisation, what's the reality?
Speaker 24 Could the Naked Week survive in a hardline Make Great Britain Great Again economic environment?
Speaker 24 To find out, I'm joined by the Naked Week's hardline Make Great Britain Great Again Economic Environment correspondent, Freya Parker.
Speaker 54 Freya.
Speaker 7 Hi, Andy.
Speaker 51 Does this show need other countries?
Speaker 7 In theory, no.
Speaker 7 The Naked Week could survive as an anti-globalist, hermetically sealed British show with no foreign influences whatsoever.
Speaker 47 Great.
Speaker 7
I mean, you'd have to change the title. Why? Well, the word weak comes from the Old English wick, which is Germanic in origin.
And being naked technically comes from the Garden of Eden, which
Speaker 7 it simply can't have been in the UK because no true Brit would have enough body competence to strut about in drizzle wearing a fig leaf.
Speaker 12 Okay, well, what would be a 100% pure British title for this show?
Speaker 7 If you'd want to keep it truly British, I think you'd have to call it something like
Speaker 7 the
Speaker 7 basically no words, just a sort of disappointed sigh.
Speaker 7 The sort of noise that you make, you know, when you wake up in a travel lodge.
Speaker 48 You know what I mean?
Speaker 37 Okay, what would an episode of BBC Radio 4's The
Speaker 7 contain? Well, no jokes, that's for sure.
Speaker 53 No change there?
Speaker 28 Yes.
Speaker 35 You were all thinking it.
Speaker 53 Okay, but why?
Speaker 54 Why no jokes?
Speaker 7 Because the concept of jokes actually originated in ancient Mesopotamia. And the first ever written down joke was about 4,000 years ago for series 7 of Have I Got News for You?
Speaker 11 Okay, so no title, no jokes.
Speaker 31 Do we get microphones?
Speaker 7 Maybe, if you credit David Edward Hughes as the inventor, but then the sound mixer they're plugged into is American,
Speaker 7 and the table the microphones are sitting on is
Speaker 46 just a sec.
Speaker 7 Oh, it's being held up by a Filipino child, what?
Speaker 8 Yes,
Speaker 7 he said he wanted to work in show business, so and also you wouldn't have any way of broadcasting the show singers. Radio is Italian.
Speaker 18 What if we just gave people the scripts to read?
Speaker 7 You're forgetting about the printing press. Witches? No, it's nothing to do with witches.
Speaker 7 It's German and paper is Chinese. What about you? Any non-white British ancestry?
Speaker 46 Actually, no.
Speaker 31 No way.
Speaker 50 Wow.
Speaker 7 But you can wear that suit, seeing as it looks like it was made in a sweatshirt by six-year-old Ricardo under the table here.
Speaker 54 How dare you?
Speaker 12 This suit is genuine, 100% Italian.
Speaker 7 Just like the Dolmio puppets.
Speaker 7 No, to be honest, Andy, if you wanted to make a truly anti-globalist episode of The Naked Week, it would probably boil down to just you wearing 100% Harris tweed, singing green sleeves into a radish.
Speaker 15 Bring it on.
Speaker 15 Bring it on, did you say?
Speaker 27 Globalization lives on.
Speaker 55 Thank you, Freya. Thank you.
Speaker 30 You're listening to The Naked Week on Radio 4, where it's time once more for us to join hands and, in the spirit of topical togetherness, stroll through the quiet garden of current affairs contemplation.
Speaker 14 It's the news in haikus.
Speaker 30 Charles and Camilla, 20 years.
Speaker 36 More like 45, says Diana.
Speaker 35 For our last ever episode,
Speaker 40 it's the news in haiku.
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Speaker 9 So, in the midst of the whole world continuing to collapse, our glorious leader tried to cheer us all up this week.
Speaker 21 Someone comes and says, Would you like to launch a theme park?
Speaker 27 A theme park!
Speaker 38
He's excited. We're excited.
It's so exciting.
Speaker 27 A new theme park, and it's in Bedford.
Speaker 52 But no, it is exciting.
Speaker 30 Because The Naked Week has managed to get hold of some of the theme park plans.
Speaker 18 Joining me now is The Naked Week's Some of the Theme Park plans correspondent, Freya Parker.
Speaker 26 Freya, what have we got?
Speaker 7 The Global Markets Coaster. It just drops.
Speaker 33 There's the Trumper cast.
Speaker 51 They just indiscriminately smash around with no sense of direction, completely out of control.
Speaker 7 The Thames Water Log Flume
Speaker 7 is pretty self-explanatory, but do keep your mouth closed on the ride.
Speaker 22 Yes, please.
Speaker 19 There's the HS2 ghost train, the northern leg of that.
Speaker 18 The northern leg has been cancelled.
Speaker 33 There's Russell Brand's heavy petting zoo.
Speaker 28 Oh.
Speaker 10 I'm sorry, that's been cordoned off with police tape.
Speaker 10 Unfortunately, the teacups are closed because of tariffs on China.
Speaker 10 No, you get stuffed.
Speaker 54 It's the last in the series.
Speaker 18 You're listening to The Naked Week, in the week when Prince Harry began his latest UK court battle.
Speaker 33 And speaking of pedigree chumps, it's time once again to grab the plastic bag of investigative journalism and trail behind a leaky Westminster watchdog.
Speaker 33 To do this, please welcome Tortoise Media's political editor and six-time winner of the Naked Week Award for Most Convoluted Canine-Based Introduction.
Speaker 55 It's Kat Nealon.
Speaker 16 Kat, it's the last of the current series.
Speaker 11 What's our grand finale?
Speaker 59 Actually, Andy, we're going back to the watchdog where it all began, the Electoral Commission.
Speaker 36 Ah, the original lassie trying to drag political sleeves out of the well.
Speaker 34 So, in episode one of this series, we looked at a millionaire businessman making donations to senior Labour MPs, some of which were only registered with the watchdog after the Naked Week pointed them out.
Speaker 15 Is that right? right? Yes.
Speaker 59 Although the Electoral Commission does, in theory, regulate donations from individuals and individual companies, there's also a little-known third way to give money to politicians called unincorporated associations.
Speaker 20 Which are?
Speaker 48 Damn.
Speaker 60 As a House of Commons report put it earlier this year, unincorporated associations are permissible donors, but they do not have to conduct permissibility checks on their own donors.
Speaker 60 Anyone, including foreign nationals, can donate to them.
Speaker 37 So hold on.
Speaker 30 Even though there are very explicit rules against foreign money entering UK politics, anyone from anywhere can donate to our politicians or parties through an unincorporated association.
Speaker 51 Yeah.
Speaker 54 With no checks on who they are or where the money's from or what kind of influence they might hope to buy with those donations.
Speaker 16 Pretty much.
Speaker 11 Okay, are there any specific examples of overseas money coming in via these associations?
Speaker 7 There are.
Speaker 59 Are you familiar with the Carlton Club?
Speaker 51 The Carlton Club, which is the private members' club, formerly the Conservative Party HQ.
Speaker 47 Yeah.
Speaker 59 So it probably won't come as a surprise to hear that they donate quite generously to the Tories.
Speaker 41 And where do they get their money from?
Speaker 59 Well, since 2020, the Carlton Club and its political committee have received payments worth £250,000 from a letting and real estate company called Stranbrook Limited.
Speaker 47 Okay, so what's the issue there?
Speaker 59 The issue is that although it's registered in the UK, Strandbrook has a different controlling company registered in Lichtenstein.
Speaker 50 Ah, Lichtenstein.
Speaker 30 Where famously, nothing financially creative has ever happened.
Speaker 51 And this company, ultimately based abroad, has been giving money to an unincorporated association which has been giving money to the Conservatives.
Speaker 59 All completely legal and the Carlton Club Political Committee told us they had complied with electoral law in respect of all political donations.
Speaker 59 But it's also worth noting that until last month, Strandbrook's directors included Henning Connler, a Swiss-German property tycoon who was recently accused of using a frontman to funnel millions of euros to German far-right party AFD?
Speaker 39 And was that legal?
Speaker 59 Well, the allegations are sufficiently serious that police in Germany and Austria have launched an investigation.
Speaker 59 Conner hasn't commented on the claims, and the AFD says they have been assured the donation did not come from him.
Speaker 46 Of course.
Speaker 13 But in the UK, at least, the company.
Speaker 13 Oh, excuse me, that's me.
Speaker 52 I'll just pick that up.
Speaker 46 Hello?
Speaker 13 Oh, hang on a second, yes, I'll put you on speaker.
Speaker 25
BBC lawyer here. No UK rules have been broken, and there's no suggestion of wrongdoing from Stranbrook, the Carlton Club, or the Tories.
Thank you.
Speaker 62 Bye-bye.
Speaker 15 Bye-bye.
Speaker 16 Thanks. Hastily added libel prevention voiceover.
Speaker 16 And may I say, where were you for the first five episodes of this series?
Speaker 33 Presumably though, there are stringent requirements for unincorporated associations.
Speaker 24 Financial records, business bank accounts, that kind of thing.
Speaker 42 No.
Speaker 59 The only requirement for an unincorporated association is that if it donates more than £37,270 per calendar year, it has to give the regulator a few extremely basic details.
Speaker 18 Okay, what if they don't want to give the regulator those few extremely basic details, but they do want to donate more than that weirdly specific amount of money?
Speaker 59 Then they can create another unincorporated association and carry on donating until they've reached that threshold again. Then create another, then another, then another, and so on.
Speaker 59 It's seemingly limitless.
Speaker 33 Oh, like Ed Davies' capacity to embarrass the nation.
Speaker 51 But hang on, we still haven't defined what exactly an unincorporated association is.
Speaker 7 Conveniently for us, us, Andy, the regulator has an association of individuals who've come together to carry out a shared purpose.
Speaker 53 Is that it?
Speaker 47 That's it.
Speaker 16 That's the vaguest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 34 And I've heard Robert Peston ask a question.
Speaker 51 So, according to the watchdog, practically any group of people with a shared purpose could be an unincorporated association.
Speaker 24 Bell ringers, your 10-year-old niece's birthday party, fight club.
Speaker 59 Yes, to all of those.
Speaker 33 Individuals who have come together to carry out a shared purpose.
Speaker 11 Wait a second, Cat, that could define everyone in this room.
Speaker 15 We're all here for a shared purpose.
Speaker 63 And that is to listen once again to Boris Johnson being attacked by an ostrich.
Speaker 9 It's so cheering.
Speaker 30 It's so cheering. But
Speaker 11 hypothetically, Kat, if the naked weak wanted to funnel billions of pounds into British politics, could we form our own unincorporated association right here and now?
Speaker 61 Andy, we absolutely could. Yes!
Speaker 35 Let's do it.
Speaker 59 What do we need? You need a name and some written rules.
Speaker 11 Written on what?
Speaker 59
Anything. Doesn't matter, as long as they're written down.
Genuinely, anything will do.
Speaker 39 Oh, great.
Speaker 38 Okay, well, what about Chris Mason's crop top?
Speaker 18 He left it here after they recorded Americast this morning. Hang on.
Speaker 48 Honestly, anything.
Speaker 8 Here it is.
Speaker 13 I've got a sharpie here, so I'm going to write on it.
Speaker 42 Are you sure this is the official, legitimate legal method for creating an unincorporated association?
Speaker 59
Astonishingly, yes, it really is. And it doesn't cost anything.
And you don't have to register with any regulator.
Speaker 54 Okay, that is incredible.
Speaker 42 So I'm just going to write a Naked Week unincorporated association.
Speaker 51 And you said we need some rules.
Speaker 54 Well, that's easy.
Speaker 51 The first rule of the Naked Week Unincorporated Association is you do not talk about the Naked Week
Speaker 52 Unincorporated Association. Right, done.
Speaker 59 And now you can give as much money as you like from any part of the world to any UK politician or party.
Speaker 15 But do you know what?
Speaker 24 We're feeling generous. We might want to donate more than 37,270 quid a year without giving any details to the regulator.
Speaker 63 So let's have a second one set up just in case. So I'll just scribble this one on this page of the script here.
Speaker 9 The Naked Week Unincorporated Association 2, brackets, overflow, close brackets.
Speaker 27 Rules, audience, what is the second rule of the Naked Week Unincorporated Association?
Speaker 8 Do not talk about the Naked Week Unincorporated Association.
Speaker 10 Beautiful.
Speaker 54 Two overflow.
Speaker 48 Good.
Speaker 19 And we've got some lawyers in.
Speaker 25 Great.
Speaker 59 Congratulations. Everyone here is now part of the biggest regulatory loophole in Westminster politics, and my work here is done.
Speaker 16 Wallets out, everybody.
Speaker 55 Thank you, Cat Nealon.
Speaker 16 This is The Naked Week on Radio 4. Still to come, Nigel Farage discovers a long-forgotten tattoo of Greta Tunberg.
Speaker 35 Gross.
Speaker 3 I couldn't scrub it off this morning, but it will go.
Speaker 9 And as he makes his debut on CBB's bedtime stories, GB News' chief conspiracy peddler Neil Oliver reads the tale of Peter Rabbit and friends.
Speaker 62 They're kept and used as slaves, used for sex, and then their organs are harvested from their ruined bodies.
Speaker 27 Sweet dreams, children.
Speaker 18 Imagine the excitement in the Naked Week production office this week when BBC management slid into our DMs with this kind of red-hot steamy chat.
Speaker 7 We are now well into the election period for the English local elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. So, at least two notches up on the impartiality dial this week, please.
Speaker 50 Four
Speaker 35 X-rated filthy stuff gives me the runt horn.
Speaker 37 horn.
Speaker 18 But as we're now in an election period, this is to remind us that we need to be impartial in our coverage.
Speaker 24 The idea being that you, the listening public, could well be swayed in your voting intentions if, for example, we were to say the word bad enough without immediately adding the word good enough.
Speaker 18 Now, historically, the pre-election period which elicits exciting emails from management is called purdah, a word of Muslim origin which means curtain or veil.
Speaker 24 But what is it? When is it? Why is it?
Speaker 41 How does it apply to elections?
Speaker 24 And if it's a Muslim word, do we also need a Jewish one for balance?
Speaker 16 To talk us through all of this, please welcome Blitio journalist Alicia Fitzgerald.
Speaker 47 Hi, Alicia.
Speaker 16 Now, you have reported on purdah.
Speaker 6 I have indeed.
Speaker 53 So, purdah she wrote.
Speaker 34 You know, if you didn't like that, you are going to hate the next three minutes.
Speaker 51 Alicia, tell us about Purdah and how it impacts local election coverage.
Speaker 6 Well, Andy, there are 23 elections for councils across England contesting 1,641 seats. While general elections can be called any time of year, these local elections tend to be in spring.
Speaker 34 So they're not mid-summer purders.
Speaker 8 Got it.
Speaker 15 Now you're warming up.
Speaker 6 Well to be honest, technically they're not really purder at all. I quote the definition.
Speaker 6 Purdah is the official period between the announcement of an election and the formation of the newly elected government, but it isn't called purder in local elections.
Speaker 14 So general elections are the only purders in the building.
Speaker 48 I mean
Speaker 6 look, while purdah applies to government officials, broadcasters also have a duty of impartiality and have to make sure their coverage of the election meets the Ofcom broadcasting code.
Speaker 40 So meet is Purda.
Speaker 6 Specifically, the section on due impartiality and due accuracy and undue prominence of views and opinions.
Speaker 41 And we would have to dance around those rules.
Speaker 6 Are you going to say purder on the dance floor?
Speaker 22 Well, I was.
Speaker 37 I'm not now.
Speaker 6 And the BBC's own election guidelines say this.
Speaker 25 The order in which parties or candidates appear or are introduced in discussions should normally be editorially driven.
Speaker 25 However, programme makers should take care to ensure that they vary this order so that no fixed or unfair pattern emerges in the course of the campaign.
Speaker 39 Hmm.
Speaker 24 That really sounds like a bit of a dial em
Speaker 15 for purder.
Speaker 13 Come on, it's the last in the series.
Speaker 6 Look, I guess the main thing really is that you have to provide equal coverage of all the larger parties.
Speaker 6 So, if you're making any jokes about parties who are standing for election, you must be balanced.
Speaker 18 Okay, great advice.
Speaker 24 Now, as you know, we at the Naked Week like to lend a hand, not least to our fellow broadcasters.
Speaker 24 So, to help any BBC programme in this period of heightened election sensitivity, we have come up with a foolproof plan.
Speaker 11 With the details, I'm also joined by our We've Come Up with a Foolproof Plan correspondent, Freya Parker.
Speaker 13 Freya, I know the BBC spent a lot of time and resources on getting things right.
Speaker 47 What have we got?
Speaker 7 What we've got, Andy, is a game of twister.
Speaker 54 Okay.
Speaker 7 Note that the colours on a twister mat reflect the colours of the main parties. Red, blue, yellow, and green.
Speaker 47 What about reform? We'd have to include reform?
Speaker 7 Yep, we do have to include them, which is why I've drawn some turquoise circles on the mat over on the right.
Speaker 46 Or the left, or the left.
Speaker 7 Depending on balance and also which way up the mat is.
Speaker 54 Yeah.
Speaker 18 So we have a twister mat here.
Speaker 30 It's taped to the the floor.
Speaker 53 Yeah.
Speaker 24 And I'm going to be playing Twister on my own. Yes.
Speaker 50 Okay.
Speaker 54 Story of my life.
Speaker 54 Talk me through how it's going to work.
Speaker 7 Okay, so what's going to happen is every time the spinny spinner thing dictates, you have to put a hand or a foot on a colour and then you're going to have to tell a joke about the party of that colour while you are literally balancing
Speaker 37 on the mat.
Speaker 11 But the spinny spinner thing is random.
Speaker 51 How can we be sure we'll be telling an equal number of jokes about each party?
Speaker 7 Because of a special broadcasting trick, Andy, known as the edit.
Speaker 16 Of course, of course.
Speaker 54 This is brilliant.
Speaker 11 They should do this on question time.
Speaker 16 And Fiona, if you're listening, you can borrow this after us.
Speaker 10 But please do give it a wipe before you return it.
Speaker 52 Okay.
Speaker 54 But there we go.
Speaker 33 Let's play BBC Balance, Local Elections, Naked Week, Joke Twister.
Speaker 7 Okay, right foot, blue.
Speaker 37 Okay, right foot, blue.
Speaker 16 Okay, blue, Tory.
Speaker 33 How many current Tory leaders does it take to change a light bulb?
Speaker 64 None, because apparently now is not the right time for change.
Speaker 28 Okay,
Speaker 7 left hand, red. Okay.
Speaker 54 Left, left, red, labour.
Speaker 48 Red labour, yep.
Speaker 38 What do you call a fish with no eyes?
Speaker 27 Perfectly able to work, according to Wes Streeting.
Speaker 7 Okay, left hand green.
Speaker 54 Left hand green, no problem.
Speaker 37 Knock, knock.
Speaker 35 Who's there?
Speaker 55 The two co-leaders of the Green Party.
Speaker 16 The two co-leaders of the Green Party, who?
Speaker 47 No idea.
Speaker 61 Okay, right foot.
Speaker 54 Shall we curry this up a little bit, please?
Speaker 7 Oh, I'm going as fast as I can.
Speaker 15 Are you?
Speaker 7 Right foot yellow. It's already on yellow.
Speaker 27 Oh, it doesn't matter, it's just a conceit for a comedy show tonight.
Speaker 12 Yellow.
Speaker 65 Why did Ed Davy cross the road? Because he was on a space hopper and and it seemed like a fun way to connect with the electorate.
Speaker 7 Okay, uh, left hand, turquoise.
Speaker 27 Left-hand turquoise.
Speaker 39 Why?
Speaker 27 Turquoise reform. Why is reform's official colour turquoise?
Speaker 54 Because this is the colour of Lee Anderson's face when he's asked for his pronouns.
Speaker 7 Okay, and, oh, I'm slightly between two colours here.
Speaker 27 That's fine, I have a contingency for that.
Speaker 27
Here it is. Five MPs, one from each of the larger parties, walk into a bar.
The barman says, I didn't agree to be in this joke. I didn't know you were coming in here, and I do not endorse any of you.
Speaker 8 No, I've lost it, and I've lost the balance.
Speaker 26 Ricardo, Ricardo, up here.
Speaker 65 The Naked Week was hosted by me, Andrew Hunter Murray, with guest correspondent Preya Poker and guest Alicia Fitzgerald.
Speaker 55 It was written by John Holmes, Gareth Koretic, Katie Sayer, Sarah Dempster, and Jason Haisley, with investigations team Kat Neelan, Louis Mian, Matt Brown, and Preya Shaw.
Speaker 65 Additional material by Carl Minnes, Alice Bright, Phoebe Butler, Cooper Mwinny Swirk, and Kevin Smith.
Speaker 16 The Naked Week is produced and directed by John Holmes.
Speaker 65 It's an unusual production for BBC Radio 4.
Speaker 37 Hello, Russell Kane here.
Speaker 21
I used to love British history. Be proud of it.
Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.
Speaker 21 That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.
Speaker 21 Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.
Speaker 21 Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.
Speaker 52 Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.
Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.
Speaker 3 Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.
Speaker 3 In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.
Speaker 3 Listen to Your Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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