The Naked Week: Ep4. Performing, Potholes, and Paddington.

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 3 Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 5 We demand to be home. Winner, best score.

Speaker 4 We demand to be seen. Winner, best book.

Speaker 5 We demand to be quality.

Speaker 6 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 9 Suffs!

Speaker 7 Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 10 BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 11 Hello, I'm Andrew Hunter Murray and welcome to The Naked Week. Imagine the news quiz after 10,000 staff had been cut to save costs.

Speaker 11 This week, Donald Trump finds his NATO membership card down the back of the White House sofa.

Speaker 12 I think we probably won't be using it very much.

Speaker 11 And as always, both the spring statement and opposition response were sentence after sentence of tedious spin.

Speaker 11 To keep themselves awake, Rachel Reeves and Mel Stride had a competition about who could say the word headroom the most times per minute.

Speaker 13 The headroom left by the previous government.

Speaker 11 All of her fiscal headroom disappeared.

Speaker 11 Providing headroom of 15.1 billion pounds what provision has she made in her headroom when i was left with a slither of headroom with a slither of headroom okay you're very good at that let's make it harder let's try twice in a sentence when i've been tested with a deterioration in the headroom we have restored that headroom she left way too little headroom way too little headroom and he says that it's a slither of a headroom well it's 50 percent more headroom than i inherited

Speaker 11 Guys, guys,

Speaker 11 get a headroom.

Speaker 11 So, this week, we... Oh, hang on.
Sorry. Just got a message.
Oh, it looks like I've accidentally been added to the Radio 4 group chat.

Speaker 11 Let's bomb Radio 2.

Speaker 11 Then there's a punching fist emoji, the Radio 4 logo, and an aubergine, which I think means they're going to strike during drive time with Sarah Cox.

Speaker 11 It's awkward. Well, anyway, we'll just.
Oh, sorry. It seems I've now been accidentally added to the U.S.
National Security Service Group. What are the odds? Oh, hang on.
No, it's not defense.

Speaker 11 It's just the White House Neighborhood Group chat.

Speaker 11 This is a message from J.D. Vance.
He says, which bins is it this week?

Speaker 11 And then he's written, I hate bailing out recycling. It's pathetic.

Speaker 11 Oh, here's U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complaining about Houthi rebels hanging around drinking cider in the bus shelter.

Speaker 11 Classic neighbour chat.

Speaker 11 They've accidentally added Keir Starmer, and he, Segway Ahoy, is complaining about potholes. There are far too many of them.

Speaker 11 Yes, while Trump's national security advisor was digging himself an embarrassing journalist-in-the-chat-shaped hole, both on the other side of the Atlantic and in the Atlantic, Holes were also a big talking point over here this week, as in a cynical move to sugar the pill of encroaching austerity, the government announced on Monday that they would be fixing the nation's potholes, presumably with a coalition of the filling.

Speaker 11 I'm staggered that that got that reaction, I'll be honest. Now, of course, Labour have been whole-obsessed since they took power.

Speaker 11 First, the noted son of a toolmaker wouldn't stop banging on about this. The £22 billion black hole.

Speaker 11 And now this week, with tools very much in mind, he's announced. The allocation of a record amount of money for filling in potholes, which is.

Speaker 11 No, Keir. It's got nothing to do with witches.

Speaker 11 Unless, of course, you count the famous one at Wookiee Hole. Carry on.

Speaker 11 I hope really welcome news. Oh, it is, Keir.
It is welcome news. Just like it was every other time you and your prime ministerial ilk have promised to sort them out.
It's very funny, isn't it?

Speaker 11 It does seem as if every time there's a bit of bad financial news or, heaven forfend, local elections just around the corner, the then leader pops up to talk about potholes. Here is Rishi Sunak.

Speaker 15 Mr. Speaker, I'm proud that we've announced an additional £8 billion for roads resurfacing.

Speaker 11 That will mean fewer potholes. Fewer potholes.
Brilliant. He promised.

Speaker 11 Just as David Cameron did.

Speaker 16 And what we need is the potholes mended. So the government stepped in with a £200 million fund.
So they are going to get done.

Speaker 11 Great, great. You hear that, everyone? They are going to get done.
Not sure when that clip was from, 11 years ago.

Speaker 11 But it's not just prime ministers who prattle on about potholes around local election time. It's also people who want to be prime minister but never will be.
Isn't that right, Ed Davy?

Speaker 11 300 million so we can really deal with the potholes, which are such a menace.

Speaker 11 Oh, such a menace, especially, especially when you're doing wheelies on a quad bike to try and win over floating voters in Digcott and Wantage. Isn't that right, Ed?

Speaker 11 Anyway, for some reason, Rachel Reeves,

Speaker 11 Keir Starmer chose this week to pledge £1.6 billion to help fix the pothole pandemic.

Speaker 11 And joining me now is The Naked Week's hopeless ploy to try to curry favour with the public correspondent, Anya Magliano.

Speaker 11 Anya, £1.6 billion does sound like a lot.

Speaker 10 It certainly does on the surface, but of course, you won't be surprised to learn that that surface, like Starmer's pledge, is cracked, broken, and full of... Holes?

Speaker 11 I was going to say shit. Oh.

Speaker 11 Plus sir change. Pardon my French.

Speaker 10 So he promised $1.6 billion this week, including an extra 500 million of funding to councils who can prove they're tackling the issue via a checkable league table of holes.

Speaker 10 So it's kind of like Grinder, but for tarmac.

Speaker 11 So repairing pothole league table. Let's call it patch of the day.

Speaker 11 I know. I know.

Speaker 11 And I'd like to remind you the tickets to this show were free.

Speaker 11 But surely, with this bounty of riches, the nation will soon be whole-free in less time than it takes to say cynical attempt to distract the electorate?

Speaker 10 Yes, except that this week it was reported that the estimated budget needed to tackle the crisis would be somewhere in the region of 17 billion.

Speaker 10 And what Starma's actually offering is less than 10% of that. It's a bit like claiming you're really, really serious about tackling the pile of washing up by committing to rinsing a single teaspoon.

Speaker 11 By 2029. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 Well, that said, after Trump's 25% tariff announcement, potholes are now no longer the biggest wrecker of British cars. That's good news.
But is the point that councils can't keep up?

Speaker 11 As soon as one is filled, another one opens.

Speaker 10 Yeah, exactly. In fact, as I was speaking then, one has just opened up under the desk here.

Speaker 11 Really?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, just there. Look.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 11 Oh, my goodness. Okay, that certainly wasn't there when we started the show.
That is huge. How fortuitous

Speaker 11 that a pothole has opened up in a piece we're doing on potholes. We now have our very own Naked Week pothole.

Speaker 10 I'm going in. What?

Speaker 11 Anya, no. You don't know what's down there.

Speaker 11 She's doing it.

Speaker 11 Anya has descended under the desk. Are you down there?

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's quite dark down here in the pothole.

Speaker 11 This is an exclusive live report now from inside one of the nation's newest potholes. Anya, what can you see?

Speaker 10 Now I'm down here, Andy. I'm not sure it actually is a pothole.
What I think the Naked Week has literally stumbled into is the hole where Labour buries bad news.

Speaker 11 Oh!

Speaker 11 What's in there?

Speaker 10 There's loads of old broken manifesto pledges, the fossilized remains of Labour's green investment policy, a rotting net with zero written on it,

Speaker 10 a forgotten compensation scheme for WASPI women.

Speaker 11 Do you think you'll be able to find your way out?

Speaker 10 Yeah, well, I've just found Rachel Reeves's moral compass down here, so I'm not.

Speaker 18 I'm just going to give that a go.

Speaker 10 I'll hang on, it's skewing to the right.

Speaker 11 And you're magnetic about the Naked Week brand new, brand new pothole, pothole correspondent.

Speaker 11 Now, amid all the world's noise, it's time once again to invite your ears to go for a quiet stroll in the Naked Week's relaxing garden of current affairs contemplation. It's the news in haikus.

Speaker 11 Reeves' spring statement even brought cuts to haikus.

Speaker 11 So this line won't.

Speaker 11 The news in haikus.

Speaker 11 Now, something else that you may have seen this week: a judge who sentenced two vandals for destroying a Paddington Bear statue in Newbury said this, as reported by the BBC's South Today programme.

Speaker 19 He said the men's actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for. Yeah.

Speaker 11 The antithesis of everything Paddington stands for. Quite right, too.
Let's just remind ourselves of Paddington in action.

Speaker 11 Why do you have to come crashing in here like a natural disaster?

Speaker 5 Marmalade.

Speaker 11 Oh dear.

Speaker 11 In all honesty, it sounds to me like the vandals were inspired by Paddington.

Speaker 11 He is the real criminal here. Paddington Bear, the hairy Andrew Tate of residential vandalism.

Speaker 11 And he's an illegal immigrant. Plus, I think we all know what Mr.
Brown is code for, you duffle-coated smack dealer. Lock him up!

Speaker 11 You're listening to The Naked Week, in the week when Keir Starmer told the New York Times that he likes and respects Donald Trump. And speaking of shamelessly lapping up your own sick, it's now time

Speaker 11 for another look at some dogs, specifically the Westminster Watch variety. I am joined once again by Tortoise Media's political editor, Kat Nealon.

Speaker 11 Kat, we have been at this for four weeks now. Surely we are running out of orphaned little regulatory puppies.

Speaker 13 Actually, Andy, this week I want to tell you a story about parliamentary passes. Anyone who was an MP for six years or more can have one.

Speaker 11 So, just to clarify, even if the country has voted an MP out of parliament, they can still get one of these cards and keep appearing on the premises. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 13 They are all about access.

Speaker 13 A parliamentary pass gives you access to the parliamentary estate, access to the people currently working there, and even access to a range of succulent taxpayer-funded meals. Okay.

Speaker 11 So, not only are we paying for current MPs' food, we are also paying for former parliamentarians.

Speaker 13 Yeah, hypothetically, if, say, the former Tory Minister for Implausible Hare, Michael Fabrikant, decided to park himself in a corner of the Commons dining room and spend an afternoon taking that hair off and mopping up gravy with it, we'd all be funding that.

Speaker 11 Wow.

Speaker 11 I mean, firstly, what a haunting tableau.

Speaker 11 And secondly, there must be some strings attached to these passes. Are there any do's and don'ts?

Speaker 13 Some very unambiguous don'ts.

Speaker 18 Among other things, the House of Commons Code of Conduct states that former members may not use their privileged parliamentary passes for the purposes of lobbying on the parliamentary estate.

Speaker 11 Okay, so no running, no bombing, no heavy petting, absolutely no lobbying. Who enforces this code of conduct?

Speaker 13 Initially, it's the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

Speaker 11 Okay, I knew it. A watchdog.
There's always a watchdog.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is literally just one bloke.

Speaker 11 Okay, but there is this one bloke. He's there patrolling the corridors of Westminster in his dog costume.

Speaker 13 I don't think he's wearing an actual dog costume.

Speaker 11 Well, I don't think we know for sure he isn't, so let's assume he is. So his job is to sniff around Parliament, ensuring everyone everyone is keeping to the code of conduct.
Something like that.

Speaker 13 However, the Naked Week sent a Freedom of Information request to the House of Commons asking for a list of all former MPs who have used their parliamentary past since the last general election.

Speaker 13 We analyze this list, and it turns out that at least 87 of those ex-MPs now work as or for consultants or lobbyists.

Speaker 1 87.

Speaker 11 Just for context, that is the same number of times that Elon Musk has wished to be a real boy.

Speaker 11 Now, presumably, we're not saying that all the names on that list have been doing lobbying work in Parliament.

Speaker 13 Absolutely not. Although, one in particular did leap out at us.

Speaker 11 Like a man in a dog costume?

Speaker 11 No, I D.

Speaker 13 His name is Lawrence Robertson. He's the former Conservative MP for Tewkesbury.
And shortly after he lost his seat last July, he set up his own company called Theok Consultancy. Witches?

Speaker 13 No, it's nothing to do with witches.

Speaker 21 Instead, the website says, we connect you with key policy makers in Parliament, Whitehall, and local government.

Speaker 21 We help you engage with the right decision makers at the right time to shape policy that impacts your business.

Speaker 11 So, shaping policy that impacts your business does sound a lot like lobbying.

Speaker 21 And it also boasts about offering direct access to key decision makers with the vision to influence policy.

Speaker 11 So, Robertson certainly talks a good game. What else do we know about?

Speaker 13 He's a former trade envoy to Angola, Ethiopia, and Zambia. So, unsurprisingly, his firm is specifically targeted at Africa-based clients.

Speaker 13 And that might explain why, when he was an MP, he asked a lot of questions like this.

Speaker 11 But it's not exactly a smoking gun, is it? He may have just been going into parliament to have dinner with Michael Fabricant's hair.

Speaker 13 To be fair, there's no way of checking what anyone with a parliamentary pass actually does on the premises.

Speaker 11 Well, then, case dismissed.

Speaker 13 Although, we found social media posts from a few months ago showing Lawrence Robertson on the parliamentary estate wearing his pass. Okay.

Speaker 13 And one of those posts includes pictures of Robertson on the Commons Terrace alongside Conservative leader Kemi Badenock and Shadow Foreign Secretary Dame Pretty Patel.

Speaker 11 Okay, we have that picture on screen screen here. Now, not only had I forgotten that Pretty Patel is the Shadow Foreign Secretary, I had also genuinely and happily forgotten Pretty Patel.

Speaker 11 So, that's for that.

Speaker 11 But, hang on, we still don't know that Lawrence Robertson was engaging in lobbying at this event with Patel and Badenock. No, we don't.
Great, case dismissed. Although.

Speaker 13 Okay, here we go. Robertson then reposted the picture of the three of them on his personal LinkedIn account with the following caption.

Speaker 14 I was pleased to meet Kemi and Pretty again and to be able to talk about business in Africa. I'll be taking up this issue with them in the new year.

Speaker 11 Okay, granted, that might sound staggeringly similar to lobbying, but what if, and I appreciate this is a long shot, what if by business in Africa, he was actually talking about the song Africa by Toto.

Speaker 11 What do you think? I said it was a long shot, but speaking of Toto, can we please get back to dogs? This parliamentary

Speaker 11 it all fits together. So

Speaker 11 this Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

Speaker 13 Andy, for the last time, he doesn't dress up as a dog.

Speaker 11 We're going to have to agree to disagree on that.

Speaker 11 Either way, surely this is the kind of thing that might make his ears prick up.

Speaker 13 Here's the thing.

Speaker 13 The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards can't open an investigation into alleged lobbying until either someone complains about it directly to him, or he happens to spot something that he thinks needs investigating.

Speaker 11 Interesting.

Speaker 11 So if he were to spot a story about a former MP with his own consultancy firm openly talking business in parliament with current lawmakers, possibly in direct contravention of the Commons' code of conduct, and if that appeared on, say, Radio 4's flagship Friday night so-called comedy show,

Speaker 11 would he, should he, then open an investigation?

Speaker 13 Well, here's what Susan Hawley, executive director of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, told The Naked Week.

Speaker 18 It is crucial that there is proper scrutiny when former MPs with passes tout access to decision-makers as a way to to win business.

Speaker 18 Given the questions raised in this case, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner should review carefully that the passes are not being misused.

Speaker 11 And does Lawrence Robertson himself have a perfectly innocent explanation for all this?

Speaker 13 Less of an explanation, more a blunt statement.

Speaker 14 When we put all of this to him this week, he said: I can confirm that since I left Parliament, I have carried out no lobbying of ministers, MPs, or officials.

Speaker 11 It's the antithesis of everything that Paddington stands for.

Speaker 13 And here's a quick reminder of what he said about his recent meeting with two very senior Conservative MPs.

Speaker 14 I was pleased to meet Kemi and Pretty again and to be able to talk about business in Africa.

Speaker 11 It does sound like something that might tickle the tummy of the guy in the dog costume. Cat,

Speaker 11 this is genuinely a Naked Week exclusive, I believe.

Speaker 13 Where there are dogs, there are scoops.

Speaker 11 Cat Nealon, everybody!

Speaker 11 This is The Naked Week on Radio 4, and there's just time to have a quick listen to Donald Trump speaking at an event for Women's History Month.

Speaker 12 We're going to have tremendous goodies in the bag for women.

Speaker 11 Okay, I mean, the last time I saw someone offering women goodies from a bag was in an educational video about Stranger Danger.

Speaker 12 The women, between the fertilization and all of the other things that we're talking about,

Speaker 12 it's going to be great.

Speaker 11 Yeah, these women are definitely in danger.

Speaker 12 Fertilization.

Speaker 12 Probably police. I'll be known as the fertilization president.
And that's all.

Speaker 11 We all know what fertilizer is full of, don't we? So that makes sense.

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Speaker 3 Sucks. The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 5 We demand to be home. Winner, best score.

Speaker 4 We demand to be seen.

Speaker 5 Winner, best book. We demand to equal.

Speaker 7 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 9 Suffs!

Speaker 7 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

Speaker 11 Just another message in the U.S. National Security Neighborhood Group chat.
Please, can people stop parking their tanks on Russia-Ukraine border?

Speaker 11 It's becoming a rat run for local residents if you do not have a parking permit your tanks should be in the clearly marked bays in Belarus oh that's you Anya what have you got? Oh

Speaker 10 okay it looks like a two-factor authentication code XZ37A9B. Oh sorry my mistake Elon Musk has added one of his children to the group chat.

Speaker 11 Oh, and it now seems Donald Trump has joined the chat to say, I know nothing about this chat and I wasn't here. Fertilization, wink face, wink face, egg emoji.

Speaker 11 So Wednesday this week was of course the Chancellor's spring statement.

Speaker 11 Straight after Prime Minister's questions Rachel came out swinging, displaying all of her trademark dazzling rhetorical verve and panache.

Speaker 13 Mr. Speaker, this Labour government was elected to provide security for working people.

Speaker 10 Prosperity.

Speaker 13 for working people. On the side of working people.
And I will always put working people first. For working people.
Working people. Working people.
We wipe the slate clean.

Speaker 13 It was needed to wipe the slate clean. We have now wiped the slate clean.

Speaker 11 Well we now know about working people and wiping the slate clean and at least I suppose thank God the world isn't changing.

Speaker 13 In this changing world. A changing world.
A changing world. The world is changing.
In a changing world. A changing world.
In a world that is changing.

Speaker 11 There you go. A changing world in a world that is changing.

Speaker 11 Words that mean absolutely nothing no matter what order you put them in.

Speaker 11 See also any Adrian Childs column in The Guardian.

Speaker 11 So, what was the end result of all this financial flourishing? In a nutshell, everyone got even more angry than they were already.

Speaker 11 The right claimed the Chancellor was paving the way for a tax hike and a raid on people's ICEs. The left wailed about another slash to benefits and overseas aid.

Speaker 11 And everyone, left, right, economically conservative, free market liberal, or whatever the hell Ed Balls is this week,

Speaker 11 all of them pointed to the Office for Budget Responsibility revising expected growth for this year down and growth for future years up as definitive proof that they were right all along.

Speaker 11 Because if you so much as glance at the coverage, it turns out that the economy is both recovering and tanking at the same time.

Speaker 11 It is Schrödinger's economy. Alive and dead in Rachel Reeves' red box of fiscal prudence.
In fact, Rachel Reeves felt so harassed by the coverage, she had to go to the Commons Bar and ask for Angela.

Speaker 11 Very sadly for Rachel, they sent her Angela Rayna, which must have been disappointing.

Speaker 11 But in the avalanche of non-news surrounding the Chancellor's statement, there was one genuinely jaw-dropping story that got completely drowned out by the relentless Westminster squawking of lesser spotted pestons, tufted rigbies, and greater crested Koontzbergs.

Speaker 11 I'm joined by our dropped jaw correspondent, Anya Magliano. Anya, please reattach your mandible and tell us what happened.

Speaker 10 Right, so this was a story that slipped out in the run-up to the spring statement when everyone was trying to work out how on earth the Chancellor was going to get all government departments to reduce spending by up to 11%.

Speaker 10 And Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson's solution, which she suggested to the Treasury, according to the Times this week, was to axe universal free school meals for infants.

Speaker 11 Oh, just like that.

Speaker 10 Yep. Free meals for kids under seven was apparently deemed to be not sufficiently value for money.

Speaker 10 Now, there are plenty of things I wouldn't call value for money. The new Snow White film, train travel, tickets to this recording.

Speaker 11 Tickets to this.

Speaker 11 They were free.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and yet somehow still terrible value.

Speaker 10 But Philipson wasn't done there. To quote treasury sources, she also proposed cutting music and dance funding.

Speaker 11 I mean, yeah, people might object, but what are they going to do? Make a big song and dance about it.

Speaker 10 Now Reeves has denied it, but it's fair to say these proposals went down like drag queen story hour at this weekend's reform rally.

Speaker 11 To sum up.

Speaker 10 Andy, I listened to every word of the spring statement and all I know for certain is that I don't have any money.

Speaker 11 Thanks, Anya. And I think you speak for us all.
In fact, I just want to reassure listeners.

Speaker 11 If you listen to the spring statement and you think you sort of understood it, but really deep down, you're just a scared child who's feeling frightened and overwhelmed by the news and a bit, ah.

Speaker 11 And truth be told, you don't really know what's going on at all, but you feel like you have to keep nodding along and you're secretly terrified that somebody's going to rumble you any moment now.

Speaker 11 First of all, hello Chris Mason. Thank you for tuning in.

Speaker 11 But secondly, don't worry. We're going to make everything as clear as possible.
Help is at hand.

Speaker 11 The Naked Week has been thinking about how to condense all of this into an easily digestible parcel of information.

Speaker 11 And given the news around proposed classroom cuts, we've decided the best way to do this is in the form of a music lesson. So to help us and you, please welcome music teacher Bethany Reeves.

Speaker 11 So Bethany, Bethany Reeves. Reeves, any relation?

Speaker 17 Thankfully not.

Speaker 11 Okay.

Speaker 11 So we need to simplify the other Reeves' spring statement and I believe you're going to help us.

Speaker 10 That's right.

Speaker 17 Despite what the Department for Education might or might not think, music is a really effective way of both conveying information and training your brain.

Speaker 17 If you can link words to a simple, memorable melody, that information is much more likely to stay with you.

Speaker 11 So we set you the Herculean task of listening to every single word that Rachel Reeves said into a microphone on Wednesday, and we're obviously very sorry about that.

Speaker 11 We know you may now be suffering from PTSSD,

Speaker 11 post-traumatic spring statement disorder. We've all set you up with a counsellor.
Thank you. Was there anything that stood out to you?

Speaker 17 She clearly had several key points she was keen to hammer home and hammer them she did. Here's a very quick reminder.

Speaker 13 A changing world demands a government that is on the side of working people. We wipe the slate clean.

Speaker 11 Yes, changing and wiping. The economy is now a big baby.

Speaker 17 Yes, so what we're going to do is we're going to set these phrases to a simple children's tune, which everybody knows, and which, more importantly, for this show's budget, is in the public domain.

Speaker 11 Ah, great. My favourite domain.

Speaker 17 And everyone here in the audience is going to sing.

Speaker 17 I'm seeing quite a few apprehensive looks, but I promise you, you'll know the tune. It's London's Burning.

Speaker 11 Which it was last week, or at least the airport's electricity supply was.

Speaker 18 And here are the lyrics.

Speaker 11 We have the lyrics up on screen. I'm just going to talk them through for the people at home.
World is changing, world is changing. Working people, working people.
Cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts.

Speaker 11 Wipe the slate clean. Wipe the slate clean.

Speaker 11 Brilliant.

Speaker 11 Do we need accompaniment for this, Bethany?

Speaker 17 We do. And we've got the saddest sound in the known musical universe.
The school recorder, of course.

Speaker 11 We now bring on

Speaker 11 the Naked Week wing section.

Speaker 11 Dr. Lee,

Speaker 11 do feel free to join in wherever you are listening to this, whether you're at home, in the car, in the witness box. And

Speaker 11 if you can get a whole group of you singing it with the actions, please do film it and send it in to the one show. We haven't asked them, we just want to annoy them.

Speaker 11 By the way, because this song is being broadcast on national radio, we have had to register it with PRS for Music.

Speaker 11 That's the Performing Rights Society, the organization which sorts out royalty payments for songwriters.

Speaker 11 And although the composer of this ditty is unfortunately both anonymous and dead, don't forget, lyricists also receive royalties.

Speaker 11 And our lyricist just happens to be current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, MP,

Speaker 11 who is now, thanks to The Naked Week, also a credited professional songwriter

Speaker 11 and eligible to receive payment for performances of her work.

Speaker 1 We have genuinely done this.

Speaker 11 We have also informed her parliamentary office, so

Speaker 11 hopefully in a few months' time, her official register of interests will include an entry of roughly 50p

Speaker 11 for broadcast royalties, brackets, original lyrics, radio for the naked week, closed brackets. Typical.
Another MP with a second job.

Speaker 11 Right. I think we're ready to go, are we? All together, ready.

Speaker 17 One, two.

Speaker 11 World is changing, world is changing.

Speaker 11 Working people,

Speaker 11 working people.

Speaker 11 Cuts cuts, cuts, cuts.

Speaker 11 Work the state clean, work the state clean. World is changing.
World is changing.

Speaker 11 World is changing. World is changing.

Speaker 11 cuts is dancing, cuts it down to, what is right clean, what is right sleep, what the state clean, what is fake clean,

Speaker 11 goodbye,

Speaker 11 the naked week was hosted by me, Andrew Hunter Murray, with guest correspondent Annia Magliano and singing teacher Bethany Reid. And on recorder, the Naked Week wins section.

Speaker 11 It was written by John Holmes, Gareth Koredic, Katie Sayer, Sarah Dempster, and Jason Haisley. With investigations team Kat Neeland, Louis Mian, Matt Brown and Freya Shaw.

Speaker 11 Additional material by Carl Mins, Ali Panting, Helen Brooks, Cooper Morwini Swirk, Phoebe Butler and Kevin Smith. The Naked Week is produced and directed by John Holmes.

Speaker 11 It's an unusual production for BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 11 Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

Speaker 24 And I'm Brian Cox and we would like to tell you about the new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage. In this series, we're going to have a plan it off.

Speaker 1 We decided it was time to go cosmic, so we are going to do Jupiter

Speaker 11 versus Scepter!

Speaker 24 It's very well done that because in the script it does say in square brackets wrestling voice question mark. And once we touch back down on this planet, we're going to go deep.

Speaker 11 Really deep.

Speaker 24 Yes, we're journeying to the center of the Earth with guests Phil Wang, Chris Jackson and Anna Ferreira.

Speaker 1 And after all of that intense heat and pressure, we're just going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.

Speaker 24 And also in this series, we're discussing altruism. We'll find out what it is.
Exploring the history of music, recording with Brian Eno, and looking at nature's shapes.

Speaker 1 So, if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to the infinite monkey cage first on BBC Sounds.

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Speaker 4 Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 11 We demand to be home.

Speaker 5 Winner, best score, we demand to be seen. Winner, best book.
We demand to be quality.

Speaker 7 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 7 Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Speaker 5 Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.