Best of The News Quiz 2024

28m

A satirical smorgasbord of The News Quiz's best bits of the year. Covering international tensions, a UK General Election, and of course the question on everyone’s lips, what exactly was a ‘Brat Summer’?

With Andy Zaltzman in the chair, full of whimsical animal metaphors and cricket stats, we’ll hear highlights from the crème de la crème of British and international comedy and journalism to dissect the news. It's a chance to return to, and revel in, some of 2024's funniest moments, starring Ian Smith, Lucy Porter, Geoff Norcott, Alasdair Beckett-King, Mark Steel, Ria Lina, Simon Evans and Zoe Lyons, amongst others.

Come digest a dramatic year of news, along with the leftover turkey, as we say goodbye to 2024, goodbye to 14 years or Conservative rule, goodbye to short-lived presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, and goodbye to Earth’s temporary second moon.

Written and presented by Andy Zaltzman

Producer: Sam Holmes
Executive Producer: James Robinson
Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman

A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4
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Transcript

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Hello, I am Andy Zoltzman, and this is the official Newsquiz Review of 2024.

So this frankly substandard decade has just barreled snout first into its halfway point.

So what better time to look back at the last 12 months, or at least the bits of the last 12 months that we've been on air for, which is about half of those 12 months?

The year began with Britain looking to the horizon and not much liking what it saw.

A national scandal dating back 25 years was jabbed firmly back into the public eye like an unwanted pickled carrot by a public inquiry and much more importantly and effectively, by a hit TV drama series.

Our first question goes to Ian and Aisha.

Which television program has brought brought a national scandal into the spotlight?

The teletubbies.

Right, can you explain a little bit?

Not one of them had a TV licence.

Well, yeah,

it's the big post office drama, which I haven't watched, and I'm not going to watch it because I know what happens now.

I know that it's a serious miscarriage of justice, but what I will say is...

So the last time I went to the post office, someone had finished and I went up to the counter.

The woman there, without looking me in the eye, said, I'm not ready yet.

So I walked back to the queue, and as soon as I got back to the queue, she pressed a thing that went, Cashier number four, please.

So, what I'm saying is, I wouldn't mind if some of them are in prison.

Some of them deserve it.

When I first heard about a royal meal scandal, everyone was like, Oh, what's Andrew done now?

And also, I find this really, really difficult as a kind of an Asian person because it was like post office owners versus IT guys, and it was like it was horrible to see my people turn against each other.

Very, very uncomfortable.

But just on one side, note, the thing that is so extraordinary about this is we've had a lot of scandals recently, and this just sums up the British legal system.

You've got Michelle Moan, who is innocent until proven guilty, and you have these post office people who are guilty until proved otherwise.

It is just absolutely mad.

The real scandal of this is, after all, is they're still using the Horizon thing.

They're still using this technology.

It's a bit like if in Terminator, they'd have gone, okay, Skynet did become self-aware and tried to kill everyone and everything, but we've had a chat with the programmers and

we think that we've fixed most of the glitches now.

And you know, with the post office as well, even if they do deliver compensation, they'll probably leave it with a neighbour.

Miscarriages of justice, traditionally a proud pillar of our national heritage, and one of the very few that still seems to be functioning just as well as ever.

Another stalwart plank of our nation, of course, is the news quiz, which has been impartially quipping about current affairs ever since the famous special Go Home Romans episode in 55 BC.

But we came under fire for a perceived lack of balance.

For the sake of balance, I should emphasise that not everyone thinks the show lacks balance.

I'm not saying who's right or wrong, it's just important to present both sides of the argument.

Transport Minister Hugh Merriman described which BBC Radio 4 show,

which you, yes, you, I'm talking to you, are currently listening to as completely biased.

Oh, I feel so awful.

So, Hugh Merriman, Transport Secretary, said that he listened to the first 10 minutes of last week's show and it was completely anti-Tory bias.

And I'm just so glad he didn't listen to the last 20 minutes.

But no, genuinely, I wept because I'm such a fan of Hugh Merriman.

I don't know about you guys, but he's always been my absolute faith.

I'm a Merry fan, I'll admit it.

His lovely rich hair, have you seen his lovely hair, his eyes like limpid pools, his breath smells of butterscotch angel delight?

Did you know?

And my whole family were like, You've upset Hugh Merriman.

And my kids were in tears saying,

Mummy, he's our favourite apart from Grant's shapes.

So, yeah, I'm just so sorry to Hugh and to all who sailing him.

But then he went on to say the BBC's bias.

The other example he gave was that he'd been attacked on universal credit by Neil Buchanan,

which, unfortunately, Neil Buchanan is the name of a children's TV presenter who worked on ITV.

So

it wasn't a brilliant interview for Hugh.

So yeah, you got the wrong Buchanan.

I think you meant Neil Buchanan, the Whig MP for Glasgow from 1741.

Isn't the internet fun?

But of course, I mean, the art attack was ITV, was it?

But there's a long history on the BBC of using children's art shows to promulgate anti-Tory propaganda.

You listen to this from the supposedly neutral Tony Hart on the Heartbeat Show back in 1988.

Hello, and welcome to another Heartbeat.

And today the theme is all to do with stone.

Now that sounds perfectly innocent, but what happens when we play it backwards?

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!

Ouch, ouch, ouch!

As the Conservative Party were to find out over the following few months, some people had genuinely become very biased against the Tories, those people being their own voters.

In May, interim Prime Minister Rishi Sunak weckly called a general election, and soon he he and Labour leader Keir Starmer went on the telly to debate the state of the nation.

The problem with Rishi is he does come across like the bloke that you know when your teacher would say on a Thursday there's a test tomorrow, Rishi would be going, yes!

He thinks he should be Prime Minister because he revised hard enough for it, doesn't he?

He's definitely got headboy vibes.

He's definitely got headboy vibes.

And I think the Starma is like, he's just alright.

He sort of seems like the first bloke that your mum dates after getting divorced, doesn't he?

He's got that.

You're like, yeah, fine.

I don't think he's her one, but certainly why she rebuilds her self-esteem.

You know, he seems like

he treats her nice.

I feel like this is the most accurate explanation of our political landscape I've ever heard, Jeffrey said.

Soon the parties had to regretfully lay out their proposals to win the support, or more realistically, the temporary grudging tolerance of a sceptical, demoralized voting public.

It was manifestival season.

Everyone's got their manifestos this week.

I think the Conservatives have the most forlorn manifesto, I think.

It's kind of like

a sort of marriage guidance therapy manifesto.

Kind of going like, I can change.

Your new boyfriend's really boring.

Give me another chance.

It's like in no other field of life would it be acceptable to act like the Conservative manifesto.

It's like your builder going, you know, I thought we'd give your new conservatory a sort of Palace of Versailles feel.

Cooler thing.

You're going like, but you built the garage out of mud and it fell down in a week.

But they just, it's the chutzpah of it that I quite admire.

We'll do it differently next time because we can, just didn't.

They don't seem confident.

I don't know if you've seen the Tory Manifesto, but the cover is a picture of Rishi Sunak clearing his desk.

Just putting like gonks and potted plants in a cardboard box.

We also had the Labour Manifesto, of course, just today,

yesterday, or whatever, on Thursday.

It was the front of the Evening Standard.

It said, Keir Starmer wants to relight Britain's fire.

And I thought his speech was sort of amazing because he basically basically said, How can we escape this feeling of insecurity?

I need you so much.

And I'm not sure you really need me.

But if we all stand up, etc.

For me, Starmer's Labour government is going to be like Turkish delights.

You know, go with me.

You know,

when you read the Chronicles of Narnia, you hear about Turkish delights, and I spent my entire adult life thinking I would love Turkish delights.

And then when you actually try Turkish delights, this is horrible.

I hate this.

I'm not enjoying this at all.

I'd the same with lions from Reading Economics.

Real disappointment.

Isn't it a vital theme always of like Labour governments that Labour voters don't like them?

Isn't that just always happen?

You know, it's like Labour sort of in this tireless war against the real enemy that is Labour.

And there's still a good amount of in-fighting.

I mean, it does look like Labour's going to win, but they're not taking it lying down, are they?

Not coming up without a fight.

With polling day looming, we at the Newsquiz decided to unleash the the animals.

One of the key issues in this election campaign is all the key issues that have barely been talked about, the so-called elephants in the room.

So in this, our last news quiz, before we all vote, we thought we should hear from those elephants.

Bring in the elephants!

Just hope we don't have another Blue Peter incident.

But our panelists will choose one of the elephants in the room.

The elephant will tell them what undiscussed, avoided or under-the-carpeted election issue they represent.

Our panel simply have to translate that issue from elephant into English.

Luckily I speak elephants.

Benefits of a private education is basically the same as Latin.

I'm African but I don't speak elephant.

Jeff and Katie choose your elephant.

Do you want elephant A, B, C, D or E?

What do you think, Katie?

C.

C.

Okay, elephant C.

Right, which much overlooked election issue was that?

I think the elephant sounds disappointed.

Yeah, it sounds like

they had hoped for deregulation outside the EU, but it hasn't really materialised in the way they thought it would be.

And I think maybe they thought there'd be a few more trade deals?

They thought that, yeah, there'd be more trade deals, and Britain would become

more like Singapore on Thames rather than Brussels by the sea.

Yeah.

Is that our elephant?

That is correct.

It is Brexit.

Yeah, why not?

Why do you think there's been so little Brexit talk in this campaign?

Well, it's funny because if you ask a politician that, they'll say no one cares about Brexit anymore.

But then you think, well,

if no one cares, why are you so scared to mention it?

Because even the Lib Dems don't want to talk about it very much.

And Kirstama doesn't want to go anywhere near it because I think the Red Wall voters he's trying to get back.

Lots of voters in 2019 didn't like the Labour position.

And then Rishisinek doesn't massively want to talk about it, even though he's done a tweet or two, because there's lots of voters on the right going to reform who think he's done a bad job of delivering it.

So no one really wants to go near it.

And it means they're all kind of being let off the hook because the others don't want to accuse the other because then they would have to talk about it.

Right.

It is a forbidden word.

If you stand in front of a mirror and you say Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.

Logic for Arge appears.

So election day arrived.

The Sun newspaper finally endorsed Labour, reminiscent of when they picked the USA to win the race to the moon, just as Neil Armstrong's foot was emerging from the Apollo 11 lunar landing module.

And sure enough, Labour's vote share slumped disastrously and they romped to victory.

Thanks be to democracy.

It moves in mysterious ways.

I mean, can you call it a win if your opponent cuts off one of their legs and then tries to finish the race as two separate athletes?

It is confusing.

I mean, it's like, so Kier Starmer, he's now got a mandate to do the very important things for Britain that are so important for Britain that he didn't want to risk blowing his chance to get to do them by telling us what they were beforehand, which is great.

But there is this sort of looming sense that it's like an imperfect victory, even though it's such a massive victory.

Which I think it's a bit, I'm not sure about that, because it's like it is done now.

We are done with elections until the next election.

It's like if you have this sort of vicious, drunken fight with your other half and about all about who was an idiot at a party, and you come home and you shout at each other, and you narrowly win the argument, and then the next morning your wife is like, well, we need to reopen that.

And you go, no, no, no, we'll talk about it again in five years.

As Labor said about the challenging task of meeting the expectations it had so skillfully lowered, attention popped across the Atlantic to the quadrennial festival of national self-loathing that is an American presidential election.

And Joe Biden hit the ground stumbling.

He clearly isn't up to the job at the moment.

He really, really isn't.

And the only person that's going to take him out of that position, apparently, is the Lord Almighty.

Yes.

So, which sounds quite dramatic.

But, you know, I mean, the thing about it is, he's only three years older than Trump.

But Trump has done that incredible thing of being both alive and mummified at the same time.

I think, I think Trump is like one of those fast food burgers that if you put it in a cupboard, it just won't decompose.

Like, if you dug him up, they'd be like, yep, that's Trump.

Yeah, he's just made up of highly preserved burger meat and Dorito dust.

That's him.

And he'll probably still be riding quite high in the polls at that point.

He'll probably be doing that.

People were originally behind him after the debate.

There was a lot of sort of Democratic support for him, sort of going, you know.

But then this week, George Clooney, one of the biggest Democratic fundraisers, has come out and gone, he's not up to the job.

And he should know because he was an ER doctor for a very long time.

It's his family, really, though, isn't it?

It's Jill Biden.

And we all know why.

People hate it when their spouses retire.

I think the problem is, you mentioned Trump is also old, but the difficulty for Biden is that people won't vote for Biden because they think he might be mad and detached from reality.

Whereas for Trump, people want to vote for him because he is mad and detached from reality.

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Freshly convicted felon Donald Trump was now looking an almost unassailable favorite to win November's election.

He survived an assassination attempt, prompting a rare instance of the American right criticising gun violence, and his besotted supporters took to their first aid kits to show their adoration for their Hall of Fame nation splitter.

I think it's very sweet that they're all wearing the little earplaster to support him.

I'm going to support Biden with his COVID and just go back to bed.

My favourite bit is when the Secret Service came out trying to defend their lack of service and they said, Oh, we couldn't put guys in that roof.

I'm like, What?

They're like, Yeah, we couldn't.

Well, the shooter was the roof was a bit loose.

And I thought, At no point have I ever watched James Bond or The Born Identity, and two guys have jumped over a fescale to a building and went, Have you seen a risk assessment for us?

Yeah, the movies, you know, you sort of picture them leaping in front, going, No,

whereas what actually happened was they were like, Well, duck if you want, I'm not your mum.

They nailed the secret bit

because she didn't know they were there.

But it was interesting watching him sort of go down.

And then he said, Where are my shoes?

That's what he said.

Didn't he?

He had sort of blood on his face.

He was being bundled to the ground.

And I thought, that's a night out in Nottingham.

I've heard people say, Where are my shoes?

They also said

we need to take violence away from American politics.

And I was like, Abraham Lincoln was literally assassinated.

You have always had violence in American politics.

What are you talking about?

He said, I've been doing this forever.

The guy never got in the school rifle club.

This school had a rifle club.

But it's also, it missed Trump as well.

It's like the riot guy.

You know, the riot guy is the guy who's saying you've got to take violence out of politics.

The guy who literally got them to storm the parliament is the guy who's saying, it's getting a bit violent, guys.

I mean, come on.

Are you suggesting there might be elements of hypocrisy in American political discourse?

As America continued to eviscerate itself as only America can, the Starmer government over here, fresh from its eight-minute honeymoon period, found that it wasn't just the mathematical contortions of the first past the post system that didn't quite add up, nor did our national accounts.

£22 billion had apparently gone missing, and we had to pay for it somehow.

So how they're going to do it is what they always do.

Things like library, because that's where the 22 billion quid's gone, isn't it?

Over the last, that's who's caused the 22 billion deficit is libraries.

That's what's happened.

The energy companies, bless them, the shareholders of the energy companies have done as much as they can, they've been as kind as possible.

No, no, no, have all that money, but libraries, you go to any library and there's gold-plated Agatha Christie's everywhere,

Hector in library.

Do you know they've got us a librarian, Beyoncé?

Finally, finally, the word is out because libraries try to keep it quiet for years.

I love the idea of Beyoncé being a librarian, that if you liked it, then you should put a hold on it.

Now, as all of our American listeners are no doubt aware, there's a famous old saying in American politics, if in doubt, groundlessly accuse immigrants of eating people's pets.

Are you an American cat or dog?

Are you worried that you've been nibbled at, chewed, or swallowed by someone from another country?

Then you might be entirely fictional.

Well, that is further conclusive evidence, and I'm sure you will all agree with me on this, that America's foolhardy 248-year experiment in going it alone is going very badly indeed.

Come home, America.

No shame.

Love the idea.

You gave it a good crack.

It just hasn't worked out.

All is forgiven.

Kirstama, meanwhile, was discovering the first law of being Prime Minister.

It's not easy, so don't make it unnecessarily harder for yourself by taking a bucket load of freebies, having constantly criticised the previous government for taking bucket loads of freebies.

Ian, I don't know who pays for your clothes.

Yeah, it's very hard to slam someone about their appearance on the radio.

You can just go back to everyone with made up.

So why don't you have any clothes on, Simon?

Andy, Andy, why have you drawn that offensive moustache on your top lip?

Why are the audience all looking like this?

I've reacted very badly there.

I've reacted like a man who clearly doesn't look good because I've gone very defensive very quickly.

I could do with David Lammy defending me.

David Lamy's come to Kiersteiner's defence.

He said the matter was not a transparency issue, which is very good when we're talking about clothes.

But yeah, he said this happens a lot, and that Keir Stam and his wife want to look their best to represent the UK.

And I don't mean this as any disrespect to any of us, but I think if you really want to represent the UK, looking your best is not

the way to do it.

Now, whilst the amount of money in the public coffers might have been shrinking, some things were going up and up.

We're going to get a second moon.

Second moon, to send all the astrology girls crazy.

It's a little asteroid, which still seems quite quite big to me if we're counting it as a moon.

It's getting pulled into the Earth's orbit, so for, I think it's like a month and a bit.

Spare moon.

Yeah.

Quite exciting, though, isn't it?

It is exciting.

Say what you want about Starma, but he said change is going to begin.

Last 14 years, one moon.

Three months in, he's doubled the moons.

Can't say further than that.

It's about time as well that I think the moons had it too good for too long.

If you look at like Jupiter and Saturn, they've got lots of moons and they've all got individual names.

The moon is so arrogant.

What's your name?

The moon.

I am THE MOON.

So I think we need to come up with a name for the moon now, because it isn't just the moon.

It can't be called the moon too.

I can't believe this libertarian moon economics that you're coming up with.

Oh, the free market will solve the moon's arrogance problem.

It'll get competitive again and start, I don't know, giving women women more periods like, I don't understand.

I'll wait for this rash of werewolves that come in every fortnight.

Oh god, yeah, there's going to be so many werewolves.

Sadly, our temporary micro-moon did not hang around for long, unimpressed by what Earth could offer it as a moon and hoping for a planet that was better able to look after itself.

Stung by this rejection, the news quiz instantly concocted some plans to make the world a better place.

I think it's time that we hand over power to people in the world that are worse affected by what is going on at the moment.

And that is why I think only women and children should be allowed to run the world currently.

That is it.

I mean, it sounds so obvious when you put it in those simple terms.

I think we need more podcasts.

I think I've cracked it.

Right.

Well, that is a hugely beneficial suggestion.

Alastair?

I try to stay positive.

In the spirit of de-escalation through escalation, I've started jogging through sitting down.

I call it couch to not okay.

That's really helped.

Yeah, I mean, it's a tough week to digest news.

Is there anything if you do personally to just try and lighten your own mood during weeks like this when the news is just unremittingly shit?

Drinking, bake off, Korean takeaway.

I had a little session on the kids' trampoline the other day.

I don't think you can be annoyed at the world when you're you're bouncing.

It's a good point.

You make Bryony Page, who won Olympic golden trampolining this year, has never started a war.

The Mini Moon was not the only thing to leave the scene in October.

I did as well.

Well, those test matches in Pakistan weren't going to statistically analyse themselves, were they?

Whilst I was away, Jeff Norcott kept tabs on the first Conservative leadership election for more than two, count them, two whole years.

Whose surname didn't save him this week?

Cleverly, James Clatterly.

Yeah, it is James Cleverly.

On Wednesday, after surging ahead in round three of their leadership contest, James Cleverly was unceremoniously dumped out as Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenock made the final two.

So having been destroyed in the polls after lurching to the right, the Tories have done the smart thing and lurched further to the right.

It's good stuff, yeah.

You know, you ever come out of a nightclub with your mate and you're both too drunk to drive?

That's what these two candidates are like.

None of you are fit for the job.

Well, yeah, I mean, you make it.

It's interesting because the Tories saw cleverly.

He did give a really good speech, and they were like, we're not having any of that, right?

That is not what we do here, okay?

He's an odd boy, isn't he, Jenneric?

Jenrick, I can't.

I've never seen a man that needs a session on a sun bed more.

Like, it's the end of the summer and he's grey.

What are you doing?

Get outside.

Why are you so indoorsy?

He looks like a shade you can only get in a fancy paint shop.

If the inner workings of the Conservative Party remain one of humanity's great unsolved mysteries, so too does the economy, as our next stand-in host, Lucy Porter, and her guests discussed.

Rhea and Hugo, what might be the cause of a sudden lack of interest in the economy?

Okay, so inflation has fallen to 1.7%,

which means if things carry on like this this time next year, if you want to bribe a government minister, you'll have to give them, I think, 1.017 Taylor Swift tickets.

They'll do it.

Nobody understands it.

Nobody understands the economy at all.

It's like that movie Tenant.

I think the economy is being directed by Christopher Nolan.

If I'm honest, because nobody quite gets.

One goes down, one goes up, one does the other.

But let's be clear: this is a blip.

Unless it continues to last, this is a blip.

It's like when you skip dinner and then weigh yourself first thing in the morning the next day, and you're like, oh my god, I lost a kilo.

It'll be back by lunchtime.

It's because airline ticket prices have fallen, is the main thing that's going to do.

Well, it's like, I wasn't buying buying that.

We weren't buying fuel or airline prices.

Not really.

Okay, well, your inflation can stay up at 2% then.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

So we can get a plane to somewhere, but we can't afford to pay our mobile phone.

We can get a plane to somewhere less increasingly expensively than we could before.

I blame decimalisation.

The news quizzes year came to an end with Ian Smith in the temporary chair, just in time to not know for certain whether or not America wanted to stick its national fingers back into the dodgily wide electric socket that is the Donald Trump presidency.

Trump is of course famously both the most and least American American there has ever been and he was planning to put someone equally American and non-American into his cabinet in the form of the world's leading obviously fictitious cartoon evil genius.

Now, I don't want to be a hipster about this, but I was disliking Elon Musk before it was cool.

In the early days, everyone was like, oh, he's doing jetpacks, he's doing electric car, he's like Iron Man, he's amazing.

And I remember someone saying to me, have you heard about Elon Musk?

He's a South African billionaire.

And somehow, based only on that information,

I formed an opinion.

Now, obviously it's wrong to hold stereotypes about wealthy white South Africans, but it does save time, doesn't it?

The Democrats are obsessed with the idea that there's going to be like a procedural way that they're going to win.

It's like someone sort of hits you in the face with a custard pie and then starts kicking you and you just sort of go, that's illegal actually.

I was also thinking those checks are so embarrassing.

If you want a million dollars, have you seen them?

They're so big.

But if you win one of those checks, you have to, I think you have to go to a bank with it.

How are you going to carry it?

Because you're going to fold it and then you'll worry that they'll go, oh, it's been tampered with.

So you're going to carry it really neatly all the way there it's all automatically

you have to like put the check in the machine

ram it in like come on well you take a photo of it with your phone but you need to be like so far away

so there we go 2.5 of the way through the millennium we've only got 975 years to put it round can we do it It's looking touch and go.

Will 2025 be better?

Let me look into my crystal ball.

Well, all I can see is a weeping penguin, so still not clear.

Anyway, Anyway, do tune into the news quiz as we fearlessly chart the 26th candidate for stupidest year of the third millennium.

Happy old year to you all, and hopefully, an even happier new year.

The News Quiz 2024 compilation was written and hosted by me, Andy Zoltzman.

The producer was Sam Holmes, and it was at BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4.

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You'll explore our curated selection of diamonds and gemstones while learning key characteristics to help you make a confident, informed decision.

Choose from our signature styles or opt for a fully custom design crafted around you.

Visit yadavjewelry.com and book your appointment today at our new Union Square showroom and mention podcast for an exclusive discount.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere, automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!