After last week's Tory bias row, The News Quiz has never sounded funnier
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Typing this column into a not-very-smartphone on a crowded commuter train, I found that rail minister Huw Merriman’s surname kept auto-correcting itself to “Merriment”. He’s provided plenty of it this week.
It seems Merriman has started dabbling in radio criticism. I can’t help taking it personally: this is my first week as The Telegraph’s radio critic, and a minister is already trying to steal my job. Perhaps he expects me to sort out the strikes. Anyway, he had listened to 10 minutes of the January 19 episode of The News Quiz (Radio 4), and was appalled by it, as he told Sky News.
“It wasn’t satirical – it was just a diatribe against Conservatives,” he said. “There wasn’t actually anything in it [...] which struck me as being sort of amusing.” I listened to that episode too, and found it “sort of amusing”, but only just. I didn’t laugh. But what a change a week makes.
Merriman’s complaint – which was widely covered in the press – became the lead story on Andy Zaltzman’s topical quiz on Friday. Zaltzman came out swinging, with an episode that mocked politicians of every bent – most notably Merriman – and the BBC itself, while being extremely funny. There’s a risk of Radio 4 humour about Radio 4 humour eating its own tail, but I’ve been listening to the programme for about 18 years and I don’t think it’s ever sounded fresher or livelier.
There was, however, one moment when the jokes dried up, and Zaltzman launched into exactly what his show had been accused of – a laughless, anti-Tory diatribe. The government is “sleepwalking towards annihilation”, riven by “self-indulgent, facile” in-fighting. Careerist MPs who treat politics as a game “should shut up or shove off”. On and on it went. If Merriman tuned in halfway through, he’d have had steam coming out of his ears. The punchline was that Zaltzman hadn’t written any of it; these were all criticisms of the government voiced by former Conservative ministers over the past week. (“Thank you to our new writing team of Simon Clarke, Priti Patel, David Davis, David Frost and Conor Burns”.)
When I spoke to Zaltzman in 2020 – one episode into his News Quiz tenure – he fretted prophetically about accusations of bias. “A government will inevitably be more criticised than an opposition, because it’s the one making decisions. So that might lead to a perception of greater bias than is actually the case.” It’s easier to joke about people who say and do things that matter; perhaps for this reason, neither of the latest episodes mentioned the Lib Dems. As The Spectator’s Cindy Yu put it on Friday: “The real test is, if and when – when – Labour get in this year, what is The News Quiz going to sound like at that point?”
Friday’s funniest lines came from Alasdair Beckett-King, who was introduced alongside Lucy Porter as one of the episode’s two ostensibly Left-ish guests (balanced by two ostensibly Right-ish ones, Geoff Norcott and Yu). But he’s not usually political, more a whimsical surrealist – imagine a young Bill Bailey, with the hair of Ariel from The Little Mermaid (invisible on radio, alas). He had “a bone to pick” with more conservative colleagues: “You see Right-wing comedians out there just doing these unfunny, jokeless political rants, and the audience are clapping. And, speaking as a Left-wing comedian: we invented that. That’s our thing. Get your own thing.”
It’s a rare joke that’s funny and balanced. “They say satire is when you criticise the Left and Right equally,” Beckett-King mused. “No. These people don’t understand their history. Satire is when you do an etching of the King with his pants down, and on his bottom you’ve written something really boring like, ‘Agrarian Reform.’ That’s satire.” Private Eye’s Ian Hislop – himself a fan of dusty Georgian cartoons – would probably agree. But he went back even further than Gillray in the first week of his ongoing series Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes (Radio 4).
An episode on visual comedy studied the medieval grotesques of Oxford (sculptures, not dons) while one on wordplay reminded us that – in the Venerable Bede’s account – a pun brought Christianity to England. Eyeing up handsome slaves on sale in Rome, Pope Gregory the Great asked who they were. “Angli,” came the reply (Angles). No, he corrected them, surely they were “Angeli” (angels). Christian missions followed.
For all the jokes about bottoms, the series is pleasingly, unashamedly highbrow: there were long quotations from Anglo-Saxon and Latin texts, and hushed visits to archives with the microphone held close to pages of cow- or goat-skin. “You can hear that good crunkle of the parchment,” as Exeter Cathedral archivist Ellie Jones put it. Crunkle – excellent word. Almost as good as hleahtorsmiþ (“laughtersmith”), what Anglo-Saxons called a joker.
Many of the riddles in the codex known as the Exeter Book, gifted by a 10th-century Bishop, remain too filthy to quote in this newspaper. Jones recited one that would have made Frankie Howerd blush. “People like jokes. People like filth. Why not?” she said. “People are people.” Politicians come and go; dumb jokes are timeless.
