The News Quiz was recorded last week at the Hay Festival, a book-besotted bastion against the consolidation of all human communication into anonymised insults and half-second-long AI-generated memes of A Labrador Trying to Mate with a Space Hopper. Choosing the stories to cover in the show is a major part of my News Quiz weeks, and a constant reminder of the reasons why, on Radio 4 news bulletins at the top of the hour, they always have to bleep out the first six words. In distant, simpler times, the world had to deal with only five to ten news stories per year, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Nowadays, in the Trumpistian micro-epoch through which our species is being churned, apparently momentous and unignorable news splurts at us from all directions at all times.
We therefore have no choice but to be selective in the news we choose to allow into our consciousness. This process is sadly beyond the scope of some. The oil markets, for example. They are sensitive souls with fragile confidence who react to any hint of potential trouble like an unstable teenager in a disappointing soap opera. We humans, however, have a duty to at least try to control our reactions both to actual events and to hypothetically possible events that might potentially happen based on words someone has said, or posted on so-called social media, or, in some cases, is thought to be about to say and/or post.
Number crunching
From the broadly unappetising buffet of news last week, we chose to cover, among other things, the unlonged-for return of Brexit to the headlines, and the latest on the cosmic bafflement that is HS2 (a very rare example of a transport project that benefits all regions and nations of the UK equally – by being absolutely useless to everyone). The seemingly eternal after-rumblings of Brexit have emerged as a squabble-ground in the Labour leadership harrumph-off. My elder child was born in January 2007, and, unless Keir Starmer can turn toast back into bread, will be moving on to the ninth prime minister of their lifetime before turning 20. My sister, born in 1980, had lived through three prime ministers by the same age.
On the positive flip-side, by the time my sister turned 20, the England men’s Test cricket team had had 14 different captains. In my soon-to-be-20-year-old’s life, there have been only seven. So, while there has been increased stability in the more important position of public responsibility, being prime minister has in essence become a temporary work-experience gig before toddling off to a proper job as an influencer.
Mental gymnastics
Recent scientific research has incontrovertibly proved that consuming culture is a hundred times better for your health than exercising, or something along those lines. I admit that I did not read the granular detail of the report. I was too busy thinking about paintings and wondering who would win a poetry slam between John Milton and the celebrity rabbit Miffy. I was therefore disappointed to emerge from Hay without having spontaneously developed the body of an acrobat.
Just for the love of it
For our cultural full-soul workout last weekend, my wife and I went to the Royal Albert Hall to see Emmylou Harris, performing her farewell tour show at the age of 79. She was superb. I always find it exhilarating to watch artists performing long after they could reasonably have retired. Towards the end of my first solo Edinburgh Fringe run, in 2001, at which I was playing to ten to 15 people each night, I was Joan Rivers’s support act for a run at the Festival Theatre (capacity around 1,900). She was in her late sixties, with almost half a century of comedy experience. Aside for her phenomenal charisma and comic timing, I was most deeply struck by the energy of her performance, and her ongoing love of the craft of stand-up, decades after she needed to do it.
My personal favourite moment of seeing a Megastar Perform Just for the Love of It was at a TV recording of The Live Floor Show in 2003, at which my five-minute stand-up set did not extract an excess of laughter from the audience. Robert Plant was the musical act. He recorded his two songs for the broadcast, then, when the floor manager announced that everyone needed to vacate the studio, Plant asked if he could play another. With an overwhelming democratic mandate from the audience, he did so. The cameras were no longer rolling. He had fulfilled his contractual obligation. This had become an unpaid private gig for a couple of hundred people. Someone who had been one of the biggest stars in the music world for decades played a song purely for the sake of playing a song, purely for the moment.
Andy Zaltzman is a comedian, host of the Bugle and the News Quiz, and a statistician on Test Match Special
[Further reading:An approaching comet augurs a Burnham ascendant]
