Episode 2 Have I Got News for You

Good evening. Welcome to 'Have I Got News For You'. I'm Richard Osman. In

the news this week,the BBC is forced to apologise after cutting to the

wrong camera during an interview with Nigel Farage.

With yet another story about his love-life about to fill a Sunday

newspaper, the victim takes direct action to try and stop the presses.

Evidence emerges that the Australian Air Force are developing their own

stealth bomber. On Ian's team tonight is a TV presenter who says,

"History is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to anyone on

this planet." Clearly he never saw Todd Carty and Bonnie Langford win

the Christmas edition of Celebrity Pointless. Please welcome Dan Snow.

And with Paul tonight is a left-wing comedian who has been described by

one critic as "so honest, when he talks it's like he's going to start

a war at any time." Well, he's good, but he's no Tony Blair. Please

welcome Mark Steel. And we start with the bigger stories

of the week. Ian and Dan, take a look at this.

This is goodbye. Chloe Smith. Diane Abbot. Yes, goodbye to you, too.

Goodbye. He is one of the other ones. Don't know who even he doesn't

know who he is. This is reshuffles. The big political parties have

decided it's time to reshuffle their teams. It's extraordinary. The

change is unbelievable. Within a day, no-one 's noticed. As a swing

voter, it's completely convinced me. Has it? Yes. I'm definitely voting

for one of them now. What all the parties have done is bring in women

which is one of those moves that even the Beeb will do. Um? I'm quite

willing to have the operation, if it helps.

Anyway, what do you want to know? We got three people who used to work

for breakfast television have been promoted.

Who are the three daytime TV hosts who were promoted? This is like your

Pointless programme. It is a little bit. Except I am

allowed to say BLEEP, that's the difference.

For the benefit of those of us who have jobs and don't watch daytime

television. I've been a student for so long, I've forgotten who is on

daytime television. You know what, how dare you? 5.30

isn't daytime, it's early evening. Access prime. Exactly. It's daytime.

Tell us the names of these three ladies. Esther McVey, Anna Soubry,

another Tory, and Gloria de Piero. Let's look at Esther McVey. What is

her new job? She has gone to work and pensions.

She's been asked to play the role of Iain Duncan Smith's Number two. But

it's not all about TV presenters being promoted.

Another person has been promoted by Ed Miliband, Tristram Hunt NP. A TV

historian. He is my competition. He is not your competition any more. It

historian. He is my competition. He is better to be a journalist. I love

your history of the railways. I did a programme about Doctor Beeching's

cuts. Prime access. 5.30. It is hard to make trains interesting. You did

it well. Portillo did it well. He is charismatic. Paul, I it when you go

to India, on the trains and that. It is a wonder people do it when you

can't do it right. Another man was promoted in the reshuffle.

That was Alistair Carmichael. He is the Minister of state for Scotland.

Give it 18 months, and he is gay to be an answer on Pilots. The first in

the queue to -- going to be an answer on Pointless. The first in

the queue to shake his hand was Nick Clegg.

It went on for seven years. During the seven years War, it was said

that the ministers used to change like the scenery at the opera. So

often. Really? Why didn't you say that, Paul? Because it was boring.

There were a huge emotions as well. -- a few sackings. Ed Miliband

sacked Diane Abbott. She wanted to be in charge of the Labour Party.

She was never on message. She has been sacked. She will be back to

helping Portillo. He is so good on trains. Mind you, anybody can make

trains interesting. Most people can make that job funny as well.

Who reshuffled themselves? And extremist?

Tommy Robinson, you are right. What did he do this we? He resign from

the EDL. He found out many of them were racist. They used to go,

Muslims out, and it turns out some of them were against Islamist. So I

went off of them. Do you know what Tommy Robinson does

for a living? Does he work at the United Nations? You can see sick

children with Roger Moore and Lulu? He also used to run a tanning shop.

Exactly right. What, changing the colour of people's skin?! So your

customer comes in, "Come in, madam," half an hour later, "You can get

out!" This is the day of reshuffles. According to the Daily Telegraph,

Employment Minister Esther McVey once shared the GMTV sofa with

Eamonn Holmes. I'm guessing that wasn't half each. Explaining his

decision to quit the EDL, Tommy Robinson said, "Here's the thing

-10% of our members are dick heads." Yes, it's always the tiny minority

that makes marching on a mosque such an unpleasant experience. Paul and

Mark, take a look at this. This is clearly somebody trying to

post letters there, the dog is helping him out. The dog might be

replacing the postman in the new privatised service. And then

postmen, in an act of revenge, will bite dogs. The Royal Mail is being

sold off, isn't it? Even Thatcher said we will not

privatise the Royal Mail. But this lot have decided to do it, and you

have to conclude these people really would genuinely sell their granny,

they would go, "Granny, come on, you are no use to society, you are too

expensive, we're having to drive you round to your mates' funeral. Take

around to the tanning shop and get her brick -- deported.

Can I guess you haven't applied for shares? I have, but? It's just, it's

horrible. Everything about this government is rolled up into one

story. It is as if the country is run by Ryanair now. You pay for your

little bit and nothing else. "I don't want to pay for libraries, I

don't go to the library. All this money wasted on guide dogs. I can't

climb a tree, nobody buys me a gibbon." It was hugely

oversubscribed though, that's the key. About seven times as many

people trying to get the shares as there are shares. All this idea that

it is going to be capitalism that reaches out to the poor, and the

bank that is organising this that is going to make a huge amount of money

is Goldman Sachs. You think, it's about time they had a break, isn't

it? Labour is saying it is being sold off on the cheap. Because it is

massively oversubscribed. The logic is clearly, "We've got to sell off

the post office." And then the market says, "Actually, everybody

wants a piece, it is really valuable." Which raises the

question, why are we selling it off then? If it's a state asset, why

can't we keep it? And the answer is, they don't know. According to The

Times, this might not be the last privatisation we see as well. What

else are they suggesting might be privatised? The Queen. They haven't

yet, but that would be oversubscribed, wouldn't it? I'd

like a piece of her. I've heard the rumours. What else have they got

left to sell off? I think the next one will be lamp posts. They'll sell

off lamp posts and you'll have to put 5p in a little meter. It will

give you just enough light to get to the next one and you put another one

in. Somewhere George Osborne is writing that down, you know that,

don't you? You know Royal Mail owns a brilliant miniature electric

railway. It goes from Paddington to Whitechapel. It hasn't been used for

about eight or ten years. That would be brilliant, wouldn't it, to use

that? Yeah, they're thinking about using it for shops on Oxford Street.

They could have their own little spouts and they put the goods up and

down it and it whizzes around. Mark, you were saying earlier that

Margaret Thatcher always refused to sell off the Royal Mail. What reason

did she give? Oh, wasn't it something about the Queen's head,

wasn't it? Yes, she said: It was Denis's favourite pub, I think. Yes,

this is the mad rush to buy shares in the Royal Mail. To our younger

viewers, a letter is a bit like a text but you write it down with a

pen and you put it in an envelope, then you buy a sticker to put on it,

then you put it in the hole in one of those red boxes and within two

days it will be delivered to the wrong house somewhere near where

your friend lives. The shares were priced at £3.30. No-one quite

understands how they got to that price. It was a bit like trying to

buy a stamp for something that doesn't weigh very much but is quite

wide. Ian and Dan, here's another for you. That's newspapers, you

won't see them for much longer. Lord Leveson and that's the Prime

Minister. Oh, this is the Privy Council is going to report on press

freedom and the plans to regulate the press and they've decided to

reject the newspapers' own solution and have a Royal Charter, but the

main thing that's coming out of the proposal is that publications that

won't join up to the regulator such as, say, a small magazine like

Private Eye, those publications if they get involved in a libel action

and they win, they win, they prove that they were right to say it, they

will not only have to pay all their own costs, they'll have to pay all

the costs of the person who sued them. That is now law. That's

already been enacted by the government, not by anyone

independent, by the politicians. So the idea that then given any say on

the rest of the press they will act responsibly, they won't, they'll

punish those whose views they don't like who won't play ball and

obviously that may well be me. It ought to be simple. It's only

because it was Leveson, one of these chaps who sits there going, "Oh,

I've spent 84 years looking through a billion pages," and really he

should have just sat there and gone, "Oh, for Christ's sake, all you

horrible bustards, you're just in jail and that's..." It was simple,

that's what happened. Everyone said, well, Lord Leveson, he reported,

nothing happened. It did happen, they closed down the biggest

newspaper in the country, scores of people have been arrested,

journalists, lots of people have been prosecuted, it's a big result.

It's probably difficult at this time if people find themselves siding

with the Daily Mail. You're not. But that's what people are thinking.

They are thinking I'm lining up with Murdoch and Dacre, that's very

embarrassing. I'm embarrassed, internally I'm crawling. But in

Britain we have a free press. It's not a pretty press but it's free.

It's like the people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they're saying you

should ban it. No, no, no, you don't ban it, you don't ban it, you don't

BUY it. APPLAUSE. At least once a week there will be a

story in there that goes, have you seen this woman in a council estate

and she's got 403 kids and they're all on benefits and now she's bought

a giraffe and the giraffe is on benefits and now she's said to the

government that she can't fit the giraffe in the house, it's getting a

cricked neck so they've put it up in St Paul's Cathedral. Now she's

saying that three of her kids have got compulsive snooker syndrome, so

the Town Hall has brought a snooker table round but she can't be referee

because she's allergic to white gloves, so the mayor has to come

round and count up the points, otherwise it will be arrested by

Europe. That is absolutely true, but then every now and then the Daily

Mail runs a story like the murderers of Stephen Lawrence shouldn't get

off scot-free, they did murder him, we are going to campaign for ten

years until they get justice. I mean, the free press does good

things even if you don't like most of what they do. You have to allow

people to do these stories otherwise they won't appear. What you're

saying is sometimes Luke Skywalker has to team up with Darth Vader,

right? LAUGHTER. Or as I might put it, Churchill with

Stalin. Indeed. Just to translate that, that's Darth Vader and Luke

Skywalker. LAUGHTER. Presumably, Ian is Churchill in that analogy. Yes.

And Stalin is my father. LAUGHTER. So this is all going to come into

play on October 30. I've got the official timetable of what happens

because it's Privy Council so it's quite confusing. The Queen will

attend the Privy Council with her official seal. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Judging by that noise, he's in the front row. CLAPPING.

She will then ratify the Royal Charter which editors will be

expected to sign up to. Ian Hislop will then be hung for treason. Did

you see the journalist Mehdi Hasan taking the Daily Mail to task on

Question Time? No. Yes, I did. Oh yes, Ian did. ? He called it:

Although the Mail did print this in retaliation. It's a letter from

Mehdi Hasan applying for a job at the Mail. In a letter to Paul Dacre

a few years ago he says: Ooh. Ouch. Ed Miliband of course has

done very well out of his fight with the Mail this week. He's been

reinforcing his tough guy image. Let's take a look. LAUGHTER. As an

example of press freedom what did the Guardian do that was described

this week as the greatest damage to the Western security apparatus in

history? It's the new head of MI5. Yes, the new head of MI5. Has said

the Guardian has acted really irresponsibly in pointing out that

we're spying on people. And the Guardian has said, well, even Obama

has said actually we were probably overdoing the spying but in this

country everyone's gone absolutely mental and so the Guardian should be

put down because they've pointed out that we're all being spied on all

the time. You know, it's a matter of consent really. You can debate this

and say yes, I would like to be spied on, I know I would. Anyone

showing any interest in my life would be terrific. I'd be very, very

happy with that. But I think it's a matter for public debate and if we

want to pass laws saying we can spy on people, we can. It's just what

the Guardian did is point out this is happening and nobody knows it. I

always like people's use of the word "in history" because that's quite a

long time. What about when the entire British Secret Service was

working for the Russians? When did that happen? During the cold, for

most of the Cold War. All of them? Pretty much. You think that was

pretty bad, wasn't it? So this is clearly also a bit bad but I don't

think it's the worst, it's not the worst security breach in history.

Also when Judi Dench died. LAUGHTER. Yes, this is the march towards

government regulation of the press, which the whole of Fleet Street

argues would be an unmitigated disaster. According to the Mail the

cross-party agreement was negotiated in Ed Miliband's office over pizza.

Pizza, that's Italian, God, Miliband really does hate Britain. Meanwhile

in a speech Andrew Parker the head of MI5 has attacked the Guardian and

Edward Snowden for harming Britain's intelligence services. Spy master

Parker may not look much like he's a specialist in espionage and covert

operations, but to be fair to him he is a 60-year-old black woman.

LAUGHTER. Paul and Mark, here is another one for you. This is a cat

being massaged. There was a story this week not all cats like being

stroked and when they are purring it could be a sign of distress. That's

exactly right. You mustn't stroke cats. Who was the research done by?

It was done by dogs. It was actually done by Professor Daniel Mills of

the University of Lincoln. How could he tell that cats were stressed when

you stroke them? He had them all wired up. To electricity, which

would stress anybody out. He said, when they're handled by humans they

let off a small amount of hormone linked to anxiety. I did that at the

start of the show. Did you? We're not meant to actually do a full

massage on cats, are we? I mean, just if they're feeling a bit down

and saying, oh, have you had a terrible day? What's it like

outside? Oh, raining again. Oh, is that the cat speaking? That's more

of a story in my mind, that the cat is actually talking rather than

getting a massage. No, he doesn't say anything. It's me doing the

massage. Well, that's misleading. You're the editor of the

publication, cats can talk. Where's Lord Leveson when you need him?

Working for the dogs. During the test, what proportion of cats

enjoyed being strokes? 43%. Oh, you're so close. Ian? Eight out of

ten. It was none at all. I'm just going to warn viewers at home now to

look away if you don't want to see a photograph of somebody deliberately

look away if you don't want to see a stressing out a cat. The Mail Online

carried the story and there was a big response in the comments

section. For example Alexandra wrote:

Round two is called the history noise. I will play you a noise which

will relate to a story from this week's news, which has a link to

history. Buzz in when you think you know what the story is. Let's hear

the first noise. Come on. Come on! Quickly, I need an answer!

BUZZER. Merton, Magdelen. That's Jeremy Paxman. It is Jeremy Paxman.

And he's just brought a book out, has he, about the First World War?

And he was being asked some questions about it at the book

Festival, and he didn't know any of the answers to the rather simple

questions he was being asked. That's absolutely right. Do you know what

he was asked? Yes. BELL RINGS. Hislop. Maudlin. By

nature or by...? LAUGHTER. University. And he

couldn't answer. What happened to Lord Kitchener? Pretty much the

poster boy for World War I. Yeah, he drowned. He was on a ship that hit a

mine. He was on his way to Russia. It was a bit of a Cabinet reshuffle,

actually. And Paxman didn't know at all. He didn't even know the name of

the soldier in that tomb in Westminster Abbey!

LAUGHTER. That's inexcusable, isn't it, Dan? Yes, and it's also

inexcusable to be a BBC history presenter that loses out to a man

who knows nothing in a big landmark history series about the First World

War. So I'm an even bigger failure. Aww. Was it not offered to you? Of

course not, no. You were a shoo-in for that job! Well, you would have

thought so. In addition to Jeremy Paxman, who else is stupid this

week? Oh, is this the global education report? Yes, that's right.

The international education report. Britain was 22nd in literacy, and

21st in numeracy. And that was out of 20!

LAUGHTER. I don't know. I couldn't read it!

LAUGHTER. And older people in this country are much more literate and

numerate than younger people, and in all the successful countries it's

the other way around, which suggests that something has gone wrong.

They've got their own language, though, haven't they, 19-year-olds?

So have the French! LAUGHTER. Who are the least numerate

people on earth? Below us? It was the Americans. They don't even know

there's more than one math. LAUGHTER. Yes, Jeremy Paxman is the

latest in a long line of people to cash in on... I'm sorry, commemorate

World War I. One plan for the commemorations is to replay the

famous Christmas Day football match, with a special game between England

and Germany to be shown live on Sky Sports on the Sunday.

LAUGHTER. Also this week, the cookie monster made and exclusive

appearance on Newsnight, saying: I'm so sorry, that was Boris

Johnson. LAUGHTER. Let's take a listen to the

next history noise. ZIPPING.

BUZZER. Paul and Mark. That was a zip? It was a zip. Why is a zip

particularly historical this week? It must be the 100th anniversary of

the zip. Yes, it's been 100 years to the day since a man first went, "Ow,

no, that's just making it worse!". LAUGHTER. I tell you what, if cats

don't like being straight, they should try that! Visit appears in

the top five in the list of 100 greatest inventions of all time. Can

you tell me what else might appear in that top five? Fire! There's a

moth in the studio. Moths! A moth. Fire. Fire's got to be one of the

top inventions, hasn't it? Er, no. I think fire was a discovery more than

an invention. That moth is very, very excited. Someone has got

something very old out the wardrobe! I think it's that gentleman's

jumper! It shows you how interesting this programme is. Everybody's

focusing now on that moth! So, fire. Fire is a discovery. Let's take a

look at the top five. They are, in order: Fire! Portable fire, I should

have said. What about the moth zapper?

LAUGHTER. We could really do with one now. I told you to wait in the

van! LAUGHTER. And the next history noise

for you. FANFARE.

WHISTLE. Ha, ha! BUZZER. Paul again. That's the sound

of a football being kicked. It is. And the whistle was a clue that it

was football. Some sort of fanfare before that? We have had a football

match at Buckingham Palace this week. Exactly right. It's 150 years

of the FA? And one of the teams playing was actually one of the 12

original teams, Civil Service United. Yes, Civil Service FC. I

only read first few... I got so bored of the story, I stopped

reading after PO. And that's why, as a historian, you haven't buzzed in

for one other question on the history round. No wonder they gave

Paxman that documentary! I know. LAUGHTER. Didn't Prince Harry play

in this game? Prince William. It was Prince William. Shall we take a look

at him? That's from Danny Baker's 101 campest throw-ins of all time.

In his pre-match speech, Prince William said: and what's more,

you'll have to pay for it. Oh, hang on, you already pay for it. There

were all sorts of nationalities playing in this team. What did they

have to do with Prince Philip while the game was on?

LAUGHTER. Where did they send him this week? Balmoral, or somewhere?

They send him to an old people's home. Oh! A people's home, I think

he would call it. But how did he show he was back on form? He saw

this girl, a pensioner's great-granddaughter. He said:

LAUGHTER. Time now for the missing words

round, which this week features as its guest publication International

Sheepdog News. It's a brilliant read, brilliantly illustrated. The

dog's bollocks... Are on page 16. And we start with:

Telling the neighbours that you are bisexual!

too soft, says Putin. All right, once you got to know him. You were

right the first time. Apparently, Ivan the Terrible was not so bad.

Ivan the Terrible died whilst playing chess. He was given the last

rites by a bishop who took his time getting there because he could only

move diagonally. And finally: Lebensraum! Ahistorical joke!

Sheepdogs! Partly because all the Polish border collies are in this

country rounding up sheet for half the price of the English ones!

So, the final scores are: Ian and Dan, seven points. Paul and Mark are

this week's winners with 11 points. APPLAUSE. But before we go, there's

just time for the caption competition. Budget cuts affect

Incredible Hulk movie. And this: if Qatar can have the football,

Atlantis can have the cricket. Rain stops play.

LAUGHTER. APPLAUSE. On which note we say thank

you to our contestants, Ian Hislop and Dan Snow, Paul Merton and Mark

Steel, and I leave you with news that in London, the publisher who

suggested a new Bridget Jones book would be a great idea is swiftly

tracked down. LAUGHTER. As part of a crackdown on

recycling, Kingston Council officials go through the bins at

Ronnie Corbett's house. And there are incredible scenes at the world's

smuggest man competition, as judges declare it a three-way tie.

LAUGHTER. Good night. APPLAUSE.