Like a duck out of water

I have never won an award for being on the radio. And now I’m not going to win one for my tomatoes. This weekend I am back in the Somerset homeland (writing this while noshing on GWR fruit cake hurtling through the countryside). In a career highlight, I am opening the village flower and produce show (organised by my auntie who finds it all very funny, me cutting a ribbon in front of six people). Only a few categories are open for “outsiders” to enter (to stop interlopers from nudging out the villagers). They include gluten free cake, a bouquet of foliage, and six tomatoes on a plate. I had high hopes for the latter. Three had ripened up nice. But just as things seemed to be turning in my favour, and I was on course for a win, time ran out. Now I know how Keir Starmer feels.

WE LEARNED ducks don’t have saliva… One of my early scoops as a journalist was that rain was nice weather for ducks. Or at least that in 2009 Defra had spent £300,00 on a study which found ducks were happy when they had access to a pond, a water trough and a shower. They liked the shower. Sometimes drinking from it, often just standing under it. Front page sorted.

Fast foward 17 years, and duck content has become a regular feature of my 5 Live show, from how to save a lame duck PM (peas, apparently) to the man in the 1980s who tried to hatch a duck egg in his pants (without success).

This week I went to the Department for Education to interview the new education secretary for England, Lucy Powell. We discussed vocational training, exam stress and “egregious” student loans.

She also explained why she’d quit studying at Oxford University, switching to King’s College London to finish her chemsitry degree:

“Academically it was quite sink or swim. There's a lot of self teaching, self-learning, which I wasn't really used to. I found myself just in an environment I wasn't really used to. I was a bit of a duck out of water.”

And a listener got in touch and said she’d got it wrong, she meant a fish etc etc. So I went back to Tim Jones, from Sally’s Duck Rescue, to ask:  Is a duck out of water happy?

So the short answer is yes, they can be all right. The long, more technical answer is, no actually they do need water for their basic survival. They need it for things like eating – they don't produce saliva like other animals do. So they need to have access to water so that they can digest their food and most of all they use it for hygiene: keeping themselves clean and actually keeping themselves waterproof. The water stimulates the oil gland, which gives them the ability then to preen themselves and remain waterproof. So, so yes, they can be out of water, but it's not the best for them.”

So Powell was right. Not gasping for air like a fish out of water, but discombobulated, and unable to eat or look after itself. So actually probably should move unis.

WE LEARNED… that Andy Burnham’s cup of tea isn’t Mandy Burnham’s cup of tea: By now you’ve probably seen “Mandy Burnham”. She’s actually Emma Roberts, a chaplain in Swansea, who posts online about faith. Or she did until someone on TikTok noticed that she looks quite a bit like the new PM.

She came on the radio and told me how she’s decided to lean into it, and shared her views on things the PM has shared views on: bar snacks, football etc. But there is one thing she isn’t on board with – how he makes a cuppa, putting the milk on the teabag first before adding water.

Here is Mandy on Andy:

 “I can agree with him in a lot of things, but what he has said about a teabag is an abomination. All I can say is that softening the teabag with the milk, it just should never have come into our national consciousness. That was just awful. And he needs to retract it.”

I obviously have no opinions as I work at the BBC, but on this I’m Team Mandy.

WE LEARNED… it it’s happened again: I mentioned last week that for interviews with Angela Rayner and Nick Clegg I’d turned up to find us in matching outfits. Well the same thing happened with Lucy Powell. Let’s see what happens if I meet Count Binface.

WE LEARNED… the time history was made: I have been running a weekly feature on my 5 Live show where I sit down with Nicholas Posner, a former GP who alongside his medical studies and career took photographs, notably of many senior politicians, some of which are now in the National Portrait Gallery collection. His trick? Writing to them and asking to take their pictures. Egos are that easy to hook in.

He’s done Tony Blair, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Paddy Ashdown, William Hague, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen, David Miliband, Michael Heseltine, Cecil Parkinson and Kenneth Baker, among many others, including John Major.

On November 1, 1990 he went into the Treasury to photograph the chancellor of the exchequer (above). His watch shows it’s 6.15pm.

What neither photographer, nor subject, knew was at that precise moment, Geoffrey Hower was around the corner in Number 10, telling Margaret Thatcher that he was resigning from the cabinet. His personal statement in the Commons – “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain” – helped preciptate her downfall. And Major’s rise to become PM.

He had know idea that’s what was happening as he posed for the photograph. But he liked he so much he used it in campaign leaflets as PM.

WE LEARNED… something is happening, we’re just not sure what: I spend a lot of time looking at the Wikipedia polling aggregator. Not just the tables, but also the chart. So far Labour (and Tories) up, Reform (and Greens) down etc etc. But the main thing it tells us is to ignore anyone who tells you they know how Britain will vote at the next general election. Britain doesn’t know yet. What a rollercoaster. And we’re only two years in.

WE LEARNED… how presidents cut it fine: For all the talk of TikTok comms, there are moments, even in the 2020s, when a leader has to address the nation, not just the terminally online scrollers. And that requires a speech, which will require speech writers.

In an earlier, but still online, age, Ben Rhodes was a speechwriter for Barack Obama, and hhe as now written a book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches, which we discussed this week.

I asked him about the process of working with Obama, and those moments when he thought a speech was finished, until the president calls late and says, “I’ve had an idea”.

Rhodes described the night that Bin Laden was killed, and the very last minute preparations for how Obama would tell America, and the world.

“I had to write a speech in about an hour that he would give to the entire nation. Wow. And he calls me up to the Oval Office right as he’s gonna go on television, and all the American television networks were breaking into their coverage to take that live. And he hands me a draft with a bunch of handwritten edits, and I said, ‘Well, you’re going on in a couple of minutes.” And I had to sprint ahead of him, who was walking, to where the teleprompter was and literally help insert the final edits into that.”

Rhodes also described being with Obama at the service for the church leader and South Carolina state senator, Clementa Pinckney, who was among nine people shot dead in the city of Charleston in 2015.

“He said to us before he went out, ‘I think maybe I'll sing’. So we watched this speech having no idea if he would actually do that.”

Well he did. And it was quite the moment…

AOB

• How cool is Sid James in this photo?

• I liked The Odyssey more than the translator (but still think that the only work of art that should be three hours long is the whole of the first series of I’m Alan Partridge).

• The new Diane Morgan/Sue Johnston series Ann Droid should be awful (elderly woman is given duff robot carer with hilarious consequences) but it’s joyous and funny and heartwarming and funny and silly and funny.

• I am gutted by the news of Celebrity Mastermind being axed. Not least because I’ve just finished reading Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by Mel Stuart, and thought I could have done my favourite ever film as my specialist subject. (On the subject of cancellations, I’d long given up on the idea of making it on to Live At The Apollo, but am gutted for stand-ups who have fewer and fewer ways of getting on to telly.)

• My mate Joe Lycett doesn’t need any extra help plugging his first exhibition, EVERYTHING MUST GO, but what I love about what Joe does is the silliness. There’s not enough of it about.

• Great question from our pub quiz last night: can you name the six towns or cities outside London which feature on the standard Monopoly board? (I’ll put the answers in the comments.

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If you like this sort of thing, you’ll live my show on BBC Radio 5 Live, weekdays from 2pm. It’s like this, but with more music.Thanks for reading this far, if you have. If you haven’t, nevermind. Do hit the like button bla bla bla.