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Chapter 1: What is the significance of the US and Iran deal?
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Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a guide to the use and abuse of political language. I'm Amanda Unity. I'm joined this week, once again, back, Stuart Lee. Thanks for having me back. This week, the phrase we're taking a look at is, it's all signed. The deal is all signed.
So we're looking at Trump's art of the deal, the language around that, also the language of reporting the deal that people are using to describe what's going on.
Also, because we're going out on a by-election day, we are beholden to broadcasting rules, which we will go into later on, which means we won't be talking about the candidates or the parties or the issues that affect the outcome, which is fine because, thankfully, there is a big, beautiful deal to look at on the international stage.
Shhh!
which we'll dig into. First of all, I've just finished doing a season of Taskmaster. Oh, yeah. I say that as if it happened last week. It didn't happen last September. What?
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Chapter 2: What is a memorandum of understanding?
But I've been... I know. Oh, right. Television is all alive. Are they not in trouble for that? Because it gives...
impression it's going out in real time i know right i know so so this must not get out okay and i thought i'd done okay i mean i did you know points wise i did all right i thought i'd left with my dignity intact but i was sent a message on social media by someone who said they didn't really know who i was before it and fully expected me to be surly and annoyed and not the ghibli grandpa he really is
The Ghibli, Studio Ghibli.
I know, but you are exactly like a Studio Ghibli grandpa.
Oh, thank you. So I should, I didn't know whether that was a good thing. The grandpa, I'm a little bit, you know, I'm not a grandpa. I could be. I could be anytime I want. You know, I've got that power. Ghibli's a good thing, really.
It is a good thing. It's the height of Japanese cartoon art form. The grandpas in the Ghibli films tend to be really nice. It's probably a young person saying that about you.
I think so. That said, the sooner the social media ban comes, the better, I think.
The main problem, I think, is not under-16s, but the over-60s need to be kept off social media as well because they're spreading a lot of false information and getting really wound up. I recently did some little clips for social media for an East London record shop cross-promotion where you go into all the second-hand shops and whatever.
And they're the first things I've seen that my daughter's seen because they prop up on Instagram and things like that. And she said, Dad, they're really amazing. You're like an influencer. I said, what do you mean? And she goes, well, you say things like, come on, let's go and have a look in here. And I go, yeah, but that's just, I've been presenting things for radio for nearly 40 years.
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Chapter 3: How do broadcasting rules affect political discussions?
I mean, that's Waiting for Godot as well, isn't it? Yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah. I was wondering, would you do anything like Taskmaster?
Would you go on, would you be a traitor? Well, I think I'd be good on traitors, right? But I think it boosts you up to a whole level of recognition. I mean, you're talking about people that don't know who you are and now please, they say you're a Ghibli grandpa. Yeah. I find it very difficult being stopped and spoken to by strangers all the time, even though they usually say delightful things.
It's sort of quite traumatic to be interrupted every 30 minutes when you're looking at a painting or trying to read. You have to kind of recalibrate yourself. And people are always really nice, but I wouldn't want to be... I've judged it brilliantly that I'm just about famous enough to make a living at a level that I like, but any more, I think I would go crazy. Yeah.
And Taskmaster does seem to... I mean, it introduces people to comics who... I mean, what it's done really well... I'm expecting a lot to come out of it for me.
I mean, what it's done really well is I think probably the two main guys, they lobby... for people who are valuable talents to get on it. And you get someone like Mike Wozniak, whose current touring show, The Bench, is superb. And he's able to reach an audience he wouldn't have reached. And they're often people that aren't like panel show fodder. They're slightly more quirky talents.
Yeah, I'm expecting a real career kick from it. I think this time, actually, I might be doing the PM programme.
Well, at the very least, you could get on the thing where you rent someone that looks like a Ghibli granddad for a kid's birthday party. And they perform a Japanese folk song. That's right. I just pop out of a cake. Yeah. I'd give Virgin Island a go. Would you?
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Chapter 4: What role do social media influencers play in political narratives?
I don't know what that one is. It sounds a bit dodgy to me.
It's You're a Virgin. Janet Ford tries to coax you to lose your virginity. I think. Is that right? No.
God, you're joking.
I think I might have misread that. Is that television now? Yeah, that is television. Wow, thank God I never watch it. No, no, no. Nobody watches television. People watch YouTube. I know, and Instagram. I'm an influencer now. And you're an influencer. Right, that's covered that. So, we have this terrific deal. Yeah. Actually, its proper title is a memorandum of understanding.
I love that phrase. And it's the sort of phrase that you really get your teeth into on this programme. The memorandum of understanding between America and Iran. Yeah. That phrase is designed to create the maximum distance, isn't it, between the declaration that something might happen and the possibility of it not happening. Yeah. All we've got, we haven't got a deal, we've got a memorandum,
Of understanding. It's not clear what's understood. It's not clear what form the memorandum takes. It's not binding. It's a memorandum of understanding.
And just to show you how foggy the understanding is, J.D. Vance was quoted as saying, I think it's a big moment for the United States. Thanks, of course, to the president's leadership and the hard work of the entire team. Whereas Iran was quoted as saying, the humiliated enemies have no option but to accept defeat and surrender.
To me, that's a memorandum of misunderstanding.
So there's room for ambiguity in all that.
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Chapter 5: How does Stewart Lee compare himself to a Ghibli grandpa?
We have to kind of mention all the... Are they standing in Macfield then, the Iranians? That doesn't matter. It's a bit like when you look on an old pound note and it says, I undertake to pay the bearer. It's a kind of huge... It's saying this bit of paper, the pound note, is a symbol of the fact that this money... sort of exists and could be converted into goods at some stage.
And that's kind of what this is. This is saying we sort of might do something. And yet again, it's sold because he's all about the art of the deal.
It's sold as if another victory has been made. Absolutely. And obviously, if you look at the pound on any kind of banknote now, it also says underneath it, have you thought about crypto? Because that's even realer.
Yeah.
That's absolutely more secure. The value of your crypto may go up as well as down. The value of Elon Musk and all that lot will go up while yours goes down.
You know Trump didn't write The Art of the Deal. We know that it was ghost written. Do you think he's read it? If it's such a good book, why isn't he better at doing deals?
Yeah, well, let's look at it. Yeah, let's look at it. Yeah, I think he hasn't read it. I think he's certainly read, if not written, the reviews of it, which says it's the best book on whatever.
Because I saw a great interview with Katie Price once, God bless her, where she's the model, where she said, when they write my books for me, she didn't have a problem with it. To her, it was just part of the brand, and there was a refreshing honesty about it.
Because that's what people assume.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Michael Grade provide about broadcast journalism?
I think J.D. Vance is saying, it's about a page and a half and a very general document on a number of issues. We're going to have to figure this stuff out during the technical negotiation phase. But the technical negotiation phase is... Will you destroy any of our country? Will you stop all shipping and oil getting out? Those are not technical issues.
Those were the subject for the conflict in the first place.
Vance is weird, isn't he? Because even though he's a Christian nationalist and he's decided that he's a Trump loyalist, he's clever enough He's not like Hegseth. He's clever enough to know when it stinks, right? And he can't quite bring himself to endorse this absolute nonsense. He has to put a little bit of distance between him.
I kind of think Trump's a bit like a guy on the forecourt of a used car place where he's always upselling. He's always giving you the impression that the deal has to be closed now. And I got in trouble with this recently.
I went into the Pets at Home superstore without my hearing aids in and accidentally, without realising, left having agreed to pay £175 every three months for a large amount of pet food discounted at 25%, which I was charged directly to my account. Now, I didn't know I'd done this, but the man gave me this sense of urgency that I had to commit to this deal now to save 25%.
And they have refunded me. It's very much like what happens on the... They've refunded me, by the way. I'm not criticising pets at home. They've been very reasonable about it. But it was that kind of thing where the sort of urgency of, you have to do this now.
This offer will only last for... Well, it's the kind of thing, you know, would you buy a used car from this guy? And that guy wants you to buy the used car now. Yeah. So you can just take it off the forecourt because it is a pile of junk.
Well, he wants this off the forecourt because it's really damaging. He wants it off the forecourt at any cost, even to the point where they're essentially paying reparations to Iran.
There is talk of something like £300 billion, although Trump has now said that is fake news and something being cooked up by the Democrats. The Democrats. The Democrats. It's very clever because it's both Democrats and dumb. You see what's happened?
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Chapter 7: How does Trump’s language shape perceptions of deals?
And Trump is consistently surprised. Trump's idea of a deal is... You agree to everything I say. Yeah. I think he thinks a deal is talking about a deal.
I think so. It's something that's in perpetual motion. And at the moment, it's fixed. It's obviously not going to work. So the deal is better unrealised and talked of as if it's in a perpetual state of becoming.
Yeah. Yes, it's that sort of quantum state of it could, you know, Iran collapses it one way into one meaning, absolute surrender for the enemy, and Trump collapses it into the other meaning, which is a total triumph, let's move on.
I mean, there have been some great deals in history like that that have worked, like the Good Friday Agreement, which allowed both sides to think contradictory things, and until Brexit messed it up, was absolutely a fine and functioning thing. But that's not this deal. That's not this deal. No.
So when Trump is doing a deal, does he sit down with, you know, a company, say, and they discuss terms and then halfway through it, he just takes out a hammer and starts hitting them And then that company starts ticking out hammers and trying to hit him. And in the end, they sign a piece of paper saying, we've agreed not to hit each other with hammers. And he presents that as a deal.
Well, he presents everything as a deal. He presents everything as a deal. And I mean, it's a cliche to say it's transactional, but I think that's the only way you can think of things. And to be honest, to talk about this in business terms, like it's a deal, it's pretty disgusting given that thousands of people have died in
in the immediate vicinity of the war, and the knock-on effects economically have caused loads of people to die as well. It's really, really tasteless. Obviously, taste and Trump are not two words.
Well, there is an upside, because a senior White House official was quoted as saying, one of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process is that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. That's one of the cool things.
One of the cool things about blowing everything to bits. I mean, they could have talked to those people anyway, and they already were under Obama. Yes, I know.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of political language in media?
Do you know what I mean? Outside number 10.
Yeah, little zip-up tops.
Zip-up tops and, you know, some of the jumpers for golf balls and all that kind of stuff.
Do you think it's, I mean, Vance, one of the things Vance said about culture that I thought was really interesting, he said, I mean, you can find this quote, but I haven't got it at hand. Yeah. He didn't think anyone really liked opera or classical music. He said people liked it or affected to like it because it gave them social standing and was a way of access to the higher echelons of society.
So he was kind of against the Kennedy Center and things like that. Do you think that on some level, putting cage fighting on the White House lawn is a deliberate attempt to do... Something that the right-thinking folk would think is tasteless and crass is a deliberate way of writing.
I think a lot of that is a sort of an enjoyment, a glee in upsetting the people that they don't like. It's their version of, I'm being very general here, but I think this is true, it's their version of comedy in that they're very suspicious about comedy because comedy is about targeting people and making fun of them.
Well, and ideas and understanding.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas annoying people provocatively and deliberately with glee is their version of it, I think. It's their form of entertainment. So, yeah, Trump's form of entertainment is not actually the cage fighting. It's the fact that the cage fighting is happening. Right, yeah. Outside the White House. Yeah. That's what he loves. Which has all been knocked down and bashed about.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he doesn't care about what the cage fighting... I mean, I don't know what the rules of cage fighting are.
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