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Hello, here is our review of the week with Friends of Newscast, which we recorded on Thursday evening, which was broadcast on BBC One after question time, but is now here in your feeds to listen to.

And it includes an update on Chris Mason's Food Tour of China. Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Fat boy sliver me in the classroom doing our violin lessons. I was the tattle tail in the class. Can I have an apology, please? I trust almost nobody. That daddy has to sometimes do strong language. Next time in Moscow. I feel delulu with no salulu. Take me down to Downey Street. Let's go have a tour. Blimey. Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio. And it's Alex also in the studio. And Sarah Montague. And James Landel also here in the studio. Oh, so you went for surnames over this half of this studio. We weren't so presumptuous. I'm just... Okay, sure. Well, you're an old... I'm a bachelor in podcaster. I was very tickled to see that Kier Starrmer got exactly 18 minutes of coverage on the Chinese news last night. Laura Bicker was telling me from Beijing. So I'm thinking we could maybe give his trip to China about, maybe for 13 and a half. What is that some sort of proportional calculation? Well, no, just I think it's just a bit of a target to aim for, isn't it? Nice little challenge. There's a lot. I mean, you've been on a podcast before, James. No, I know. What do you mean in China? How long is China to get on? Yes. Is that how long is that half an hour program? He got 80 minutes. Yeah, it's half an hour and it's the main like state sponsored news. And it sounds like it was more than either Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron got when they went. That's interesting. Quite hard to obviously to be a judge on that. Intriguing. James, you must have been to China as a journalist a few times.

I have a few times, yes.

Any memorable tales?

Do you have a burner phone?

Yes, we all took the burner phones.

You know, there's nothing new about that.

And there are always problems with comms,

getting your VPN to work and things like that.

I mean, the first time I ever went to China was a very, very long time ago. And I can remember, you know, even then, you know, if you were thirsty, you would say to your friend in the hotel room, I'm really thirsty. Would you like Kuppety? Yes, I'd really love Kupti. You know, yes, Koppity right and everything, five minutes later, a nice person would turn up the door with a freshly boiled castle. Because they've been listening. And so you could always, and quite often you can go in and you'd, there would be some sort of air duct or something. And then literally there would be a, you know, sort of 1970s style microphone with a little tripod that sort of sticks with a very long, thick cable. That's exactly what it would be.

And, you know, so the surveillance, you know, is certainly not new.

Well, Chris Mason used his burner phone to send us this little message from Beijing.

Hello, newscasters, my rather parky at Beijing.

You know, when I'm doing the television news, they don't like things like hats, but flippin' out, I'm putting it back on because it is cold. I'd have the snood on as well if I could, but it would get in the way of the microphone. So day two of the Prime Minister's trip to China. This was the big day, really, meeting the President, meeting the premier, the second in charge politically.

All of the talk about warming up the relationship between the UK and China.

And a couple of case studies the government would point to in doing that.

So this idea of visa-free travel for trips of under 30 days.

Coming soon, we don't have a date yet, but the government hopes it'll

be signed off as soon as possible. And then halving the tariff, the import taxes on whiskey

that is sold from the UK into China from 10% to 5%. What else can I tell you? Newscasters,

what would you like to hear about a trip that goes a little beyond what you might hear on the main television news or radio news or whatever? Ah yes, food. So we've had some fantastic food here. It's a wonderful kind of privilege, really lucky to get to go on trips like this. We've just been in a great restaurant down the road. However, one of the things on the spinning Susan thing

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