More Or Less A Wonderful Programme

* Britain has more surveillance cameras per head of population than anywhere else in the world.

* The death rate falls when doctors go on strike.

* Half a million chickens are thrown away each day in the UK.

* Over 400,000 ballot papers were spoilt in the recent London election.

You might well have seen any of the above headlines in newspapers recently. They all represent stories currently doing the rounds in the media based on statistics. But how accurate are the statistics and how robust is the analysis? That's an interesting question.

It is the nteresting question which is the subject of one of the best BBC Radio 4 programmes on air at the moment : More or Less. Like so many of the best BBC programmes, it is a co-production with the Open University. The idea of More or Less is delightfully simple : focus on some of the statistics which are endlessly used by the media and investigate the statistical significance of them. It sounds a bit dry and anorakki but it isn't, it's a wonderfully entertaining half hour. And the good news is that it is available as a podcast, and for that reason I am delighted to present the BBC More or Less Podcast with the News From Nowhere Podcast of the Month award for May 2008.

And because I know that I have whet your appetite, here are the programmes' take on the above statistical stories.

Surveillance Britain : I have often heard the claim that we have more surveillance cameras than anywhere else in the world repeated. On investigation, it turns out that this claim is based on one minute survey carried out a good few years ago. The survey was undertaken by counting the number of cameras on just two streets in Putney, counting the number of people living on the streets and multiplying the ratio up to represent the entire United Kingdom.

Deadly Doctors : The main statistical evidence for this oft-repeated story is a strike of doctors in one part of Israel a few years ago. During the three month strike the death rate did fall, but this can largely be explained by potentially dangerous medical procedures being postponed.

Chucking Chickens : Several leading newspapers recently reported the claim that we throw half a million chickens away each day in this country. Unfortunately, the first newspaper to read the research mis-read the numbers, by a factor of 100! All the other newspapers went on to copy the figures from the first inaccurate report.

Spoilt Ballot : It turns out that 400,000 ballot papers were listed as "spoilt" in the recent London Mayoral elections. But this did not represent large-scale electoral fraud - as at least one website claimed. In the ballot, electors had a second choice (the transferable vote systems being used). 400,000 voters chose not to make use of their second preference and their ballot papers were, quite rightly within the definitions, listed as being spoilt. This did not mean that their first choice was not counted, it was.

All My Yesterdays

One of my favourite television programmes of all time has got to be "All Our Yesterdays". If you weren't watching television between 1960 and 1973 (or during the programme's brief resurrection in the late 1980s), the format of the programme was simplicity itself. Each week it would present edited excerpts from the cinema newsreels of exactly 25 years previously, linked together by a simple commentary. What the programme managed to do for the first time was to introduce the idea of film as an historical document and in so doing to launch a new, innovative, accessible and exciting approach to the study of modern history. Why the series came to an end I do not know - it must have been relatively cheap to make. There have been some modest experiments with a similar format (BBC's Rock and Roll Years was one of the better examples) but they have not had either the depth or the breadth of the original series. It was the fact that All Our Yesterdays looked back on every week - whether anything momentous happened or not - which made it compulsive : true history can always be found in the cracks between the big events.

The BBC is currently trying out another interpretation of the format. As part of their "1968 - Myth or Reality" season, every day for six months Radio 4 is recreating 1968 in sound - drawing on the BBC and other news archive and the music of the time. The individual segments are broadcast each day and a weekly omnibus edition is broadcast each Sunday. The programmes can also be accessed via the BBC website. And the best news of all is that the weekly omnibus edition is available as a downloadable podcast (unfortunately it is only available to people in the UK, although quite how it knows where you are accessing from is beyond my limited technological understanding).

It is, of course, not film. Nor is it open ended - it only has a six month run. But in its sweep and in its choice of material it is close to the original "All Our Yesterdays" concept. Listening to the weekly compilations as I walk Amy through the woods, I am transported back to a year when everything seemed to happen. And for that reason "1968 - Day by Day Omnibus" is my Podcast of the Month for April 2008.

First Loves Never Die

I will never forget my first love : what man will? The excitement, the expectation, the thrill, the realisation that you have progressed through a new portal of existence. And mine was a BBC Micro.

It was twenty-five years ago. The Beeb was not the first computer I had come into intimate contact with - we had an early Apple at work which was bolted to an old canteen trolley and wheeled between lecture rooms - but it was the first computer I had owned. Thus it was the first computer I could explore with abandon, the first computer I could share the early hours of the morning with, the first computer I could play with. Like all first loves, it was beautiful with its red and black keys and its fawn plastic case. Later computers were more sophisticated, more ergonomic, more practical, but the Beeb had that flush of impetuous style that only the young are capable of.

The things it could do were almost beyond imagination. It could justify type (this may not sound much but for some of my publications I used to do this manually by typing a piece, counting how many extra spaces would need to be added to each line to make the right-hand edge straight, and then re-typing the piece with the spaces in). It could construct crude pictures by putting together a complex pattern of the letter "x". It could play music, and - with the addition of a little programme - it could talk. It could play wondrous games such as "Elite", "Space Invaders" and the glorious "Mr Ed" (which I still occasionally dream about). You could programme it (actually you had to programme it because it could do nothing by itself). Within a few hours of it coming into my life I had taught it to type "Good Morning Alan" when I switched it on. The book said that you could teach it to use "morning", "afternoon" or "evening" as appropriate, but I never progressed that far.

My Beeb and I lived together for two or three years until I fell for an Amstrad 1512. This was newer, more powerful, more serious ....... but it wasn't the same. If you asked me to was lyrical over an Amstrad I couldn't. These thoughts and memories were brought into focus this morning by a leader in the Guardian entitled "in praise of the BBC Micro". It came as a bit of a shock to discover that others had experienced love affairs with the same Beeb. But I am not jealous. I am reminded of those lines from Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy"

And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:

We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.

My Beeb is packed away in the loft space. I have not visited it for many years. But I will search it out and boot it up again. As they say, "first loves never die".

Catch The Egg

If you try to watch BBC television at the moment, you are beset by constant and annoying announcements which say something like "Missed this programme? Well never mind because you can watch it on your computer using the BBC iPlayer" (which, if you think about it, is a bit like saying "give me a call if you don't get this letter"). They are annoying for several reasons, the main one being that - try as I might - I cannot get the iPlayer to work on my computer. The help page suggests that the problem is a conflict with my Norton Ant-Virus, but I have followed all the instructions on how to overcome this, none of which have had the slightest effect. In so doing, I have scripted my Norton to allow cookies, pop-ups, and tins of sardines from bbc.co.uk. I have given free rein to everyone from the Director-General to the BBC lift operator to wander around the inner-sanctums of my hard drive. But still all I get is an annoying grey screen.

The maddening thing is that the BBC has been concentrating on the development of their blasted iPlayer at the expense of almost everything else. Their podcasts are still disappointingly few and far between - although now you can catch up with what is happening in Ambridge whilst you walk the concrete urban sidewalks. They also seem to have adopted a path-of-least resistance in relation to the copyright problems that surround the new media. Why, for example, can't you "listed again" to Desert Island Disks - "for rights reasons" - whilst you can "listen again" to any number of Radio 2 programmes? And what is the point in turning a programme like Jazz Library into a podcast when you limit yourself to playing a 30 second bite (more like a sound bit) from each of the records discussed? It's like the audio equivalent of a prick-teaser.

Most annoying of all, why does the BBC limit the availability of its back-catalogue of radio programmes to just 7 days? If I can turn on my Cable TV station and access "television on demand" why can't I access "radio on demand"? It can't be storage - you could store a weeks' radio broadcasts in the space it takes to store one Eastenders episode. I apologise for starting the week with a moan but there are good reasons. The current BBC "Book At Bedtime" is a ten-part serialisation of a book by Betty Macdonald called "The Egg and I". I was not familiar with the book and came across it by chance whilst paging through the BBC website. I will not waste time summarising the plot - suffice it to say it is very funny and extremely well written. Go to the BBC website straight away and catch-up with the episodes you might have missed. It started last Monday, so the daft BBC seven-day rule means that you have until this evening to listen to the first episode. Catch it quick - it's worth it.