Ö÷²¥´óÐã

We're nearly there - less than a week to go - but the More or Less election team still needs your help.

Our job is to explain the numbers being thrown around by all candidates during the campaign. Our presenter (and the FT's Undercover Economist) Tim Harford is broadcasting our analysis on PM and Today. You can find an archive of our work so far on the More or Less web site.

It's been fun. But after weeks of going line-by-line through speeches, combing data-sets and finding functions on our calculators we didn't know existed, we're getting tired.

So here's how you can help: if you spot what you suspect is a rogue statistic - or simply a confusing one - please contact us at moreorless@bbc.co.uk.

What sort of thing should you be looking for? Here's an example which caught our eye on Wednesday.

This is :

DM: The biggest complaint the IFS have is that we haven't had a spending review, a detailed spending review. And the second biggest complaint is that we haven't set out plans up to 2016 and 2017, i.e. into the Parliament after next. When it comes to the four years... br>SM: They say £44 billion of cuts remain undefined in Labour's plans... br>DM: For 2016, 2017.

We nearly choked on our morning croissants when we heard that one. You can see (PDF) that the well-respected think-tank the were perfectly clear: they say £44 billion of 'mystery' cuts - cuts Labour has so far failed to specify - will need to be made by 2014/15. (The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, incidentally, have similar black holes on their plans).

During the final PM's debate Nick Clegg said "80% of people who come into this country come from the European Union" - and therefore, in his view, it was dishonest of David Cameron to suggest there could be a meaningful cap on immigration.

But that 80% figure is wrong. Actually, it's about a third. On Friday morning Vince Cable, speaking on Today, said his leader was referring not to all immigrants, but to 'workers'. The Lib Dem press office pointed us to their source, an article in The Economist which included the following claim: "Workers from outside the EU make up just one-fifth of all immigrants when students (who pay valuable tuition fees) are excluded".

As my colleague Oliver Hawkins has discovered, however, the fact that one-fifth of all immigrants are workers from outside the EU does not prove that the remaining four fifths of all immigrants are workers from inside the EU.

What about other types of immigrants, like dependents?

In fact, ONS data show that of all the people who come to the UK to work - who aren't British citizens - 60% come from the EU.

In the same debate David Cameron claimed that Gordon Brown had got his facts wrong on the Conservative proposals to cut child-tax credits: he said they would only be taken away from families earning over £50,000.

As our colleague Stephanie Flanders has pointed out, however, the has called that description of the proposal "incomplete at best and misleading at worst".

All families with an income over £40,000 would lose some of their tax credits (and most families earning over £48,175, who get tax credits now, would lose all of them).

It seems, even at this late stage in the campaign, we need to keep our eyes open. If you can help, please do.

Richard Knight is series producer of More or Less

• More or Less is off-air at the moment but you can hear on Today and PM until the election.
• by . Used .

Editor's note: this post appeared on the About the Ö÷²¥´óÐã blog earlier today - SB

The advert for the job of Controller of Radio 4 is due to appear over the next few days. It's an important role - the network makes a significant contribution to the news agenda and cultural life of the nation. Like millions of listeners, Radio 4 has been part of my life for many years. When my family lived in the USA, one of my abiding memories is of evenings in deepest Connecticut listening via the internet to Today, the News Quiz or In Our Time. I realised that while I liked much of my US life, I would ultimately want to go home to the country where Radio 4 is a constant companion...

Read the rest of this post and leave a comment on the About the Ö÷²¥´óÐã blog.

Tim Davie is Director of Audio & Music at the Ö÷²¥´óÐã

• , showing Radio 4's home in the West End of London, is by . Used .

Editor's note: David Prest of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 independent supplier unearths a comedy gold-mine - SB.

There I was, parked on a double-yellow line in London's St John's Wood, trying to cram several box loads of old tapes and a suitcase of 78s into the back of my car, whilst keeping a beady eye out for traffic wardens.

An acquaintance who worked for Billy Marsh Associates, the legendary theatrical agents, had been storing "some stuff" for Doreen Wise, widow of one half of the best-loved comedy duo of all time: Morecambe and Wise. "After Ernie died, Doreen was moving house, and clearing out the garage," explained my friend, "she found these. Let me know if there's anything interesting."

For a few months, this precious archive sat in the corner of the office, giving off the sort of musty smell that only old tapes stored in a garage for 50 years can - a Macmillan-era nosegay of Bakelite, damp cardboard, Castrol GTX and old rags.

I eventually plucked up courage and gently wound the fragile tape round the playback head of our trusty old office Revox. The clarity was amazing. Here were near-studio quality recordings of classic Morecambe and Wise sketches. But this wasn't Eric and Ernie mucking about with Glenda Jackson or André Previn from my childhood. This was two decades earlier from their first ever radio series prophetically titled 'You're Only Young Once'.

I checked with the Ö÷²¥´óÐã archives who told me they had just a handful of episodes on the shelves, the rest presumably purged to save a bit of room for better long term bets like 'Round the Horne'.

Studio Manager Charlotte Austin and myself, began the 6-month restoration process, carefully prising tape off reluctant spools with padded tweezers, spraying the old acetate recordings with vivid blue chemicals specially imported from Denmark, digitising and cleaning up fifty years-worth of woops and crackles.

Before we knew it, we had a remarkable collection of recordings: near complete runs of 'You're Only Young Once' (1953-54), the boys' appearances on programmes like 'Variety Bandbox' and 'Variety Fanfare' going back to 1949, various audio doodlings from Ernie, sound copies of their stage-shows, song demos and even the speeches from a Variety Club lunch in their honour.

My good friend, and fellow fan of great Northern comics, Stewart Henderson was the first to come in and have a listen. "This is dynamite... comedy gold!" he said in his excitable Liverpudlian way.

We played extracts to Doreen Wise. "They sound very squeaky, but then we all did back then," she laughed. Joan Morecambe, Eric's widow was immediately taken back to those early touring days, reminiscing about the Sunday recordings (always in Manchester - the Hulme Hippodrome) and "going for a Chinese afterwards". Doreen remembered how Ernie used to give the studio engineer "a few shillings" to run off a copy of that night's show for him.

I'm not sure his Ö÷²¥´óÐã bosses knew much about it at the time, but through the back-hand dealings of an anonymous engineer, an important piece of comedy heritage has been saved!

David Prest is producer of Morecambe and Wise: the garage tapes

• The clip from Morecambe and Wise: the Garage Tapes is no longer available. Listen to the programme next Tuesday 4 May at 0900.
• The picture of Eric and Ernie is from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's picture library. The smaller picture going through the suitcase of tapes in the Whistledown offices. There are more pictures .
• that Victoria Wood will play Eric Morecambe's mother Sadie in a Ö÷²¥´óÐã 2 drama later this year (story .

I hope you are not disappointed by this week's blog!

I would have liked to avoid commenting on the election coverage since many Feedback correspondents are threatening to leave the country if Radio 4 keeps on clearing its schedules for the prime ministerial debates which are being transmitted at the same time on television. It is our correspondents who have a big say in the Feedback agenda, however, and that is what many have written to us about this week.

Several listeners to the first of the debates believe that the party leader who won the television debate was not the same person who won on radio. Like the Kennedy Nixon presidential debates 50 years ago they believe that radio enables you to concentrate on content, while television forces you to consider how well the candidates have shaved, how white and regular their teeth are and if there is any dandruff on their shoulders.

I am not going to be so foolish as to equate either Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg or David Cameron with Richard Nixon, but you get the point.

Other listeners thought that the gladiatorial contests should not be called debates since there was not much interaction going on, with each leader downloading soundbites rather actually debating. Others of a more nationalist disposition think that three leaders aren't sufficient. They want to know why their man wasn't up there on stage.

On the morning after the second debate I put some of those concerns to the deputy Head of Ö÷²¥´óÐã News Steve Mitchell:

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• If you have any questions for the outgoing Controller of Radio 4 or for the editor of the Archers please let us know. Both will be coming on Feedback in the next couple of weeks.
• Listen again, get in touch with the programme, find out how to join Feedback's listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• Listen again to the first and second leaders' debates (as part of The World Tonight's coverage) here. Watch the first debate and the second
• The picture shows the famous 1960 Nixon-Kennedy TV debate. It's from .

Could we do a horror on radio? Could we horrify people? Not an atmospheric, gothic spook with resonant chords and the whiff of damp tweed, but something actually scary. Something to make the audience squelch. That was the ambition.

There's a mantra in Hollywood that to be effective, a screenplay has to make your organs squelch three times while reading it. For organs read tear ducts, stomach, heart, bowels, the skin on the back of your neck, throat, toes... whatever. Are you literally physically moved by the writing? And if not, it's not ready.

Reading the final script of We Outnumber You (Friday Play, 2100 23 April) gave me a rare workout in squelching. It also reads like a list of fantastic challenges. Here are just a few, and how we achieved them.

A man, wearing a microphone, walks into a jackal enclosure at the zoo, and is attacked, killed and eaten by jackals, while an attendant crowd take pictures. Layer upon layer of sound went into this. The actor, Luke Treadaway, played it for real on his own in studio. The spot studio manager (who helps us record live effects), simultaneously chomped down on some melon very close to another mic. Separately we recorded the crowd, first screaming then stunned. We begged recordings of jackals off the Natural History Unit in Bristol, which we layered into the sound picture, together with some dog, and then degraded the whole edit to give the effect of a mashed up piece of equipment. All this work, and then the truly effective moment comes during the silence after the microphone goes dead.

A stampede of hippos that run down a crowd of visitors. Agitated hippos faithfully recorded sound remarkably - and disappointingly - like Denis Healey laughing, so that was out. However, we did find that hippos on tarmac sound very like horses on turf, slowed down, and pitch-changed, with added grunting from a mix of bear, pig and lion. And the actors did the rest, some of them running away, three of them staying and being crushed and one, the character whose foot is bitten off, holding the microphone.

A helicopter issuing a live news report crashes into an enormous bird sanctuary. Michael Shelford, the actor playing the reporter inside the helicopter, had to imagine the level of sound he was working against, and yelled his lines into the microphone. Behind him, we used the effect of a functioning light helicopter, which we then mixed with tearing metal, and a malfunctioning washing machine, and added an alarm clock (persistently and gratuitously warning the occupants something might have gone wrong). As the helicopter crashes through the enormous aviary cage, more metal tears, branches crack, wings flurry, and a cacophony of panicked bird cries add to the chaos, gradually trailing off as they all fly free, leaving only the burning of the wreckage.

A camera, set to record, is dropped fifty metres through foliage. The spot studio manager took a deep breath and blew steadily onto the mic, which after 'freefalling' for a second or two, was then hit from both sides by branches, before being dropped onto the ground, during which activity the actor - Ben Crowe - retreated silently to the other end of the studio sound trap so that his next line could sound fifty metres away.

And the hardest of all - a group of primary school children are crying. Weirdly the hardest sound to get right. It's easy to imagine children crying for attention, or crying with pain, but crying together from fear is so difficult to put your finger on. There are some stored recordings of children crying, little electronic pockets of misery on a hard drive, but they're the tears of children whose parents appear to be recording them when they should be comforting them, and not quite right. The Stalisfield Youth Theatre, in Kent, offered to cry for us. And scream. And stampede. And imitate monkeys. They were so great at screaming. Brilliant at stampeding past the microphone in mock panic. Hilarious monkey impersonators. But it took thirty attempts to get them crying right. Take after take foundered on 'boo-hoo'ing, on over-sniffing, on wailing, but mainly on giggling, and with each attempt the children became more and more miserable, understandably. And by the time they went home, they were utterly disconsolate.

So. We hope you squelch.

Jessica Dromgoole is Director of We Outnumber You

• We Outnumber You is on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 at 2100 tonight (23 April 2010).
• by . Used .

When I heard that the Vote Now Show team was writing and editing the programme three floors below me in Henry Wood House (opposite Broadcasting House in the West End of London) I had to nip down and get some photos. The scale of the task is daunting: twelve programmes over three weeks: each written, rehearsed, recorded (in front of an audience in the Radio Theatre) and edited for transmission during a single day.

And yet the team of writers, performers and producers in these photographs looks remarkably relaxed. I took these pictures at about 0930 yesterday morning, just after Steve Punt, series producer Victoria Lloyd and the writing team had gathered for the day's work - armed with newspapers and coffee. The fruit of their labour was transmitted at 2300 last night and, as I write, they're downstairs crafting tonight's episode. Relentless.

Steve Bowbrick, editor, Radio 4 blog

• If you subscribe to the Friday Night Comedy podcast (which also includes the News Quiz) you'll receive the Vote Now Show automatically. If you don't, sign up here.
• View on Flickr where you can read the captions and find out who's who.

Whenever the Ö÷²¥´óÐã surveys its audience to find out what it least likes - bad language is usually at, or near, the top of the list. Even those who enjoy using occasional expletives in company don't seem to want to hear them on the radio, and certainly not when children are around.

So why did the Radio 4 comedy series 'The Party,' written by Tom Basden, which has just finished a run at 1830, do just that and include some? The programme's use of the sexual swear word which rhymes with tanker, and is often accompanied by a gesture, shocked some listeners and baffled others.

New radio comedies often undergo baptisms of fire, but 'The Party' was widely applauded in our mailbag, and many listeners hope there will be a second series - but minus the bad language which they felt spoilt the comedy and their enjoyment of it.

In Feedback this week I put these concerns and criticisms to the Head of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio comedy Jane Berthoud, and this is what she had to say:

Please tell us at what you think of that interview and the use of explicit language on air by adding your comments here or by contacting Feedback via the web site.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• Listen again, find out how to join Feedback's listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• The picture shows the cast recording Party at The Pleasance, London. From left to right: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Jonny Sweet, Katy Wix, Nick Mohammed (sitting) and Anna Crilly. There are more pictures on the Radio 4 web site.

Here's something new. We want to know more about what our listeners and broadcasters like about Radio 4. So we're going to give a copy of the Radio Times to a different Radio 4 person once a week or so and ask them to mark the radio section of the magazine with their selections from the coming week - it's a kind of 'Pick of the Week' for radio that's not been transmitted yet.

We're starting with the Revd Richard Coles, a Radio 4 regular whose Archive on 4 about bands breaking up airs on 24 April.

You can see all of his selections as pictures and I'd like you to add your own choices from the coming week's listening by adding notes or comments to the pictures. And we're also using this as a trial for , which has so far attracted 7,000-odd fans. Click to visit the page, become a fan and leave a comment.

If you'd like to mark up your own copy of Radio Times, photograph or scan the pages and upload them to or to . Tag them 'MyRadio4' so we can find them.

And please let me know if there are Radio 4 people whose listening you'd like to know about. I'll pass them a copy of Radio Times and see if I can persuade them to get their felt pens out.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• There are always plenty of Radio 4 programmes to listen to amongst the .

"Do you have the S-factor?" That's what we asked in January on Material World. Science of course, not sex (this goes out at 1630 on Radio 4 after all) was what we were looking for when we launched So You Want to Be a Scientist? - our search for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Amateur Scientist of the Year. We asked people to write in with ideas, hunches and theories they wanted to put to the test themselves. The kind of brainwave you have sitting in traffic on the M6, or lying in the bath turning wrinkly. The kind of brainwave that we all have, even without being a scientist.

This brought up our first interesting editorial dilemma - what is a Scientist? Is a chemistry teacher a Scientist? Is a mechanical engineer? A hospital statistician? After many, many discussions with our Legal and Editorial Policy departments, we decided on the terms & conditions. Mainly - entrants couldn't have a postgraduate science qualification, or have published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Any other decisions about whether they were already a scientist were made on a case-by-case basis.

Like a naked molerat , the responses came rushing in. By the time entries closed at the end of February, we had over 1,300 applications. The mammoth task of sifting began. From whether bald people affect climate change to drilling a hole through the centre of the earth, you can read about a few of the more colourful ideas .

The overriding factor in our selection process was - can you really do this experiment yourself? A lot of people wanted to look at black holes. As an astronomy graduate, I'd love to look at them too. Unfortunately it normally requires long research trips to the Extremely Enormous Telescope based somewhere exotic like Hawaii. Nice work if you can get it, but not on our budget.

Then there were a few people who secretly turned out to be scientists. Not your Oxford heads of department, but they'd published papers in research journals many moons ago. Much as we loved their ideas, rules is rules and we had to discount them. Other entries were really good experiments. So good, in fact, that reams of papers had been published already, and there wasn't much left to do.

So we're now down to a shortlist of 10 great ideas, featuring everything from honeybees to mannequins. We'll be running clips from two candidates every day, starting tomorrow, and asking for your comments. The job of selecting four finalists falls to our esteemed panel of judges from across the world of science:

• , former Chief Science Adviser for UK Government.
• , Clinical Psychologist, author and broadcaster.
• , Science Editor of The Times.
• , Acoustic Engineer, EPSRC Media Fellow

The final four will be announced on Material World on Thursday 22 April at 1630. Over the next five months, they'll be working from their kitchen table or garden shed, turning their ideas into proper science experiments with help from the UK's leading researchers. By September the judges will pick a winner at the in Birmingham, when the finalists present their results.

Then we'll see who really has the S Factor.

Michelle Martin is producer of So You Want to be a Scientist?

• The So You Want to be a Scientist? home page and the shortlist.
• , which relates to one of the shortlisted ideas, is by . Used .

I will be leaving a job I have loved in October. I will miss almost all of it. But I always felt that I should not do much more than seven years as Controller of Radio 4 and by October I will have had the best job in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã for six of those years. I did not want to run the risk of my ideas drying up, being insensate to the best ideas of the many people who make Radio 4 what it is or have anyone muse over a date for my departure. The job of Controller gives one person a very large amount of power and that needs to be disbursed with care. So I knew that I would one day have to hand over the reins before anything about Radio 4 became routine - but I very much wanted to leave bursting with enthusiasm and love for Radio 4 - and I am.

There was no other big job in broadcasting that appealed to me - and anyway I should not presume that anyone would have offered. I wanted a complete change and I have always had a profound respect and interest in academic life and academics. (Radio 4 after all is a platform for many academics and it manifestly needs their knowledge and goodwill). So I will be swapping the particular rituals of Ö÷²¥´óÐã life for the rather different ones of Oxford. I am well aware that it will be different - and exciting. Scholarship and curiosity help define who we are - and Oxford and are places of fantastic intellectual achievement and learning.

I hope very much that I have left Radio 4 in good shape for whoever is lucky enough to be asked to run it, and what will become Radio 4 extra (now Radio 7) if the Trust approves our plans - though in the end that is a judgement for you - the audience. I am acutely aware that not all of you, by any stretch of the imagination, will approve of everything that I have done. And there will be some of you who think I have got it mostly wrong - but when I listen to the programmes I am very often moved, excited, amused or thrilled by what I hear.

The editors, programme makers, schedulers, announcers, financial wizards and others who work to produce the programmes are devoted to their work and to the audience. I do not know that this is a unique phenomenon but it is one that is palpable in Radio 4. So to have been the beneficiary of their work and commitment has been a great privilege - and I shall miss their creativity, energy and companionship. It's been wonderful. I am not going for a while and in the few months that remain there is much to be done - though I shall try not to bind my successor with ideas that he/she may not want.

Throughout my life I have been grateful that Radio 4 exists - but that applies to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã too. For all its failings and frustrations the Ö÷²¥´óÐã is a noble idea and much of what it does - though inevitably not all - lives up to its aspirations. So I wish not only for a strong Radio 4 - but a strong Ö÷²¥´óÐã too. And I shall be a devoted listener.

Mark Damazer is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• Mark Damazer spoke to John Humphrys about his decision .
• , and on Damazer's departure.
• Mark has been elected head of St Peter's College, Oxford and will take up his new role on 1 October. Here's .
• Some more photographs taken .

For a gentle, kindly, mild-mannered man, the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be often at the centre of a great deal of controversy. Part of the problem is of course that he is transparently honest and finds it very difficult not to give straight answers.

He is an academic rather than a diplomat, committed to the pursuit of truth rather than disguising it for political or institutional advantage. Above all he is serious, and so when Start the Week"s Andrew Marr asked him about the impact of clerical abuse on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland he gave a serious, thoughtful, answer.

The result was unwelcome news headlines, and offence taken by some of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, this before the programme itself was actually broadcast. The Archbishop apologised for any offence given but should it have been the Ö÷²¥´óÐã News department issuing the apology for misquoting Dr Williams and taking his remarks out of context?

That is the view of many Feedback listeners after they had heard the actual programme, which was broadcast two days after those news headlines. See what you think when I put those concerns to the Deputy Head of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Newsroom, Craig Oliver:

Tell us what you thought of the programme in a comment here on the blog.

By the way, you won"t be able to hear Feedback on fridays at 1330 during the election campaign, as The World at One is being extended by half an hour. However the programme will still be broadcast at 2000 on sunday evenings. Please join us then, or subscribe to the podcast or listen again on the Radio 4 web site.

Above all, please keep writing, phoning and emailing us, not least about the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's election coverage.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• Listen again, find out how to join Feedback's listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• Listen again to the special Easter Start the Week on the Radio 4 web site.
• If you listened to the 26 March edition of Feedback, in which Today editor Ceri Thomas answered questions from the Feedback listener panel, you might like to read his post on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Editors' blog from last week.

Imagine if you will a swan. Now think of the legs pumping away under the surface. Welcome back stage to Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio's Election Night Special.

We know the nation has never been less in love with those who represent us, so the looming General Election promises to be both brutal and dramatic.

And what you see here is the work that's already underway to make sure that drama is captured on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio in hours, possibly days, after the polls close.

It is the technical stage on which will play out a string of successes, failures, shocks and surprises. If you'll excuse the military metaphor, it is our bunker through which we hope to deliver the results from around one hundred outside broadcasts.

A challenge in itself, made even more challenging when at times the country's Returning Officers are making declarations at the rate of more than one hundred an hour. Nor is the operation confined just to London. We have similar projects underway in Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast to ensure that you, the listener, gets to hear from the most significant players and most telling results no matter where or when that might be.

It's like the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Our mission to boldly go to that key individual who stands up in front of a tired and sometimes emotional crowd and says "I being the returning officer for Trumpton South..."

Glamorous it is not. The showbusiness end is upstairs where, on the night, you'll find Jim Naughtie, Carolyn Quinn and our election number cruncher, Phil Cowley. Phil makes sense of of the numbers, Carolyn makes clear the state of the parties and Jim invariably makes a complete mess of whatever is left around him. They, like us, can't wait for it all to start.

The benches, we think, came from the second series of the Apprentice. The rug looks pure IKEA.

Welcome to what has been alternatively dubbed our 'second home' or 'Martha's Vineyard'. I'll explain. As part of the Election Bunker, we've an annex that'll swing into action once the General Election has been called. As you may have read elsewhere, part of the schedule will change to reflect all the news from the election campaign.

This includes the World At One which will last an hour during the official campaign. As part of these longer programmes, listeners will get the opportunity to question the party leaders. Martha Kearney is, of course, your lunchtime host. She will use part of the programme to host a broader political discussion on what TV-types call 'the soft sofa'. And with so many MP's standing down this year, we hope these red benches will provide a suitable perch for much lively debate.

They might also double as place for those, who in the long hours ahead, might need a lie down.

Rupert Allman is editor of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio's election coverage

I'm a bit fed up this week, well jealous actually.

Of all the dream assignments I can imagine, such as interviewing Hilary Mantel, playing guitar with Mark Knopfler, and being shown round Barry Island by Uncle Bryn or Nessa, going backstage to watch the writers of the Now Show working their alchemy on unlikely items of news is up there with the best of them.

I thought I'd cracked it this week when a listener took offence at one of their satirical takes on climate change.

I volunteered to go and report but they gave the gig to Louise Adamson instead and I got to sit in the Feedback studio with a cup of Ö÷²¥´óÐã coffee writing this script.

Louise, on the other hand, met up with the Now Show's main presenters - Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis - and even got to sit in on one of the writers' meetings at the beginning of the week. Steve and Hugh - together with Now Show producer, Ed Morrish and the rest of the team - were busy trying out ideas for the show. I do hope that the rabbit joke made it to the final cut.

I hope you enjoy this extract from this week's Feedback. Please feel free to comment here on the blog.

Now over to Louise:

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• Feedback is on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 on Friday at 1330 and repeated on Sunday at 2000. Listen to the whole of this programme on the Radio 4 web site.
• Find out how to join Feedback's listener panel on the Feedback web page.
• The Now Show is on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 on Friday at 1830 and repeated on Saturday at 1200.