Ad: More Or Less
Targeted: No
As lockdown has gone on, I've spent less time lying around listening to podcasts so my library has been building up as more episodes have downloaded themselves onto my phone. One that I do keep up with every weekend is BBC Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy podcast because it's topical, so if I fall behind the jokes are no longer up to date. It was the most recently downloaded podcast when I came to write my blog, and because it's the BBC and I live in the UK, there are no ads on their podcasts for anything aside from other BBC shows. This week's episode was preceded by a trailer for More Or Less, which is also a Radio 4 show, based around understanding numbers and statistics.
More Or Less isn't the kind of show I would usually download, or even listen to if it was on the radio. The ad is targeted in that if you're interested in one topical BBC Radio 4 show, you might like others, but it's definitely not aimed at me. Still, I downloaded the 3rd June episode, and will be judging it on whether it was able to make the subject interesting to me, as a person who doesn't care too much about numbers.
This is one of those Radio 4 shows that is split up into a number of shorter stories; a sort of 'Front Row' for stats nerds. The first story is about Coronavirus Track and Trace, a subject that's so unavoidable that I thought it would be impossible to say anything new or interesting about it. I'm sure I'm not the only one sick of hearing about COVID now and a lot of the time I avoid the news about it. This episode taught me something I didn't know - that the tests we're doing have a 30% chance of a false negative - and questioned the effectiveness of doing them at all if they're so inaccurate (apparently there's very little chance of a false positive, which is the upside). I was also surprised by how much they went after the Cabinet in dissecting the figures that are produced about our testing capacity and the number of tests that are actually being taken every day. And people say the BBC has a right-wing bias (or a left-wing bias, depending who you speak to)...
They followed this up with two shorter stories. The first was about a claim that our soil only has enough nutrients left for 60 more harvests. Turns out it's bullshit. Next up, back to Coronavirus to fact-check a Piers Morgan tweet about the government lying about the daily death toll. Again, turns out it was bullshit and Piers Morgan was wrong - who would have thought it?
The last story of the episode veered away from the news again, and was a response to a query about the mass of pheasants that exist in the UK at the start of the pheasant shooting season. This story made me kind of sad because even though we perceive them as stupid birds, I don't like the idea of them being raised to be killed for sport. I found out from this story that around 47 million pheasants get released into the wild every year and only a third of them get shot, so the rest end up out in the world with no survival instincts, which is why they don't get off the road when cars go past. I thought this was a bit of a down note to end on - the story about the soil would have made a much better ending.
More Or Less doesn't offer the escapism or humour I look for in a podcast but I would consider it to be a useful tool when it comes to understanding the truth about figures that are being publicised in the news. I won't be subscribing to the show but I might turn to it in the future if there's a hot topic that I need some help understanding.
