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The changes to the Radio 4 schedule have been in operation for a couple of weeks. Have they made any difference? The extra 15 minutes added to the lunchtime news programme, The World At One, has had the knock-on effect of squeezing the afternoon. Do we need another 15 minutes of current affairs analysis? After all, we already have three hours first thing in the morning, 45 minutes last thing at night after the ten o’clock news, with another hour in the middle at five.

The problem with extending news programmes at a time of budget cuts is that the only way you can fill the extra minutes is to add extra interviews. Anything else would cost too much money. There are just too few resources for in-depth coverage of world events. Where now are the foreign ‘stringers’, who once were paid a small retainer to provide the news network with stories from the inside?

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On Monday the only difference to the one o’clock slot was that there were more interviews, mostly by phone. Martha Kearney, the main presenter, did a valiant job of conducting three interviews about the government’s plans to improve the conditions of the housing market for first-time buyers. An appropriate range of opinions was sought from a property developer with a conscience, a spokesperson from Shelter, and the Communities Minister Eric Pickles. But Kearney had to talk to them separately, person-by-person. No real discussion or teasing out of the issues was possible. This does not make for very interesting radio, no matter how highly tuned and perspicacious the interviewer.

There were only two opportunities to look beyond the UK’s problems as Hugh Sykes reported from Tahrir Square on the protests against the unelected military regime in Egypt and Fergal Keane spoke from Cambodia, where three former members of the Pol Pot regime are on trial, defending their actions in those terrible years of the Khmer Rouge.