In a week of slim audio pickings, I spent time reacquainting myself with some of the BBC classics and can confirm that, yes, More or Less still warrants a place in that category. Like Thinking Allowed, which also drew me back, the programme works wonders with data and statistics, and benefits from having a calm and unobtrusive presenter.
While most of the questions put to the stoical Tim Harford are delightfully pedantic, some have that special quality of convincing you that, while you’ve never given the topic a second thought, you are in fact deeply invested in it, and absolutely must know whether or not the thing that’s been alleged is correct.
British waters cover an area 28 times the size of Britain itself
One such question recently came in from a chap called Ian who was surprised by a claim made on Springwatch on BBC2. Is it really true, he asked, that the area of private gardens in Newcastle combined is larger than the total acreage of the UK’s national parks? The team on More or Less threw the question straight back to the young TV presenter. She replied that it was a slip of the tongue and that what she’d really meant to say was that the area of private gardens in the UK is larger than that of the parks. This only made matters worse.
It turns out that you can calculate the total acreage of gardens. There’s a pretty doughty set of researchers in the More or Less phone book, and one had little trouble in pulling up data from the ONS, ordinance survey and latest census to perform a calculation. To the astonishment of this Londoner, at least, the proportion of households in the UK with a garden is roughly 85 per cent, and the average garden measures 185 square metres.
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