Bonus Q&A – Why do politicians use big numbers and why do we vote with pencils?
Radical with Amol Rajan
BBC
4.5 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why do politicians use big numbers in interviews? How will political reporting change in the future? And why do we vote using pencils?
Amol and Nick answer these questions and more in this bonus episode of The Today Podcast.
If you have a question you’d like to Amol, Nick and the Pod Squad to answer get in touch by sending us a message or voice note via WhatsApp to +44 330 123 4346 or email us Today@bbc.co.uk
Episodes of The Today Podcast during the election campaign will land on Mondays and Thursdays. Look out for bonus episodes like this one. Subscribe on BBC Sounds to get Amol and Nick's take on the biggest stories of the week, with insights from behind the scenes at the UK's most influential radio news programme.
The Today Podcast is hosted by Amol Rajan and Nick Robinson, both presenters of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the UK’s most influential radio news programme. Amol was the BBC’s media editor for six years and is the former editor of the Independent, he’s also the current presenter of University Challenge. Nick has presented the Today programme since 2015, he was the BBC’s political editor for ten years before that and also previously worked as ITV’s political editor.
You can listen to the latest episode of The Today Podcast anytime on your smart speaker by saying “Alexa, Ask BBC Sounds for The Today Podcast.”
The senior producer is Tom Smithard, the producer is Hatty Nash. The editor is Louisa Lewis. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths. Technical production from Hannah Montgomery and digital production from Joe Wilkinson.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Hello, it's Amol. |
| 0:06.1 | And it's Nick. |
| 0:06.9 | And our inbox is crammed full of your election-related questions. |
| 0:10.8 | Our WhatsApp is overflowing with your voice notes. |
| 0:13.4 | Thank you so much for all of them. |
| 0:14.7 | The Pod Squad are working themselves to the boat. |
| 0:16.9 | They do work, they work absolutely flat out, don't they? |
| 0:19.2 | Absolutely legends. |
| 0:20.1 | Anyway, they work themselves incredibly hard, processing, transcribing and cataloging them all. So thank you. |
| 0:25.7 | Which means we can now dive in, answer a few more of your questions. Yeah, it's time for another |
| 0:31.1 | Q&A bonus edition. We're going to be looking at candidate vetting, truth in politics, |
| 0:36.4 | there's a scary subject, and polling booth pencils. |
| 0:40.0 | But first, Nick, you do the honest? He's caught on this, hasn't it? Let's do it. |
| 0:57.9 | So let's get straight down to it. |
| 1:01.2 | Let's kick off with Liza from Whitley Bay in North Tyneside. |
| 1:02.6 | Hi Nick, hi, I'm old. |
| 1:04.3 | I want to start a campaign. |
| 1:08.8 | In this year when questions about policies are going to really matter, |
| 1:12.9 | I want interviewers to stop politicians from answering those questions with this amount of money that they've spent on it in the past |
| 1:18.6 | or that amount of money that they've set aside to spend. Those answers which give no |
| 1:24.6 | sense of the relative scale of the problem, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.