Hello and welcome to a bonus podcast of more or less. I'm Tim Halford.

And I'm Charlotte McDonald. Now, Charlotte's too young to remember

Trompton, but I'm not. Along with Chigley and Campbellic Green, Trompton was the setting

for a series of British children's TV shows made in the late 1960s and broadcast to my

joy as a little boy throughout the 1970s. Sadly, the voice of Trompton, Brian Cant,

died this week. Royal listeners to the podcast will know that we've often visited the fictional

town of Trompton to help illustrate various stories that we've covered over the years.

In particular, those naughty issues of the deficit and fiscal stimulus.

We returned to Trompton to pay tribute to Gordon Murray, the creator of the show

when he died last year. And in memory of Brian Cant, we've brought together a selection of

those items for you here. The story of Trompton is the story of austerity and the British economy.

And listening back to the items we did over a period of five years, it tells you a lot about

the times we lived through. Back in 2011, the debate was raging over whether the UK should be

trying to cut the government deficit or whether we should concentrate more on stimulating growth

in the economy, but the Conservatives with George Osborne as Chancellor,

David austerity, while in contrast, Labour's Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls,

favoured spending more to encourage growth.

Now you may have heard Evan Davis clashing with Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor,

on the today programme on Wednesday. What is your line? If we increase the deficit by a pound,

how much extra growth do you think we get? Do we get a pound 50 of a bigger economy?

Or do we get 20 p bigger economy? What is the relationship between

letting the deficit rise and the growth?

...