Weekend with Rod Liddle and Kate Silverton

Weekend is a new political and current affairs programme aimed at younger people. The producer, Ben Rich, explains what it's all about.

Happily, in the BBC these days, younger people means anyone under 45 years old, and we hope plenty of people older than that will watch too.

We want to cover politics and current affairs in the way we talk about it amongst ourselves (most of our team scrape in under 45 too), sometimes serious, sometimes passionate and sometimes mocking.

For whatever reason, people in our age group watch less television news and current affairs than older people, and we want to see if it is the style that is putting many of us off. Our presenters, former Today programme editor, Rod Liddle, and Kate Silverton, presenter of numerous BBC current affairs documentaries, and host of Sky News' 3D programme, will, we hope, offer a sharp and occasionally humorous take on the week's events.

It is quite hard to describe in abstract terms what the programme is like, so here is a flavour of what we did on the first show. The former Zimbabwean cricketer, Henry Olonga, talked to us about the ethics of Zimbabwe's cricket tour of England, and described how his defiance of Robert Mugabe during the cricket world cup cost him his international career, and his home.

In order to test whether the public is ready for genetically modified food, we set up a market stall and sold 'GM' loaves to an unsuspecting public (quite a few were willing to buy at our knock-down price).

Muslim radical Anjem Choudary, who supports suicide bombers, was quizzed about exactly how many virgins he thought you got granted in heaven for killing civilians.

Tory candidate for London Mayor, Steven Norris, discussed the state of his party, and suggested that his leader might improve his chances if he got himself a wig.

There is more in that vein available every Saturday for the next five weeks, on BBC TWO at 0900 BST. I hope you can join us then.