New series

More or Less returns for a new series on 12 Novemver

More or Less is a magazine devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers.

The programme made its debut of six programmes on Radio 4 last year and is back for what may prove a permanent slot in the schedule with three series over the next nine months.

Radio 4 gives a good deal of air time to language, and rightly so: if you want to understand what is said it pays to think about how the language is used.

The same treatment has never been extended, until now, to the language of numbers.

More or Less fills the gap. For numbers rain down on us - in statistics, measurements, targets, budgets, risks, probabilities, indeed in quantification and calculation of every kind.

They are often the way we conduct our most vital arguments. We depend on them to describe and understand the world. Our private concerns no less than our political policies are often driven by them.

More or Less begins as it means to go on with an eclectic mixture.

In the first week, it will include some of our most politically sensitive numbers with revelations about the way we measure the performance of the health service, looking particularly at the crisis of nurse recruitment.

The series will include everything from investigations of government statistics to tales of the mathematical abilities of Brazilian street children, the avalanche researcher who once rolled 650,000 ping pong balls down a ski slope and the man who counted all the bits in the space shuttle (he had good reason, honest).

Accessibility is the programme's watchword and presenter Andrew Dilnot brings authority, insight but also a lightness of touch to a subject which can intimidate.

Formerly Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he is now Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford.

Producer: Michael Blastland
Editor: Nicola Meyrick