It was at the end of a two day trip to Nigeria which had proceeded smoothly; we were there at the invitation of the Gates team, the only press to be attached to the entourage, and we had been given generous access to Mr Gates himself and entry to many of his engagements. It was a trip entirely devoted to his efforts to help eradicate polio from the country.

The interview went to plan until the end, when time was running short and I asked Mr Gates a couple of questions about his view of China and its censorship of the internet. He was clearly annoyed by the questions. They were asked in a cheeky and challenging tone, and they were right off the subject of the day.

His aide intervened (you could just hear that) and although the interview did carry on, the mood in the room was far less congenial than it had been.

It's worth asking what happened, both to help understand this particular case and how these kinds of things work in general.

This is one of those cases where there had been some advance discussion about the interview and its scope. That is often the case, but by no means always.

In this case, I think both sides would acknowledge that it had been agreed there would be a substantial interview with Mr Gates, and that it would include questions -but not a majority of questions - that went well beyond polio or philanthropy.

I think both sides would also agree that we had suggested various subjects that might come up (such as Microsoft and its relationship to Apple) but at no point had any warning been given about questions on China.

There is then room for a disagreement about whether it was reasonable to ask impertinent questions on that unannounced topic.

I think I can summarise the view of the Gates team fairly: they saw the questions as at best discourteous and at worst as a trap, an attempt to spring a surprise on someone who was unprepared. Either way, it is not right for broadcasters to behave that way.

To us, the China issue seemed like an interesting and reasonable one to raise, and within the agreed rules that the interview would range beyond Gates Foundation concerns. At no point had we said we would not ask about China.

Now, it is not normal for us to spell out in advance specific difficult questions that we wish to ask. For me, the main principle for broadcasters has to be that if people stand to benefit from an interview, they should be prepared to face some downside as well. That's why it would be wrong for interviewees to choose their questions and why it would be wrong for interviewees to choose what is broadcast (or to veto broadcast by allowing staff to break an uncomfortable interview up.)

If we agree not to surprise people with occasional difficult questions, the public will get an entirely skewed view of things, with a self-selecting sample of easy interviews.

Some would say we should never agree to terms and conditions: that we should not even have conceded that most of the interview would focus on Gates Foundation and related development issues.

I disagree. I think that condition was not one that would have constrained us much on a trip to Nigeria. What we should never concede are unreasonable terms. And I think we should do our best to be transparent about conditions that have been imposed where they do constrain us.

Indeed, in my view, it would have been quite reasonable for the Gates team to specify "no questions other than those relevant to Nigeria". But if they had done so it is highly unlikely that we would have taken up the invitation to go. One of our motives in going was to get up-close and personal with one of the richest men in the world.

The issue in this case is really whether the interview was within the agreed rules or norms. I think it was. Others can take a different view.

It might in fact be a simple matter of culture clash. For Gates, it seemed beyond the pale. For UK broadcasters (who are perhaps more feisty than their US counterparts), it just seemed like an ordinary day's work.

We listened to the Conservative and Labour parties as they sprinted through the starting line of the election race on Monday, romping through about four issues before tea time.

If this campaign is to be a marathon, one can only observe that they're burning through their glycogen at an alarming rate. If they don't pace themselves, they could end up hitting the wall three months in and limping towards the election itself at a slow walking pace.

But more importantly, by yesterday morning a lot of us were wondering how the rest of us would remain engaged with such a long campaign. Richard Littlejohn is surely not alone in the sentiments he expresses in the Daily Mail: "Five more months of this nonsense! Wake me up when it's over".

Well it's easy to be jaded, particularly for those of us in the media who watch unhealthy amounts of rolling news. But believe me, expressions of election boredom are themselves going to be very tedious in a day or two. We should stop them now.

Instead of articulating our fatigue with it all, it's our job to make the election interesting. A failure to do so is our failure more than that of the politicians.

The truth is that this election is surely the most interesting since at least 1992, mostly because we don't know what the result will be. As my colleague Jim Naughtie has pointed out, every outcome one can imagine is fascinating, whether it be a surprise Labour victory, a hung parliament which might bring the Lib Dems into government, or a new Conservative administration.

Of course, if the main parties do now spend several months bickering over tiny policy details and disguising significant ideological differences, the election campaign will feel dull.

But here's the thing: an election is not just a chance for the parties to have their say. It is best viewed as a national experience. A time for us all to take stock of the issues and to argue about how to deal with them. As we have the mother of all fiscal deficits at the moment, we have at least 178 billion things to argue about.

Now I'm not suggesting that 46 million UK voters will think it's fun to talk about the fiscal maths for several months. We'll have to do better than that. But it's hardly arcane. It's not detached from the daily lives of real people. It's not just the talk of the Westminster village.

Professionally run political parties in an election campaign may want to avoid saying too much about the issue. After all, telling people the nasty things you will do is often a way to lose friends. But just because it isn't easy for them to say much, doesn't mean there isn't much to say.

In particular, there is nothing to stop us bringing in voices who are not professional politicians to comment on the issues, raise questions, and deconstruct events. Anyone who listened to the Today programmes last week, guest edited by luminaries such as David Hockney, PD James and Tony Adams, will know that on public policy issues, having a broad cast of speakers makes for a good broadcast.

Psychologists, philosophers, comedians... I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had a perspective worth listening to. Personally, I hope they'll play a part in our coverage of Election 2010.

I certainly don't want to argue that covering the campaign is not a challenge. If the parties duck the questions, lock away their mavericks and regurgitate clichés, it will be difficult to cover in an engaging way. But we should not forget that it's there to be made interesting. It's not their election - it's everybody's.

I was there to meet the chairman, Stephen Green. and was whisked to the 40th floor, which turned out to be surprisingly funky. A bustling coffee bar, a lounge area, thinking pods and meeting rooms, and shared book cases with volumes on everything from golf to the Aids pandemic.

The one book I couldn't see was the latest work of Mr Green himself, Good Value: reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world.

I'm not surprised it wasn't there. I don't get the impression that Mr Green is the kind of chairman to thrust his book down the throats of his staff. In fact, he comes across as surprisingly gentle and unassuming.

His book reads as a fairly earnest manifesto for the capitalist globalisation that has been an unstoppable force in the world, to be tempered by a certain degree of self-restraint and driven by moral as well as purely financial values.

He makes a useful point in the week our government publishes its banking regulation white paper. Mr Green thinks regulation is necessary, but not sufficient to ensuring banks work in the public interest.

I met Mr Green and chatted to him, and you can hear my interview with him below.

The conversation we had inevitably strayed into the practicalities of regulation and it is perhaps therefore my failure that what is probably Mr Green's greatest insight rather got lost in it.

This is important, so let me spell it out here.

His point - as I understand it - is not so much that we should exhort bankers and others to somehow be moral against their own self interest when they are making money for themselves. No. His point is that bankers and others should be moral in their own self interest; that they will actually find life more satisfying if they are not narrowly selfish in their behaviour.

In other words, to be happy, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and think - I have done something worthwhile for others as well as myself.

It turns out that there is a substantial amount of empirical economic evidence for this view. And it is perhaps a finding that should generate headlines more often than other economic news which fills the airwaves: the truly interesting economic revelation is that giving is more pleasurable than taking.

A study by Elizabeth Dunn literally handed money to people either to spend on themselves or on others, and it showed that the givers were happier afterwards than the ones who spent on themselves.

There is also evidence that volunteering is a route to happiness as well. Mr Green is surely right to remind them that there is more to life than making money.

Perhaps they should teach this in school. People do not always seem very able to judge these things for themselves.

But of course, what do you do in a world where many people act according to a different set of principles? Maybe they are not programmed like the rest of us. Maybe they get their satisfaction from being selfish!

I asked Mr Green how many people in banking might fit that bill, but he couldn't give me a clear answer.

Which I guess is why we need to regulate banks.

With people like Stephen Green in charge, one wonders how banks could have allowed themselves to become to so voracious and reckless. The answer is probably that people like him were not always in charge. HSBC, of course, has not gone bust and has not received state aid.

But from the beginning of it, I have had a guilty voice in my head asking me how I would myself behave if I was offered a temptation similar to that of our parliamentarians? A system that apparently encouraged large claims, validated the general sense that the money was there to be taken and which was hidden from public view.

It's hard for each of us to know how we would behave given the chance because we are not offered such opportunities very often. We might tell ourselves we would be very different to those scoundrel MPs - especially now we have seen the MPs being held to account.

Well it was this week that I remembered there was a lot of evidence on this subject. Behavioural economist Dan Ariely has performed a number of tests on groups of people, offering them chances to benefit from cheating.

The evidence suggests that our MPs are not abnormally mischievous.

The message is that most ordinarily moral people will give themselves the benefit of the doubt on moral questions. They wouldn't dream of stealing even 10p, because they know stealing is wrong, but they would happily bend some rules to give themselves $100, if they could justify it to themselves.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules. You probably won't have to think hard to find examples in your own life (from claiming on insurance, to paying in cash for a small building job).

The evidence is not that a few bad apples cheat a lot, it's that the vast bulk of us cheat a little.

And we have an amazing capacity to tell ourselves it is all right.

Professor Ariely - whose book, Predictably Irrational is an amusing and informative read on this and other human traits - makes the point that we should be tolerant of individual weakness in this situation, but harsh on the system that encouraged that weakness.

Unfortunately for the MPs, it was the MPs who made the system.

But the implication of Professor Ariely's work is that it is collective failure which is more significant than the personal failings of individual members.

The Today planning team evidently share my view on that and to that end have set up some interviews on bizarrely prosaic subjects of late.

We recently ran one on road signs, for example.

This morning it was the turn of chairs to take the spotlight. You can hear the interview with furniture designer Tom Dixon below. (Thinking about it, chairs are very relevant to this year's budget, in that when you listened to it you rather felt you needed to sit down).

So, what did I learn about chairs from meeting Tom Dixon?

At one level nothing at all.

You see, I had thought Mr Dixon would tell me about how a good chair works; what the optimal ergonomic design consists of; what the relative dimensions are that spread the weight of the body over the widest possible area. That sort of thing.

Not a bit of it.

He appeared remarkably uninterested in the functional aspects of the design and almost exclusively preoccupied with the aesthetics.

That was initially disappointing.

I thought I was somehow missing out on securing any crucial new insights into the pure ideal of a chair. Until Tom explained that good chairs are not about function at all.

And now I understand...chairs are really about meaning.

A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself.

That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions from academia to Parliament to the law.

And the implication is that the statement a chair makes through its design is as important as any ergonomic performance. Or to put it another way, most of us would put up with some discomfort to have the smartest looking chair on the block.

Obviously one can't push the argument too far...the comfort of a chair does matter of course. And some chairs - like the plastic one I'm sitting on, in fact - are designed to be little other than cheap, stackable and sturdy.

But the general message that there's more to a chair than its contact with our backside applies to most of what we consume. Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it.

And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.

It used to be the case that £10bn sounded like a lot of money. But after 18 months of banking crisis, we've all become confused.

Government borrowing was meant to be about £30bn, but will turn out closer to £150bn. The bank assets being underwritten by the taxpayer are £650bn. With numbers like these, (not to mention taxpayer exposure to bank liabilities running to trillions) why argue over the odd three or four billion? It seems to be worrying about the pennies when the pounds are evaporating.

Well, we at the Today programme thought it was a good idea to cut through the disorientation and ask what the long term effect of banking crisis plus recession has on the typical taxpayer. The answer is... £3.50 a day.

That number comes from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We asked them for a "best guess" as to what the next parliament would have to do to reduce government borrowing under various reasonable assumptions about the economy, the recession and losses from banks.

There's no-one better to go to on this kind of issue than the IFS. Their independence is beyond doubt as all the main political parties recognise their expertise.

In essence, they think that 2.7% of national income has to be devoted to reducing government borrowing by 2016. That's in addition to the measures amounting to 2.6 % or so that Alistair Darling announced in the pre-budget report.

An overall fiscal tightening of about 5% of national income.

If you want to know what just the 2.7% of extra measures means - it is £1,250 per family per year in today's money, which you can divide by 365 to get £3.42 a day (which we round up to 3.50 to avoid spurious precision).

Now nobody really knows how bad things will be, so the results do depend on the assumptions you make. The full IFS thinking has been published, and you can find it here.

What is striking about the figures though, is that the assumptions the IFS makes about the cost of bank rescues and the hundreds of billions of pounds of recession-related government borrowing are less important in driving the results than one would think.

Those big incomprehensible numbers we have been hearing about are usually one-off numbers, and reduce to much smaller, comprehensible figures when translated into our annual tax payments.

Take an example for sake of simplicity. Assume we lose a plausible £100bn in our "investments" in Royal Bank of Scotland. What does that boil down to?

Well, fortunately we don't have to find that £100bn every day or even in one go; its effect is to push up the national debt. At five per cent interest rates, an extra £100bn of borrowing costs the state about £5bn a year to service or about £3 a week for the average family.

That is not to be sneezed at, as it is incurred year after year after year... but it is not life-changing, certainly not compared to a fiscal tightening in the next parliament of five per cent of national income.

The same argument applies to the costs of fiscal stimulus packages.

Suppose we spend another £20bn on a new package. Like a bank rescue, that is again a one-off cost. Again, it is modest in the context of the overall fiscal tightening needed in the next parliament, adding "only" £1bn to the total of about £40bn.

It turns out that two unpredictable factors are more important than bank losses and one-off borrowing in driving the IFS view of how much pain taxpayers will suffer.

One is the rate of interest on government debt. With a trillion pounds of debt, a one per cent difference is £10bn a year.

The other is how well the economy recovers in the long term.

If the economy bounces back to its old trajectory of income and growth, the long term effect of the recession is small. On the other hand, if the economy bounces back to a new trajectory where, say, we are all permanently six per cent poorer than we had thought we'd be before the crisis, the finances look terrible.

Alas, none of us know what the interest rate will be on government debt, or how much of the current economic decline will be reversed when recovery comes. The IFS projections are only as good as their assumptions. Things could be a lot worse or a lot better.

But the message is that when it comes to taxing and spending, it is the on-going performance of the economy in the long term that matters most.

I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited, they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place, a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

Anyway, that was a group of old-school advertisers, set in the relatively stuffy ways of traditional media. If they were scary, how daunting was it to meet the guys from Rubber Republic, specialists in viral campaigns, which are surely the coolest ads of the lot. (They even have an attention-grabbing vocabulary, describing themselves as a "viral seeding shop" rather than as an advertising agency.)

Matt from Rubber Republic had entered the life of Today as a guest on the programme, who offered to make a video for Today.

Now viral campaigns are special. They are usually funny. But most importantly, in pursuit of their art they are uniquely uncompromising.

You see for most of us sad folk who work in semi-creative jobs, there is a tension between artistic purity and commercial good sense. Every architect for example (except perhaps for Norman Foster) has to concede a little in aesthetics to improve the functionality of their design. The same applies to landscape architects (I know because I live with one) where there's a permanent tension between the number of trees a typical scheme can accommodate and the number of car-parking spaces.

Even the Today programme involves a balance between the worthy-but-heavy items with the worthless-but-entertainingly-light ones.

Such compromise is important in the ordinary profession of advertising. Even though they may occasionally overlook it, most advertisers are really employed to sell things. Which often means, for example, cluttering their magnificent artistry with a prominently
displayed name or message.

But the viral advertisers are different.

They have to make their ads so appealing - so devoid of the hard-sell - that the users seek them out, and so they spread themselves. The wit involved in a video (which often involves a good deal of self-deprecation) has to be elevated above all else. Companies will evidently pay for these campaigns simply hoping for a small piece of their innate coolness to rub off on their brands.

Well, so it is with the Today programme video. Except, we didn't have to pay.

I won't tell you much about the ad (part of our seeding strategy is to build anticipation). But I will say three things about it.

Firstly, we were all amused at the office when we read the script. But then we are us, we are not the intended audience. So that is no guide at all. I'll be interested to read the reviews on YouTube.

Secondly, the video was produced remarkably quickly. I had thought it would take several weeks to conjure something up, but Rubber Republic were in the office with a film crew in tow, within days of any mention of a video being uttered.

Finally, I think a lot of us were mildly surprised at how high the production values were. I thought viral ads were innately amateur. But no, the kind of rough look you see in the video is painstakingly constructed by top industry professionals.

Which of course befits the Today programme itself. We would hardly have wanted our video to be filmed on a mobile phone.

For me, the idea of standing in front of an audience of several hundred people, each of whom keenly expects you to make them laugh out loud, was pretty close to a nightmare. Not very different in fact, to standing in front of an audience only to remember that you haven't got any clothes on.

But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable.

And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy. It was Comic Relief that offered me the chance.

I've previously told friends that if I ever volunteer for any telethon duties alongside news presenters (dressing up in tights on Children in Need or whatever) they should shoot me.

But on this occasion, I was being offered the chance to collaborate with the properly funny Paul Merton. He was to be my coach. And I would be doing it alongside fellow Radio 4 presenters, Libby Purves, Peter White and Laurie Taylor.

With or without comic geniuses at our side, for the four of us amateurs engaging in this charity-supporting exercise, it seemed like a highly risky venture.

We would each have to write our own material (and what hard work that is). And at the end of it all, we'd perform at a comedy club in trendy Shoreditch.

Comic Relief of course couldn't lose. If we were funny, that would make people laugh. If we weren't funny? Well, that would probably make people laugh as well.

Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the Today programme. I can talk about the day's news.

But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.

It's a big jump to get from there to a comedy club.

Paul Merton quickly broke some bad news to me: I needed to have jokes... not the occasional quip. I needed proper punchlines.

And I couldn't have notes.

Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.

But as soon as you look like you're in trouble, you're really in trouble. The laughter will disappear as fast as money out the door of Northern Rock.

So Paul gave me the key tip. Get an early laugh to loosen everyone up.

The hardest part is thinking of the funny lines. It's much harder work than you'd imagine. You inevitably end up being a bit egotistical and talking about yourself rather a lot.

As a (former) economics journalist, I could do a little bit on economics. But my efforts were a bit feeble. (What's Alistair Darling's biggest problem? Unlike other chancellors, he can't blame his predecessor for everything.)

Unfortunately, in economics there is more to cry about than laugh about at the moment.

But as the presenter of the programme Dragons' Den, I thought I must be able to get a joke or two out of that. After all, this is the country that invented the hovercraft, the jet engine and the antibiotic.

On Dragons Den we've continued the tradition with the one handed glove (beaten to a patent by a one-handed mitten); and the fruit blender with broadband connection.

OK, I had to employ some comic timing and extreme exaggeration... but I knew I could make these ideas sound funny.

Well, the big night where all our work was to be tested came along this week.

The closer it got, the more nervous I became. You see, when comedy goes wrong, it goes far more wrong than the other arts. If we just had to sing or dance, the worst that could happen is that we do it badly for five minutes and then walk off to polite applause.

Comedy is a participation sport though... you need the audience to react continually. You don't wait until you've finished to see whether they liked you or not.

And in the run up to the event, it's amazing how unfunny I felt. People would talk to me encouragingly, undoubtedly expecting a quick and witty response. All they got was a glum looking wreck.

In the event though, it went well.

The crowd laughed in all the right places... and even in some of the wrong ones. They even giggled a bit at the comment about Alistair Darling.

I left the stage feeling elated, and listened to my three colleagues who were all more ambitious and funny than me (a bit annoying that, as we have to raise money for charity somehow and we now face a vote by Radio 4 listeners to choose the best of us).

But none of that matters.

Comic Relief has got some free comedy, and for those of us performing it went ok. What a relief.

Performing their first ever stand up gig alongside Evan will be Libby Purves, Laurie Taylor and Peter White, with their mentors, Milton Jones, Shappi Khorsandi and Josie Long.

Comic Relief - Stand up With The Stars can be heard on Sunday 1st and Sunday 8th March at 1.30pm on BBC Radio 4. Listeners can vote for their favourite performance after the first show and proceeds will go to Comic Relief. The winner will be announced on The Now Show on Red Nose Day (Friday 13th March) at 6.30pm on BBC Radio 4.

(Evan's one-liner on the Today programme:

How do you tell when a politician is telling the truth on the Today programme? Nobody knows - it's never been tried.)

You might have heard Stephen Green on the Today programme this morning, the chairman of the HSBC banking group.

Tomorrow you can hear Peter Sands on the programme, the group chief executive of Standard Chartered.

Now Peter is rather interesting. He has a special status here as chairman of the Financial Services Governors, which is a collection of the senior bankers around Davos. It has been meeting to sort what exactly the banks want from the authorities.

That group will report to a collection of Treasury ministers and central bankers tomorrow (Saturday), a group known as IGWEL (Informal Gathering of World Economic Leaders).

And that group will help shape the G20 when it meets in April.

So through the different committees and groups, Peter represents the banking link in a chain that connects to global policy-makers.

Which raises a question: does anyone listen to bankers any more, given their fall from grace?

When I spoke to Peter Sands this morning, I asked him if banks had any sway over governments.

His answer got at the dilemma faced by us all: on the one hand, we want to kick the bankers into the ground for the mistakes they have made and the amounts they have paid themselves.

On the other hand we also want to stand them up, dust them off, smarten them up and get them running properly again.

The dilemma of whether to be recriminating or respectful of banks is one that even applies to interviews on the Today programme.

I have tended to be more respectful than recriminating, if only because the bankers we are speaking to are the ones who have not come looking for state support and thus have the least to be ashamed of.

But at some point, even those who hate the banks most will have to work out a policy for re-building them.

It might be to nationalise them, close them down and build new ones, change the guard at the top of them all, or to carry on as we are.

No-one should be under any illusion: when it comes to banks, you may not be able to live with them but you can't live without them.

But one proposition keeps coming up time and time again without a dissenting murmur. It's that this is no time for nations to retreat into their shells.

In fact, as the participants flounder around for clarity in confusing times, that message is reassuringly appealing.

We've heard appeals against protectionism from Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organisation (it's his professional duty to warn against it), from Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia and from the secretary general of the OECD.

In fact, so many people agree with the idea, it's enough to make you worry that there must be something wrong with it.

As it happens, economic history supports the idea that protectionism is bad at times of global recession.

In the depression of the 1930s, nations did put up trade barriers. That policy might have selfishly benefited one country if they'd got away with doing it on their own. But when everybody does it, the lack of trade needlessly exacerbates the global problem.

Of course, even without trade barriers, a process of de-globalisation is already underway. American consumers are retreating from the shops for good economic reasons, and they are the ones who have underpinned the global trade boom for the last few years.

What's interesting here though, is the worry about another form of de-globalisation. It's not just the retreat from free trade that has concerned people. It's the retreat from global banking.

With banks being under political pressure to lend more and under simultaneous commercial pressure to lend less, there is one natural and worrying outcome: for them to lend, but only to lend at home.

In Davos this is being posited as a potential 2000's version of the mistakes made in the 30s.

You can hear Stephen Green, the group chairman of HSBC talk about this on the Today programme tomorrow morning (yes, an interview with a banker. Contrary to what we have told you, there are some here, particularly the ones from banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered, which have not been quite so badly affected by the downturn in the west).

It was Mr Green who raised the issue of de-globalisation in the interview, and he stressed it would not be to the advantage of the US and UK.

One obvious reason the US and UK would be particularly affected is that our banks have become quite dependent on foreign financing in recent years. (after all, we have not been saving much ourselves, so we've needed to borrow savings from elsewhere).

Over the next few years, we will of course have to save more domestically, but we can't allow ourselves to do that too quickly without worsening the recession. In the meantime, therefore, we need that globally-integrated banking system to keep money flowing around the world.

It'll be an interesting challenge to share round the lending in times when it is scarce.

And a quick thought for the word de-globalisation? Maybe it will soon hit the vernacular as the word globalisation did some years ago.

Maybe we'll even have anti-de-globalisation protestors at international summits in future, railing against the de-globalising tendencies of the modern banking system.

Stranger things have happened in the last year.

In his programme, The Class System and Me, we see Mr and Mrs Prescott encounter toffs and toughs across the UK, exploring what the former deputy PM describes as our "pyramid society". He clearly thinks he is an "outsider" to a system that is more comfortable with middle or upper class values and manners.

He clearly even felt an outsider in the cabinet, where he served as deputy prime minister for a decade.

It is a very entertaining programme and I recommend it. If I may express a view, it probably fails to prove the pyramid in our society is quite the one Mr Prescott thinks. Yes, people are outsiders. Yes, maybe even he was an outsider. But it's far harder to establish that outsiders are shut out on account of their class.

Indeed, watching him, one could almost believe he shut himself out by insisting on playing the class card all the time.

It was interesting to talk to him about his programme this morning. But most striking is that he chose to play the class card with us -- talking about Ed Stourton's and my education, our ways of speaking and background.

Was that fair? Or was that simply a way for someone to cope with a difficult question? More generally, does Mr Prescott have a point about class -- or simply use it as an excuse for not getting more substantive policy roles in government?

I'm not sure.

We didn't get away with just talking to Mr Prescott about his programme though. We also got his views on our programme -- he berated the us for asking about Russian oligarchs, yachts and Lord Mandelson. And said we were too depressing.

Again - a technique for deflecting attention for a difficult issue or a sound criticism of our news agenda? Again, I'm not sure.

As it happens, the star of tonight's TV programme for me is Pauline Prescott - she takes a more aspirational view of the class system. She also has some funny lines and oodles of character to boot.

Maybe it would be easier to interview her.