Vernon Bogdanor
Tuesday 1 May 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Philip Dodd meets political analyst Vernon Bogdanor, who explains why he thinks Britain has undergone a spectacle unique in the democratic world since 1997: transforming its famously unwritten constitution into a European- or American-style written document, bit by bit, without any real popular interest in doing more. How deeply will this change our system of government and does anybody know where the process will end?
Maxwell
David Suchet as Robert Maxwell, in Maxwell, BBC Two, Friday 4 May
Playlist
Roy Williams
Philip Dodd will be talking to the playwright Roy Williams about his stage adaptation of Colin MacInnes's cult novel,'Absolute Beginners', set in 1950s London and culminating in the Notting Hill race riots in 1958.
Constitutional Reforms
And, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of New Labour's first landslide in 1997, Philip asks whether the impact of the Blair Government's constitutional reforms amounts to a whole new constitution.
Do ordinary people have more or less power than a decade ago?
And have the changes gone too far - or not far enough?
Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford and the man who taught David Cameron, and the columnist and writer Simon Jenkins join Philip to discuss.
Maxwell
Ruth Dudley Edwards will be reviewing BBC2's new drama based on the final months in the life of the media magnate Robert Maxwell, played in Craig Warner's biopic by David Suchet.
Food and Class
Plus, is food the last battlefield of class warfare?
The food writer Joanna Blythman and the novelist Tim Lott will be discussing whether we are defined by what we eat and the ways in which we use food as a way of defining class.
