As you would expect of a programme with as grandiose a title as A History Of Ideas (Radio 4, noon daily), it has intellectual heavyweight Melvyn Bragg behind it and a great many parts ahead of it - 60 in all, which means it officially qualifies for that over-used tag "major new series".

Each Monday, Bragg will sit with four fellow intellectual heavyweights and chew over a particular issue.

Then the quartet is dispatched with a tape recorder to make a programme that will reflect their differing perspectives on that issue.

These will fill the Tuesday to Friday slots.

In week one, it was freedom that was under discussion and the guests were philosopher Angie Hobbs, neuroscientist Paul Broks, theologian (and, in my book, National Treasure) Giles Fraser and a Scottish barrister by the name of - wait for it - Harry Potter.

And yes, he did allude to wizardry when introducing himself.

The participants set up their takes on freedom by viewing the subject through the prism of great thinkers of previous centuries.

For Hobbs, it was Isaiah Berlin's ideas of negative and positive freedom; for Potter, JS Mill's notion of individual liberty.

For those listeners who required broader brushstrokes, there were potted biographies of these historical figures, delivered in a robotic voice that sounded for all the world like POD, the sarcastic computer from BBC Three show Snog, Marry, Avoid.

Philosophy and neuroscience being rather chewier subjects than law and religion, it was the amiable duo of Fraser and Potter whose programmes worked best.

The lawyer talked enthusiastically about the ins and outs of a famous 1987 sex and torture trial - R vs Brown - and met a former drug addict (also Scottish) who had one or two things to say about Mill's idea that any action which does not result in harm to others should not be proscribed.

Fraser introduced his programme with a track by Bellshill fourpiece The Soup Dragons and a spoof radio ad.

But he had a serious point to make - "Behind all our fancy conceptions of moral and political freedom, I worry that what it's really about, what it's really defending, is the freedom to shop" - and, among other things, a question: would

our lives be improved if we put less emphasis on individual freedom and more on community?

Plenty to chew on, then, in this "major new" lunchtime slot.