The BNP were represented by Barrister Najmul Huda and the AL by Saber Hossain Chowdhury, with award-winning film-maker Tareque Masud on hand to show a side of Bangladesh beyond the binary political divide.

Somewhat oddly, perhaps, the producers also elected to link to a studio in London via satellite, where the panel consisted of my boss, Mahfuz Anam, and Baroness Uddin, the Bangladeshi-born British peer.

I have to say that I didn't really see the point of having the London hook-up. Mr. Anam could easily have been accommodated in Dhaka, and Baroness Uddin, while serviceable, was hardly indispensable to the proceedings.

Indeed, the most galling part of the program was the London studio audience of 20-something Bangladeshi-Brits who were asked to chime in periodically, and unsurprisingly had very little of interest or insight to add to the discussion.

The debate was preceded by a somewhat tedious 14-minute documentary (hopefully this will be edited drastically when the show is aired) of one of the afore-mentioned callow youths' trip to Bangladesh, where he wanders around wide-eyed and marvels at the fact that boys and girls mix freely whereas his sisters in London wear hijab.

Interesting enough, I suppose. But actually it is an interesting point about the Bangladeshi community in London, not an interesting point about Bangladesh, that was theoretically the focus of the show.

I think that it is a little off that BBC World felt the need to construct Bangladesh through the eyes of the Bangladeshi diaspora community in order to make the show compelling to a world-wide audience.

I suspect this is a mistake. The show is being broadcast on BBC World not BBC 1 or BBC 2, and I cannot imagine that too many of the 270 million homes that the service boasts of reaching will be much interested in some inarticulate 20 year-old Bangladeshi-Brit's opinion on Bangladesh, any more than they would be in some young Bolivian-Brit's take on the recent election of Evo Morales.

But let us not quibble too much. The fact that, by virtue of this debate, the world will get some kind of a picture of Bangladesh, however partial, is surely a good thing, though I remain very interested to see what kind of a picture is ultimately going to be portrayed after the 105 minutes of shooting is edited down to 45.

The debate itself was a little uneven, as this kind of five-cornered thing was bound to be. I thought that the number of participants and constant cutting from Dhaka to London kept things a little off the boil. The moderator, Stephen Sackur of HARDtalk fame, did a good job of keeping things tight, but the format and time constraints meant that it was hard to get a substantive debate going.

Nevertheless, it was a fascinating show and should make for an engrossing 45 minutes of television.

The primary target audience is BBC World viewers around the world, and for me the most interesting consideration is what those with only a passing knowledge of Bangladesh will take away from the experience.

The audience will have seen an articulate newspaper editor and film-maker, both speaking sense. I am not sure of what they would make of Baroness Uddin and the 20-somethings, but since they were all actually British and not Bangladeshi, the impression they created is not of too much concern to me.

But the face-off which most people in Bangladesh will want to see, and that I suspect that most people around the world will find most interesting, is the one between Najmul Huda and Saber Hossain Chowdhury.

For most of the people around the world, this is probably the first time they will see representatives from the two major Bangladeshi political parties square off, and it is hard to believe that they will not form some kind of an opinion based at least in part on what they see.

If this is the case, then, to be perfectly frank, I have to say that I found Najmul Huda an odd choice on the part of the BNP, and wondered whether someone else, perhaps Moudud Ahmed, might not have done better.

Throughout the debate, Mr. Huda, looking ill-at-ease and irritable, gave a remarkable series of unintentionally self-incriminatory responses that as often as not reduced the studio audience to derisive laughter. For instance, his claim that the ACC could not function properly because it was too busy responding to busy-body journalists was one such fine moment of inadvertent comedy.

If one wished to be charitable, Mr. Huda's most unfortunate sound-bite: "the aim of politics is power" should perhaps be taken as him misspeaking more than as a statement of malevolence, but it couldn't have sounded encouraging to anyone's ears.

Mr. Chowdhury, on the other hand, turned out to be a quite good choice on the part of the AL. There is little question that he is one of the smartest and most articulate of the party leaders and he presented himself as very smooth and reasonable, which played well in contrast to Mr. Huda's rather more blustering and ill-tempered demeanour.

My sense is that someone tuning into Bangladeshi politics for the first time would be a little taken aback that a cabinet minister would be so incoherent and would have been impressed with Mr. Chowdhury's assured performance.

Of course, whether the program will have any impact beyond our shores in terms of how people view the socio-political situation in Bangladesh remains to be seen.

It may well not, but I think that it could. I think people around the world are becoming increasingly interested in what is happening here, and I think that there would be some interest in hearing what the two principal sides have to say. I know that I often find BBC World presentations on countries that I don't know much about to be strangely compelling.

As for the response here in Dhaka, that will be harder to gauge. I recommend that everyone watch for themselves on BBC World or NTV and make up their own mind.

It will be very illuminating to see the response inside Bangladesh, and I would be interested to see if a general audience would agree with the consensus among the studio audience that Mr. Chowdhury had the better of the debate.

In the final analysis, it wasn't too close a call due to Mr. Huda's continual stumbles, such as when Mr. Sackur pushed him into conceding that the electoral alliance with the Jamaat is "a marriage of convenience" and prodded him into the astonishingly revealing statement that: "Ahmadias are not a religion."

Mr. Chowdhury's toughest moment was when he was asked why the AL complains about rigging whenever it loses an election. He couldn't very well say what he believes: that the elections actually were stolen, without sounding petulant, but he ended up finessing the issue fairly well when Mr. Sackur put him on the spot, saying that this was why it was important to agree to the rules for the coming election ahead of time, so that there could be no crying after the fact.

In the end, the program was like a sushi bar. Not enough to really fill you up, but enough delights here and there to make it a very agreeable experience. I don't know how the program will look after being edited down to 45 minutes, but I know that I am going to be watching to find out. I suggest that you do so too.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

The debate will air on BBC World (television) on April 8 at 6:30pm, and April 9 at 1:10am, 1:10pm, and 11:10 pm; on BBC World Service (radio) on April 9 at 7:00pm and midnight; and on NTV on April 8 at 8:30pm, on April 9 at 4:30pm, April 15 at 3:00pm, and April 16 at 12:15am.