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More or Less
Do we really have ‘superflu’?
00:28:38
The NHS is warning of an unprecedented flu season - we check.
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- [00:00]
Nathan Gower
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead. But what about real impact on people's lives? For 18 years, GiveWell has researched the highest impact giving opportunities. Over 150,000 donors have confidently used GiveWell, saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible donation@givewell.org first time donors can have their donation matched to up to $100 while funds last. Select podcast and more or less at checkout.
- [00:36]
Kasia Rowland
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap.
- [00:40]
Madeleine Sumption
You're almost at the finish line, but.
- [00:55]
Kasia Rowland
There the last one.
- [00:59]
Madeleine Sumption
Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [01:08]
Tim Harford
Hello and welcome to a brand new series of More or Less where your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week we're getting to grips with the unprecedented winter super flu, if indeed it is unprecedented. Unprecedented or for that matter, super. It's flu anyway. And we'll be running through the numbers. We'll also look at the prison services curious habit of letting prisoners out early or keeping them in for too long. We'll ask whether there's really a mass exodus from the UK under labour and why the US economy can't grow at 25% a year. First winter pressures on the NHS have become a depressingly familiar story. And hardly a winter goes by now without worrying headlines about the strains that the health service is under. And the media didn't need much help drafting those headlines. This was part of a press release from NHS England.
- [02:07]
Kasia Rowland
With record demand for A and E and ambulances and an impending resident doctor strike, this unprecedented wave of super flu is leaving the NHS facing a worst case scenario for for this time of year.
- [02:22]
Tim Harford
Loyal listener Fiona in Devon asked us whether what we're currently seeing really is unprecedented. She wants us to investigate. As you wish. After all, if you haven't got your health, then you haven't got anything. We asked reporter Nathan Gower to look into it. Hello, Nathan.
- [02:40]
Nathan Gower
Hello, Tim.
- [02:41]
Tim Harford
So this year we don't just have flu, we have super flu. What's going on?
- [02:47]
Nathan Gower
So we've had quite a few headlines talking about an unprecedented situation or record numbers. Now that's true. If you add the important caveat for this time of year, we get flu waves almost every winter, but not always at the same time. And this year flu has come early.
- [03:04]
Tim Harford
Tell me more.
- [03:06]
Nathan Gower
So let's look at hospital admissions in England for the week ending the 1st of December. About 10 in every 100,000 of the population were admitted to hospital with flu. If we look at recent years with big flu waves, they reached those levels and then beyond, but not until a week or two later.
- [03:23]
Tim Harford
So if the whole wave had been delayed by a couple of weeks, we wouldn't be hearing about record numbers.
- [03:28]
Nathan Gower
That's right.
- [03:29]
Tim Harford
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
- [03:31]
Nathan Gower
Wait till I get going.
- [03:32]
Tim Harford
So, leaving the timing to one side, how does the scale of this current wave compare to previous waves?
- [03:38]
Nathan Gower
So, as I said, the Latest data has 10 in every 100,000 people being admitted to hospital with flu per week. This is substantially below the peaks of previous waves. So 2022-23, that was a really bad year. And hospital admissions peaked at about 19 in every 100,000. Last year, another bad year, it peaked at 15.
- [03:59]
Tim Harford
OK, so we're still not at those heights.
- [04:01]
Nathan Gower
That's right. The UK Health Security Agency, which monitors flu and other illnesses in the winter, says the latest admission rates are still in the medium category. It's a similar story if we look at infections. We're running about a week ahead of previous bad waves and it's still substantially below the peaks of those waves. We should also talk about what's not happening right now. 2022-23 was the worst flu wave we've had in years. But the NHS fared particularly badly because of what else was happening during that winter. We didn't just have a big flu wave, we also had Covid and rsv, another respiratory virus. All three waves peaked at pretty much the same time and this was a real nightmare for the nhs.
- [04:44]
Tim Harford
Yes, I remember us covering it at.
- [04:46]
Nathan Gower
The time, but we haven't got the same thing happening now. Thankfully, Covid levels are very low and they're not showing signs of increasing. RSV admissions to hospital have been increasing sharply, but at substantially lower levels than flu admissions. About three admissions per 100,000 rather than 10. And the latest data suggests that RSV may be peaking and hopefully will start to decline.
- [05:09]
Tim Harford
Ok, but NHS England seems worried about this particular strain of flu. They literally call it superflu. Is it?
- [05:18]
Nathan Gower
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. There are three main types of flu. The particular type that we're currently seeing dominate in England is called H3N2.
- [05:28]
Tim Harford
Trips off the tongue. So what should we know about it?
- [05:32]
Nathan Gower
So, H3N2 is generally thought to cause slightly worse disease in older people, which is one reason that health officials are concerned. But it also evolves relatively quickly and this year a new variant has emerged and Become the dominant strain that's circulating in this current wave. To learn more, I spoke to Dr. James Hay. He's a research fellow at the pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford. Earlier in the year, James heard talk that we were facing a potentially difficult strain of H3N2. He decided to look at what the early data tells us.
- [06:04]
James Hay
So what we were interested in doing is kind of looking at the growth rate of the virus this year and comparing it to the growth rate from previous years. And to kind of boil it down to one number, we were looking at the peak growth rate. So what's the highest growth rate for this year compared to the highest growth rate in previous years? So what we did is we went and found some publicly available data for England going back to the 2011 study, 2012 flu season, and we calculated these weekly growth rates, and we compared the peak weekly growth rates for this year to previous seasons.
- [06:33]
Nathan Gower
The peak growth rate is the moment when a virus is accelerating fastest. Comparing these peak growth rates across different flu strains can give us a sense of how they rank in terms of their ability to spread. When James and his team did this, they found that the new strain had a peak growth rate equal to doubling every seven days. In the last 15 years, there's only been one other flu strain with a higher peak growth rate. That was in the 2014-15 season, which reached a rate of doubling every six and a half days.
- [07:04]
James Hay
So that's basically the upper end. It's kind of a top two virus, but it's not unprecedented.
- [07:09]
Tim Harford
So maybe we should be calling it bad flu, not super flu.
- [07:13]
Nathan Gower
That seems quite reasonable. James. Data is from early in the outbreak. It's not the latest numbers. So there is a chance that the outbreak accelerates again and the growth rate reaches a higher peak. But once you pass a peak in the growth rate, it's quite unusual to see it peak higher later on. And James doesn't think the latest data shows signs of this happening.
- [07:31]
Tim Harford
Do we have any idea when the wave might start to recede?
- [07:35]
Nathan Gower
No one's got a crystal ball, and infectious disease dynamics are notoriously complex. But James and his team did try to get a sense of how this season might play out by running different scenarios in their model.
- [07:46]
James Hay
So, basically, in our modeling, we were looking at, if you have a virus that starts in the season two weeks to four weeks earlier than normal, and maybe it's a little bit more infectious or has a little bit better ability to evade population immunity, what might the dynamics of that season look like? And we found because of the earlier start. And if things are growing a bit quicker earlier, generally you might expect a peak to happen a bit earlier, because the main thing that drives the end of a flu season is that enough people get infected and become immune, such that the epidemic dies out. So if that's all happening earlier, then you would expect the peak to be a bit earlier. So with that in mind, we thought it's quite plausible that the epidemic might peak in, say, mid December, rather than going into January, because of this early start. So with that in mind, we thought maybe it's likely that we would see a kind of leveling off in the growth rate in these coming weeks in mid December. And that at the moment seems quite to track with what the data is.
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Tim Harford
Showing, how many people are likely to get flu this winter, then, James Hay.
- [08:46]
James Hay
Again for H3N2, in a given season, we might expect between 15 and 20% of people to get infected. So 15 to 20% is normal. But given that this season has maybe got a slightly higher growth rate, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were anywhere between 15 to 25%. But if they were getting up to numbers like 30%, that would probably be quite surprising.
- [09:07]
Tim Harford
So super flu isn't actually super, and the NHS isn't currently facing unprecedented pressure from flu or from other respiratory illnesses. But that doesn't necessarily mean everything's fine. Maybe the NHS is just more fragile than it was in previous waves.
- [09:25]
Nathan Gower
Well, there's no one statistic that tells you exactly how well hospitals are faring. But a good indicator is what's happening to the time that ambulances take to hand over patients to hospitals. This gets disrupted when hospitals are struggling to cope. For the week ending 7 December, ambulances in England were taking a mean average of about 38 minutes to hand over patients. That's actually better than the same period last year, which was about 44 minutes. And that's even though flu has come early this year. And then we can just compare this to the winter of 2022, 23, when the NHS faced massive pressures. Average handover times were much higher and they peaked at about one hour and 15 minutes. Thankfully, we are nowhere near that.
- [10:06]
Tim Harford
Thank you, Nathan, and Thanks also to Dr. James Hay and to friend of the programme Paul Mainwood. You're listening to. More or less recently, you may have heard this headline or others like it.
- [10:19]
Madeleine Sumption
Record number of Britons are moving abroad under labour. 257,000 emigrated last year. As starmer exodus grows, it was reported, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said Keir Starmer's punishing tax rises are causing Britons to flee in record numbers. The brightest and best are leaving the UK for places like Dubai and Milan, leaving the rest of us to pay Labour's higher taxes. This is evidence that increasing tax too far makes people leave.
- [10:52]
Tim Harford
What prompted all this discussion? The Office for National Statistics has just put some new stats out, but the headline number doesn't always tell the whole story. So we wanted to find out what was behind this spectacular exodus. So I spoke to Madeleine Sumption at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University. The Conservative politicians have been saying that Britons are leaving the UK because of Labour policies. Is there anything we can say to either confirm or refute that claim?
- [11:25]
Madeleine Sumption
These figures don't provide any evidence to suggest that anything particular has changed. Under the Labour government, the increase in net emigration of British citizens actually took place in 2023. But more broadly, I'm not sure we can look at these figures and assume that government policy is the major driver of people's decisions to emigrate.
- [11:44]
Tim Harford
So it turns out that the recent increase in net emigration of British citizens started before Labour came into power. It turns out that Chris Philp has fallen victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well known is not looking at the time series data. That said, Madeleine Sumption has some broader concerns about that data. You see, when a Brit decides to move abroad, they don't have to formally register their plans. Unlike an immigrant with a visa to come for a defined period, Brits can come and go as they please. They tend to go and return from holidays a lot. To complicate things, the Office for National Statistics has been trialling new ways of capturing when Brits actually move to or from the uk. But this is challenging. Madeleine.
- [12:40]
Madeleine Sumption
Again, these figures are very much experimental. There's a new method. I suspect there will be some revisions coming up and we don't know a huge amount about those people. Some of them will also be previous migrants. There will be people who came to the uk, then became citizens and now are leaving.
- [12:58]
Tim Harford
Looking at data from the un, we can see that many of these emigrating British citizens are going to places from which the UK has in the past received a lot of inward migration, such as Bangladesh, Poland and Romania. So for all the talk about Dubai and Milan, this suggests a lot of emigration is not for tax reasons, but is either of former immigrants who became UK citizens but then returned to their country of origin or of UK born citizens who are moving overseas because they married someone born overseas.
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Madeleine Sumption
Others will be British born British citizens who are going to countries probably the top countries of destination for Brits, which tend to be the English speaking countries, places like Australia, the us, Canada.
- [13:43]
Tim Harford
And I'm just trying to work out whether we can say anything about the trend here.
- [13:48]
Madeleine Sumption
We can't say anything about the long term trend because we only have figures with this particular methodology going back to 2021. So the net emigration figures, which suggests more people leaving than arriving to the tune of around well over 100,000 per year, those figures look higher than the ones we saw in the 2010s, but it may simply just be because the methodology is very different. We have a consistent time series for the last few years and what those fig show, although again, I wouldn't be surprised if as the methods develop, some of those things change a bit. But to the extent we can trust them, those figures show that the increase in net emigration of British citizens took place primarily in 2023 and was stable after that. And the interesting thing about that is actually that the net increase was driven not by more people leaving, but by fewer people coming back having previously left.
- [14:43]
Tim Harford
Conservative politicians have been criticizing the government, but actually this is a trend that continues back under the last Conservative government as well.
- [14:52]
Madeleine Sumption
That's right, yeah. And actually if you look back longer term, it's always been the case that there are more British people leaving than arriving. There's always been negative net migration of British citizens, this obviously being the country that produces Brits. And so to the extent that anyone leaves, that's likely to be a net figure. Precisely how much it's changed over time is still very uncertain.
- [15:14]
Tim Harford
And is there any indication that any of this, either under the Labour government or under the previous Conservative government is driven by government policy? Or can we say anything about why it's happening?
- [15:25]
Madeleine Sumption
That is very tricky. We do know that people emigrating tend to be young people under the age of 35. That in itself is not hugely surprising because migration is really a young people's game. And when people get older, they start to have kids, it just becomes much more difficult, much more of a hassle for them to move around. In terms of the actual reasons, there has been some other research that looks at why people move, including why people from high income countries like the UK move often. Work and study reasons are important, sometimes just the desire to experience something different. And then often what you see is people move maybe just for fun or for a lifestyle change and they get stuck sometimes in a good way. Right, they might meet a partner or they settle down and they decide even if they didn't necessarily plan to leave forever later on they end up staying in the country of destination permanently.
- [16:16]
Tim Harford
Thanks to Madeleine Sumption. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Morons. You can hear more from Madeleine explaining the immigration stats that we know and would love to know but don't in one of our special Stats of the Year programs in the first week of January all week starting on the 5th of January, we're taking over the 9am slot on Radio 4 to explore everything from the cost of living to to the weirdness of the weather you're listening to more or less.
- [16:48]
Madeleine Sumption
This message comes from Greenlight Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely and invest with your guardrails in place. With Greenlight you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance and keep an eye on what your kids are spending for with real time notifications. Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight. Get started risk free@greenlight.com iheart hey, Ryan.
- [17:19]
Nathan Gower
Reynolds here wishing you a very happy.
- [17:22]
James Hay
Half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront.
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Kasia Rowland
Payment of $45 for three month plan.
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Madeleine Sumption
Equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of networks busy.
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Kasia Rowland
Taxes and fees extra see mint mobile.com.
- [17:52]
Tim Harford
You may have heard the prison system has an intriguing and suddenly newsworthy problem accidentally releasing prisoners. First there was Hadush Kabatu, a former asylum seeker who was imprisoned after being convicted for sexual assault, then accidentally released from prison in October, which, as you can imagine, didn't go down well with anyone. Then there were other accidental releases. Suddenly it seemed that prisoners were being released by mistake all the time. David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Justice, was recently quizzed about this on the Today programme.
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Kasia Rowland
I also wanted to to ask you about a conversation you had a little earlier with our colleagues on BBC Breakfast when you were talking about the accidental release of prisoners and you said that 12 prisoners had been accidentally released since you made your statement to Parliament on 11 November. Now there'd been 91 releases in error in the Period between April and November. You described it as being on a downward trajectory, but the figures don't necessarily bear that out. If you average them out over that period, it looks like the trajectory is exactly the same and it's something that you're supposed to be concentrating on. So are those numbers going down?
- [19:05]
Nathan Gower
Well, I'm looking at the trend over the course of this year. I've asked Dame Lynn Owens to do an independent review and obviously we will get her recommendations in the spring and we will act on that. But in the meantime, I've sent in a digital squad. I've had a performance.
- [19:26]
Kasia Rowland
Sorry, just on that point, is it a downward trajectory? Because you said it was. But again, the numbers don't bear that out.
- [19:35]
Nathan Gower
What I meant by that is the trend this year does seem at this stage to be going in the right direction. The trend is on a downward trajectory based on last year's figures. But I did say in Parliament there has been a spike.
- [19:52]
Tim Harford
We wanted to play that clip in full so listeners could get a proper idea of the discussion. Also, editing clips is now unfashionable at the BBC, for some reason, in the light of the controversy over the very public accidental release, David Lammy introduced new measures meant to reduce releases in error. So to understand this whole issue, I spoke to Kasia Rowland, senior researcher at the Institute for Government. So, Kassia, just remind us what releases in error are.
- [20:21]
Kasia Rowland
It's any time when someone gets released from prison at the wrong point, so either too early or too late, or if they should be sent to another form of detention, basically immigration detention before deportation, and they aren't.
- [20:37]
Tim Harford
And do we know how common that is?
- [20:40]
Kasia Rowland
It's not that common. As a proportion of everyone who gets released from prison, you know, you're talking nearly 50,000 people get released from prison every year. And last year we saw 262 releases in error.
- [20:56]
Tim Harford
So it's a small proportion, nearly one a day, but not many compared to the total number of releases.
- [21:03]
Kasia Rowland
Exactly.
- [21:04]
Tim Harford
What about the trend? Is this just something that's been happening for years or have releases in error actually been going up?
- [21:10]
Kasia Rowland
They have been going up a lot in the last couple of years. I think that's probably mostly because we've had all of these different emergency measures in place to manage the prison capacity crisis.
- [21:23]
Tim Harford
So lots of people have been released earlier, the release date has changed. And so, yeah, that creates some confusion.
- [21:31]
Kasia Rowland
Yes. It's also become a lot harder to calculate when people are supposed to be released because they've changed the rules. That basically Say how much of your sentence you need to spend in prison. And it's now, sorry, I just got visions now.
- [21:46]
Tim Harford
Some poor prison officer doing kind of difficult GCSE maths questions and getting them wrong. And that's why people are being released in error. But that.
- [21:52]
Kasia Rowland
That is exactly what's happening. Guidance on when people should be released is more than 150 pages and people are doing maths kind of with a pen and paper or a calculator to figure it out.
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Tim Harford
I kind of had had in mind that it was kind of mistaken identity or that sort of thing, but it's basically they are letting people out when they planned to let them out, but their plans were the wrong plans because they just got so confused by the guidance.
- [22:19]
Kasia Rowland
It's definitely a combination. So there will be cases where there's, say, someone has been acquitted of one offence and so should be released, but is actually being held waiting for another offence, and so they need to be held until that's resolved and something just gets lost somewhere along the way. Or the court enters the wrong information and tells the prison that it's a suspended sentence and not an immediate sentence. Those kinds of mistakes do also happen.
- [22:49]
Tim Harford
Now, I wanted to talk to you about a claim that the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, made on the BBC. He said that releases in error seem to be on a downward trajectory and that they were going in the right direction. So what do you make of that claim?
- [23:07]
Kasia Rowland
I think it really depends on when you're comparing it to. So, in the last few weeks and months, we've seen fewer releases in error than we saw last year. But last year was kind of more than double the next highest figure on record. It's still higher than it was in any previous year and noticeably, it hasn't really shown any signs of coming down since the Justice Secretary introduced his new checks.
- [23:38]
Justin Wolfers
Right.
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Tim Harford
So there was a massive spike last year and we are now on a very elevated plateau with no particular sign of progress. Except it is lower than it was last year.
- [23:47]
Kasia Rowland
Yes, exactly. It's worth saying, though, that because this includes people who are released late as well as people who are released early, it's possible that we're now releasing people late instead of early because we're doing these additional checks that slow things down so much.
- [24:03]
Tim Harford
But that is also bad. Right. If people are staying in prison, they shouldn't be in prison. That's bad.
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Kasia Rowland
It's really bad.
- [24:09]
Tim Harford
Thanks to Kasia Rowland of the Institute for Government, recently, President Trump was hosting a roundtable with business leaders when he came out with this economic pearl of wisdom, instead of 4% GDP or 3%, which I said so wonderful, 3%, it should be be able to be 20 or 25%. I don't know why it can't be. I do. I asked Justin Wolfuss, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, to give us his take. President Trump has said he doesn't see why the US GDP growth rate couldn't be 20 or 25% a year. Do you know why it couldn't be?
- [24:52]
Justin Wolfers
Well, I just think that would be really, really hard. We don't have any historical experience that coheres with that. So he's imagining a world. It's a beautiful world, but it's very different than the world any of us have ever lived in.
- [25:06]
Tim Harford
Why do you say it's so different?
- [25:08]
Justin Wolfers
Well, for 200 years in a row now, the US economy has grown relentlessly at 2% per year. 25 is a lot bigger than 2. When the US economy has boomed and we've celebrated in the streets the party of an extraordinary economy, it's grown at 3 and maybe 4%. So he is imagining a world that is wildly outside any reality any of us have lived through.
- [25:30]
Tim Harford
And if we were to have one of those good years, say a 4% growth year, what is going on in the economy to make it grow at 4% rather than 2%?
- [25:41]
Justin Wolfers
Animal spirits are up. Businesses are investing like crazy. Workers are feeling confident, so they're happy to keep spending. Folks are building new houses. Because you feel secure at work, you might put an extension on the house as well, and just an enormous amount of confidence that not only is the present a good moment, but you feel that there are good times ahead of us, and so why not spend, spend, spend?
- [26:06]
Tim Harford
I know President Trump is very interested in what's going on in China. And China has grown enormously since the late 1970s. I mean, often exceeded GDP growth of 10% a year for an extended period of time. So even if we can't reach 20 or 25%, couldn't the US economy reach 10% a year?
- [26:27]
Justin Wolfers
China's an extraordinary story, but it's a very different story. It's a story that one sometimes sees with developing countries, countries that are not at the technological frontier, which is where China was a couple of decades ago. When you are not widely developed, when you haven't mechanized, industrialized, used modern technology, then the path to economic growth is simply doing what the other guys already did. All the inventions have been invented, and all you've got to do is Figure out how to adopt them. That's essentially what China's been doing. So it's moving from a long way away from the frontier toward the frontier that gives you incredible growth. And it's not just China. We saw that with many of the East Asian miracle countries as well. The problem for the US is that it is the technological frontier. If we need to grow faster, we can't find a bunch of inventions off the shelf that someone else has already invented that are pathways to being more productive. We actually would have to invent them. And that is a much slower, more difficult grind of a process.
- [27:25]
Tim Harford
Yeah. So have there been examples of economies growing at 25% in a single year?
- [27:32]
Justin Wolfers
There have been few and far between. But the most important point to note is only for one year in a row. So let me explain when it happens. Basically, if you shut an economy down, don't let people work or don't let them work in the market, and then you open up the next day, then you get dramatic growth like that. So we saw growth rates above 25%, if I recall, in the wake of World War II, and we saw growth at that rate, but for a much shorter period when many economies reopened after Covid. So it's basically the end of an enormous disruption, which is different to what we would hope for is we're in a pretty smooth economy right now and we just move to a higher plane.
- [28:16]
Tim Harford
Thanks to Justin Wolfers. Finally, we were shocked to hear this week that film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle had died. What does that sad news have to do with more or less, you ask? Well, loyal listener John Clarke could tell you he wrote to us years. Have you analyzed the statistical frequency of Princess Bride references in your program? In the current series, I would estimate approaching one per episode. Inconceivable. However, it needs the kind of in depth analysis that only more or less can provide. Unless you've studied your Agrippa, which I have. We are huge fans of Rob Reiner's film the Princess Bride. And things escalated to even more inconceivable heights in January 2018 when we interviewed a Spanish vet.
- [29:10]
Nathan Gower
My name is Enrique Vega.
- [29:12]
Madeleine Sumption
You killed my father.
- [29:13]
Tim Harford
Prepare to die Rob Reiner's film the Princess Bride in his memory. Maybe it's one to watch over Christmas. That's all we have time for this week. If you want to discover even more about how language and numbers can be used to mislead and bamboozle us, check out the Open University's buzzword Bingo. To find it, search for more or less behind the stats and follow the links to the Open University. Please keep your questions and comments coming in to more or lessbc.co.uk. we'll be back next week with some faintly Christmassy numbers to explore. Until then, goodbye. More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford. The producer was Charlotte Macdonald, with Tom Coles, Nathan Gower, Lizzie McNeil and Katie Sulliv. The production coordinator was Maria Ogundele. The programme was recorded and mixed by Neil Churchill and our editor is Richard Varden.
- [30:11]
Nathan Gower
Hello, I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which looks.
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Tim Harford
At amazing brands that promised a lot yet somehow ended up Toast.
- [30:20]
Nathan Gower
We're back with another series. Kicking off with a treat.
- [30:23]
Tim Harford
Sir Stephen Fry on his disappointment when the BlackBerry smartphones he loved took a turn for the wor.
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Nathan Gower
Badly designed and the haptic click noise was hideous. It sounded like a dislocated knuckle. Among our other topics is Skype, why couldn't it capitalize on the popularity of video calling during the pandemic, and a.
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Tim Harford
Bottled water from Coca Cola.
- [30:44]
Nathan Gower
Big in the States, but it sank here within just six weeks.
- [30:47]
Tim Harford
Listen to Toast first on BBC Sounds.
- [30:53]
American Giant Advertiser
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- [31:54]
Madeleine Sumption
If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.