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Sliced Bread Presents: Winter bugs: Hand sanitisers and vitamin C

13/02/2019

Winter bugs: Hand sanitisers and vitamin C

Sliced Bread

BBC Radio 4 - Sliced Bread, Winter bugs: Hand sanitisers and vitamin C

What beats the winter bugs? Scroobius Pip joins Greg to test hand sanitisers and vitamin C

How can you beat the winter bugs? Greg Foot is joined by musician Scroobius Pip to put hand sanitisers and Vitamin C to the test. Are they The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?

With offices and schools set to a soundtrack of sniffles, science presenter and YouTuber Greg Foot is on mission to find 'The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread' to beat the winter bugs.

Joining him in the studio is rapper, podcaster and actor Scroobius Pip, a man for whom protecting his voice is a professional priority. Under the microscope today are two popular products used to kill colds in their tracks - hand sanitisers and vitamin C.

Virologist Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London and microbiologist Lindsay Hall from the Quadram Institute in Norwich are both on hand to help separate the facts from the fads, to decide if these products really are The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.

Plus they'll be giving you their Top Tips, backed by real scientific evidence, for beating the winter bugs.

Presenter: Greg Foot
Producer: Michelle Martin

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While Sliced Bread takes a break, we serve up... Toast.

While Sliced Bread takes a break, we serve up... Toast. Sean Farrington examines the spectacular failures of wonder products and businesses which had promised so much.

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up... Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of brands which had promised so much to consumers.    

In each episode, the presenter and BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, examines one big idea. What did it promise? Why did people back it? Why did they get burnt?  

Some of the world's most successful businesses have also brought us some of the world's most remarkable failures. So, what led them to be toast? And what can we learn from their stories today? 

Sean unpicks all the early optimism, hype and ambition. He learns about the tremendous success of a brand before hearing how it faltered, with help from expert commentators and people who were directly involved. How do they view things now and what, if anything, could have been done differently? 

The self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White, is alongside him, analysing the missteps that changed a brand's fortunes and reaching her own, often instructive, conclusions.  

From big tech to high street retail and, of course, food, Toast tackles the business ideas that, one way or another, ended up cooked. 

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in February. In the new series, Greg Foot will investigate more of the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.

Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.

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