The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Sliced Bread podcast series image

BBC Radio 4 LW

Sliced Bread Presents: Noise Cancelling Headphones

Sliced Bread series image

Noise Cancelling Headphones

Sliced Bread

BBC Radio 4 - Sliced Bread, Noise Cancelling Headphones

The promise of noise cancelling headphones is enticing, but do they live up to the hype?

The promise of noise cancelling headphones is enticing.  But are they The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, or marketing BS?

The promise of noise cancelling headphones is enticing.  Whether it’s cutting out the background chatter to hear the radio, or drowning out the snoring coming from the room next door. But do they live up to the marketing hype?

Are they The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, or BS?

Greg Foot is joined by BBC 6 Music DJ Host Mary Anne Hobbs, who lends her professional ear to a pair of noise cancelling headphones.  While acoustic engineer Professor Trevor Cox unpicks the science fact from the science fiction.

Presenter: Greg Foot
Producer: Beth Eastwood

Sliced Bread Presents

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Documentaries

Podcasts

Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

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.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Sliced Bread Presents

Noise Cancelling Headphones

Genres

Series

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4