Is your mobile phone the best or worst friend you’ve ever had?
Radical with Amol Rajan
BBC
4.5 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over half term this week Radio 4’s Today is conducting an exciting experiment: asking teenagers to abandon their smartphones for a week.
On the podcast Amol discusses the monumental impact the smartphone has had on our lives and what the future of the smartphone might be with Professor Jim Ang, an expert in Human-Computer interaction, and digital regulation campaigner Baroness Beeban Kidron.
Amol also takes a moment to pay tribute to his friend, former BBC executive Alan Yentob, who died last weekend.
To get Amol and Nick's take on the biggest stories and insights from behind the scenes at the UK's most influential radio news programme make sure you hit subscribe on BBC Sounds. That way you’ll get an alert every time we release a new episode, and you won’t miss our extra bonus episodes either.
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* Send us a message or a voice note via WhatsApp to +44 330 123 4346 * Email today@bbc.co.uk
The Today Podcast is hosted by Amol Rajan and Nick Robinson who are both presenters of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Amol was the BBC’s media editor for six years and is the former editor of the Independent, he’s also the current presenter of University Challenge.
Nick has presented the Today programme since 2015, he was the BBC’s political editor for ten years before that and also previously worked as ITV’s political editor.
This episode was made by Tom Smithard with Izzy Rowley. Digital production was by Izzy Rowley. The technical producer was Ben Andrews. The editor is Louisa Lewis. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | On the Today program this week, we did a very interesting thing. |
| 0:09.0 | We asked some wonderful young people whether or not they could do the absolutely unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unimaginable, the unfathomable. |
| 0:17.9 | And during half term, actually give up their phones. |
| 0:22.6 | Oriel, how much is your phone sort of part of your everyday life? |
| 0:29.1 | How will you cope without it? |
| 0:30.3 | It's very much part of my everyday life. |
| 0:32.9 | I use it to talk to my friends quite a lot. |
| 0:36.6 | I get very distracted when I'm meant to be doing |
| 0:39.2 | my homework. I've got a lot of revision to do for my exams that are coming up. So maybe not having |
| 0:46.0 | my phone will be some sort of a blessing in disguise. I love the way that you're trying to sound |
| 0:51.5 | hopeful about it. It will be a blessing in disguise. |
| 0:54.8 | It'll be a good thing. Annie, I'm particularly impressed by you because you're giving up. You're giving up a huge streak to do this. I should say, by the way, if people don't know what a streak is, it's where you every day have to send a message. And if you miss one, then the streak ends. And you've got quite a good streak going. Yeah, me and my friend, Isabel, I've got a streak for 768 days. |
| 1:15.3 | Well, we don't anymore. |
| 1:16.2 | We don't anymore because it's gone. |
| 1:18.3 | And you've given it up for us? |
| 1:21.1 | I feel honoured. |
| 1:23.0 | Well, that was our brilliant colleague Anna Foster talking to Annie and Oriel, |
| 1:26.8 | who have given up their phones, which is amazing. |
| 1:29.3 | And today what we're going to do is a bit of a deep dive into the brief history and the rather complicated future of the smartphone. |
| 1:36.3 | And I should say I approach this on the one hand as a massive technophile, someone who thinks we ought to celebrate the extraordinary advances, |
| 1:43.3 | the species |
... |
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