Why do some big successful brands go bust?

Toast is back for a new series, taking a look at the decisions that often left investors burnt.

I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist. I'll be hearing about the hype.

They're going to do the deal that makes them the most money at that point of time.

And I'm picking what went wrong, talking to owners and employees to ask, what can we learn?

It was being undercut by similar rivals. It just couldn't survive.

Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to more or less. We're the programme all about the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

This week I'll be speaking to Swedish statistician Ola Rosling to find out how effective Sweden's lockdown light has been in slowing the spread of coronavirus.

But first, I have an update for you on more or less's pet subject.

You guessed it, it's testing.

And when it comes to testing, if there's something strange in the neighbourhood,

who are you going to call?

Kate Lamble.

Kate, of course, was the producer of our Marathon Radio 4 series.

Hello, Kate.

Hi, Tim. Would we? Not series. Hello, Kate. We wouldn't let you get away, would we?

Not quite. No, so just remind us briefly why you have been looking into testing for the last however many months. So when our last series started all the way back in March, the UK government

was having quite a slow start with COVID-19 testing.

But in April, they set themselves this really big target. They said by the end of the month,

they wanted to be doing 100,000 tests a day. And they said they achieved that target on the last day in April, just in time. As if by magic. As if by magic, they did it. And when you looked at it, the way they achieved that target was by starting to count home testing kits.

Not at the point where they'd been carried out by people and sent back to a lab and then processed.

...