Toast - Freeserve

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Freeserve rapidly became the UK's number one internet service provider within months of its launch in 1998, yet the brand disappeared almost as quickly. So, what happened?

The BBC Business journalist, Sean Farrington, investigates.

Alongside him is the entrepreneur, Sam White, who at the end of the show has to reach her own conclusions, based only on what she has heard and her own business acumen.

Sean and Sam hear from expert guests including:

- Rory Cellan-Jones OBE - the BBC's former technology correspondent who covered Freeserve's rise and later dedicated a chapter to it in his book 'Dot Bomb - the Rise and Fall of Dot Com Britain'.

- Ajaz Ahmed - a 'Freeserve founder' who badgered bosses to start an ISP while working as a store manager at PC World in Leeds. He later became Freeserve's Business Development Manager.

- Mark Danby - a former Chief Operating Officer at Freeserve.

Produced by Jon Douglas, Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

You can email the programme at [email protected]

Feel free to suggest topics which could be covered in future episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, podcast fan.
0:03.0	Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party.
0:06.7	We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July
0:09.0	for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival.
0:12.8	We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting,
0:15.3	including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane,
0:18.4	and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder.
0:23.2	You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free.
0:28.0	To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires. Live, forward slash fringe.
0:34.2	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:40.2	You're about to listen to the latest series of Toast.
0:43.9	Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
0:50.7	But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode seven days earlier than anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds.
0:58.2	Hello, you're listening to Toast, the BBC Radio 4 series, which looks at incredible businesses that reach dizzy heights, yet somehow still ended up Toast.
1:03.4	I'm the BBC business journalist Sean Farrington, and I'm going to be unpicking some of
1:07.7	the reasons why that's happened to the latest company to make it into our
1:11.7	case file. And as usual, I'll be accompanied by the entrepreneur Sam White, who, to make sure
1:17.2	we get her genuine immediate reactions, we keep in the dark about what's coming up. At the end,
1:22.5	Sam has to give us her opinions on why this brand has disappeared, based only on what she's
1:27.2	heard and her own business
1:28.6	acumen. This time we're heading back to the late 1990s.
1:35.4	Right Sam, back in 1998.
	...

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