Dough - Washing Machines
Could washing machines soon be cleaning our clothes without using any water?
The entrepreneur, Sam White, hosts Dough - the BBC Radio 4 series which looks at the business behind profitable everyday products and where the smart money might take them next.
In each episode, Sam, and the futurist, Tom Cheesewright, are joined by product manufacturers and industry experts whose inside knowledge gives a new appreciation for the everyday things that we often take for granted.
Together they look back on a product?s earliest (sometimes ridiculous!) iterations, discuss how a product has evolved and the trends which have driven its profitability.
In this episode on washing machines, they hear from expert guests including:
- Teresa Arbuckle - Regional Managing Director for the UK and Ireland at the washing machine manufacturer, Beko Europe- John Elliott MBE - the founder and chairman of Ebac which make washing machines in County Durham- Paul Hide - chief executive of the Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances
They trade opinions on the washing machine's 'game-changing' innovations and its most pointless, or least effective, ones too, before Tom draws on his expertise as a futurist to imagine what doing the laundry might be like in the decades to come.
Dough is produced by Jon Douglas and is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in the spring when 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, Dough is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds
Sliced Bread
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 on 3 July, 2025. 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. For this brand new series of Toast, episodes will be released weekly on Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you?re in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode on BBC Sounds first, a week earlier than anywhere else.
Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.
- No. of episodes: 157
- Latest episode: 2025-05-29
- Health & Fitness Science
Where can you listen?
