A RADIO DEBATE

Huge by-election results last night so naturally Radio 5 Live were debating whether toasters might have had their day.

“I just feel,” said an impassioned lady, “That the toaster’s been around too long. You know, we all loved having a landline phone in our house; now we’ve got smartphones, so it’s clearly time for the toaster to modernise.”

She paused for a heartbeat.

“Or, I suppose, we should embrace the grill for its true purpose.”

I laughed out loud, but had anyone been in the car to hear it, they would certainly have heard its hollow tone. It was more of a scoff, if anything.

Someone else came on to defend the poor old toaster. The grill, they said, was way more energy intensive, and it was ridiculous to go back to it. Oh and they weren’t a millennial, they wanted to stress, hinting that the conversation might have been started by a young person. I switched off the radio and shook my head.

If the argument is that something needs to modernise because it’s simply been around too long, then we are all in trouble. I mean all of us, as a species, not just anyone over 35, and not just the toaster. What kind of society would we be if we discarded things based on age alone?

In my opinion, the toaster is basically a perfect solution to the question of how you cook bread quickly, both sides at once, without burning the house down. I noticed that the anti-toaster voice (to be fair, she might not have been a millennial) was offering no replacement or improvement to the toaster - only criticism. Pipe down, lady. And anyway she couldn’t, because if you think about it, there is literally no way to improve on it.

Now, don’t get me wrong - there are tweaks. You could make a toaster faster, more efficient, more configurable. You could adapt one to accommodate hot cross buns, or maybe a cheese sandwich, and you could even figure out a way for it to vacuum its own crumbs! That would be something! But listen, that is still a toaster. It would be a very fancy toaster, certainly, but undoubtedly in the recognisable category… of toasters.

I think the radio has lost its way. They set up debates between opposing vehement opinions and then sit like umpires in the middle, poking either side to get riled up. Who’s right? Who’s an idiot? They don’t care as long as the rest of us keep listening and boosting their RAJAR figures. Toast? By-elections? Political opinions? Sports? Ding dong, ping pong, battle royale.

I can’t believe that lady didn’t realise that the smartphone was simply an evolution of the same device we used to have in our houses. I mean fair enough, it combines with a computer, a camera, a camcorder, a dictaphone, a notepad, a radio, a TV, a Walkman, a calculator and about a thousand other useful things, but it is still essentially a telephone. That’s happened because of technology, and the convergence of the internet with handheld micronised electrical components over the last thirty years. Was she really suggesting that toasters could be mobile one day? What a load of nonsense. 

People continue to eat toast. And sometimes they tune in to the radio to hear news about by-election results while they’re at it. So I say chomp, chomp, chomp, and long live the toaster.