Digital Planet

» see bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002w6r2 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The final edition is called "Digital Planet says goodbye", it runs to 52 minutes, and the broadcast date on it is Tuesday 28 March 2023. Most of it is given to Gordon Moore, who had died four days earlier. The BBC's own episode page describes him as "the father of the transistor", which he was not; he co-founded Intel and wrote the observation about doubling that got named after him. A technology show's last broadcast was an obituary with a mistake in it, which is a very human way to go off air.

It started in August 2001 under the name Go Digital, with a brief to look at the way digital technology was changing people's lives around the world. Producer Julian Siddle, writing in 2006, recalled that people inside the BBC had doubted there would be enough technology stories to sustain it beyond a few weeks. The other early complaint was about the development angle, along the lines of what do they need computers for when they need roads or water, and the show kept answering that one for two decades.

Tracey Logan presented it from 2001 to 2005, during the years when it was among the handful of BBC broadcasts being webcast, with cameras in the studio feeding a live picture. Gareth Mitchell had been a guest presenter since the start and took it over full time on 11 January 2005. He had trained as a broadcast engineer and moved across because, as he put it, the people having all the good fun were the creative types in the studios.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names in twenty-two years ~

Go Digital became Digital Planet on 28 March 2006, announced the day before on the BBC News site as a title evolving rather than ending. On 29 March 2011 it was renamed Click, to make the family resemblance with the television show obvious, and the running time was cut from 28 minutes to 18. It took its own name back in the episode of 1 May 2019 and kept it for the last four years.

~ the bookmark that went around the world ~

From 2016 the Digital Planet Listeners group on Facebook ran a game with a hashtag on it. Mitchell's copy of Jamie Bartlett's The Dark Net, carrying a bookmark that Justine Rykiel had drawn of Mitchell in his usual checked shirt, was posted from listener to listener around the world. It came back to him.

That was the audience it had. It went out on shortwave and satellite to places where the technology story was not the product launch, and the listeners wrote in from all of them. The archive still holds 710 episodes.

~ how the BBC ended it ~

On 29 September 2022, shortly after a 21st-birthday edition broadcast as-live from the Radio Theatre at Old Broadcasting House, the World Service published its proposals for a digital-first service and Digital Planet was on the list to go. The audience knew before the hosts said anything; the listeners group was already discussing the proposal that week.

At the end of the broadcast on Tuesday 21 March 2023, Mitchell told the audience that the following week's episode would be the last one. It was. In April, Mitchell and Bill Thompson started The Gareth and BillCast between them, and at the end of October 2023 the show's producer Ania Lichtarowicz launched Somewhere on Earth with Mitchell presenting. The old brand page is still standing at bbc.co.uk, and under the heading "Available now" it offers you Tech Life.

The World Service was never the part of the BBC I had trouble getting hold of. The signal reached Turkey the same as it reached anywhere, and an English-language technology show is about as reachable as anything on this site gets. I read mine instead, and twenty-one years of a weekly broadcast went past while I did it.

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