Upgrade Me looked interesting, but unfortunately went something like this:
“Hi, I’m Simon Armitage a succesful poet and completely unqualified to actually talk about this subject, but I love gadgets and the BBC loves “name” presenters. I’m on my tenth phone already and while I love gadgets, I feel a vague unease about it all. Let me go to John Lewis and talk about how John Lewis completely revamps their John Lewis product lines in their John Lewis stores every six months. Now I’m talking to some kids of some nicely multicultural London school and see how many technogadgets they have. They all would love to have an IPhone. Oh look, I’m showing them my generation’s portable media player — a battery operated turntable. Now onwards to the future, courtesy of Samsung, as I travel to South Korea, home of Samsung, to talk about the Samsung future. It’s a bit scary and not very English and although I can set up a Skype videocall with my wife, I don’t use the internet enough to find what Manchester United did yesterday. So let’s go home and meet a lovely English eccentric that has lived without gadgets or indeed electricity for years. It’s very nice and I think I could live that way too, but I do need my e-mail and mobile phone, not so much the washing machine. This woman is a modern day Luddite and I make it clear I have no clue what motivates the real Luddites but ascribe to them my own vague sense of discomfort about material things, just like I keep assuming the seventies when I grew up was much less gadget obsessed than today. Anway, the conclusion is that it’s all very difficult and there are two sides to every story but I had fun meeting all sorts of people on the BBC’s tab.”