A Chat with Jason Bradbury, Host at The Gadget Show

Tell us about yourself and how you got into technology?

I’ve got the eighties to thank for my obsession with technology. I would equate the time we’re living in now, very much with the 1980s and what felt like the almost daily arrival of new and exotic tech. Tech was everywhere, in the shops, on the TV, in the comic books and in our homes.

Our current content consumption habits have their roots in the arrival of the VCR in most homes, skateboarding, mobile phones, electric bikes and fun personal vehicles (I refer to the Sinclair C5 I currently have charging in my garage down here in Cornwall where I live), modern DJing, street dancing to the hip hop, electric and house that spawned modern dance music. Even our clothes were outward expressions of technology, exotic new sneakers, jackets adorned with vibrant flashes of colour and made of new plastics.

And of course, the movies were helping all of us to imagine the future – I defy anyone to watch Back to the Future and not dream of hoverboards! And need we mention video games! I was eleven in 1980 so more than anything, that decade imbued me with an abiding fascination with tech and gadgets. I should also mention that my dad ran a plastics company and was always bringing home prototype computers and gadgets from startups he was thinking of working with which fed my early love of tech.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m doing two things, I’m co-hosting The Gadget Show Podcast with the lovely Suzi Perry – and I’m making a movie! We are shooting the podcast mere metres from the old TV show’s studios, in Digbeth, Birmingham so it’s a little déjà vu. The old chemistry was back the second I walked in after not working with Suzi for the best part of 10 years.

The podcast is like a caravan to the swanky family home the old TV series was – a smaller, more compact, yet cool-in-its-own-right version of the series that people loved. And I should say, people did love the old show, they tell me on the street every day! So, yeah, I’m driving up to Brum and talking heat-seeking binoculars with Jon Bentley, Air Fryers with Ortis, and buzzing Suzi Perry with drones and electric skateboards while she gracefully keeps everything moving with her effortless professionalism – and I’m loving every second of it.

Oh yeah, and the movie? I’ve written a feature film called Ctrl AI Delete (www.ctrlaidelete.net) that’s going to Kickstarter in September. It’s about the rollout of a rogue AI that sends the western world into blackout, leaving a band of retro gamers with Commodore 64s and ZX Spectrums to hack it and save the world. You see, it’s that eighties tech thing again!

How have you seen technology products evolve in the past few years?

Until just a year or so ago, I would have gone with cloud connectivity for this answer, the interconnected, or Internet of Things, thing, but like many people, I’m sat in awe of the speed of AI’s deployment into so much tech. Everything from health apps, to games, office and business solutions, music, video, communications, cyber security, you name it, AI is the new kid on the block.

And with its deployment locally, by which I mean the roll-out of on-chip AI by the likes of Apple and Microsoft, the cloud connectivity, which is currently throttling AI’s potential in so much hardware, it’s exponential growth will continue. Think glasses with mixed reality displays that paint the street in front of you with virtual assets and a kind of Jarvis-like personal digital butler answering your every question.

What technologies are you most excited about right now?

I’m loving all the AI stories coming out of labs and start-ups and chip manufacturers right now, but in broader terms, the rise in fitness tech is exciting. I’m big into the gym and health and the new smart-rings that are coming (potentially from Apple and Samsung) with the promise of new innovation in Apple Watch-like heart and health functionality is interesting. I’m big into VR and a more affordable, wear-all-day, Vision Pro-style solution seems tantalisingly close.

Any innovation in personal electric vehicles always excites me, so electric bikes, surfboards like the Fliteboard (I live five mins from several surf beaches in Cornwall) and the One-Wheel I ride to get my morning coffee, this sector often produces new products that get me itching to reach for the credit card. I’m also a fan of filming and photography and my movie project has given me an excuse to buy a cinema lens for my camera – predictably it’s an anamorphic lens, so it produces that cinematic lens flare synonymous with 80s films. There’s a huge amount of innovation in the camera and video market, from stabilising gimbals and affordable Hollywood-grade lenses that still makes it worth having a camera above and beyond the insanely good cameras most of our phones now have.