大象传媒

Thirty years ago years ago, in March 1995, a fresh-faced Claudia Hammond arrived at the 大象传媒 for a job interview as a trainee science producer. To prepare, she put together a comprehensive list of science and health stories, ready to pitch at the interview.

Fast forward to the present day and Claudia, now an award-winning broadcaster and presenter of Radio 4鈥檚 All in the Mind, is sorting through the drawer of paper she keeps to recycle in her printer and she discovers the list of stories she鈥檇 prepared to pitch at that interview three decades earlier.

In this quirky, personal journey, Claudia revisits five ideas from her Ideas List to find out what happened next. She tracks each headline-grabbing story forward through the false-starts and dead ends, the surprises and successes. And she asks what each tale teaches us about the tortuous path of scientific progress.

In the first episode she looks into a bold experiment in digital cash which aimed to consign notes and coins to history.

Mondex looked like any other debit or credit card but it wasn鈥檛 associated with a bank account. The money was right there on the card and it was designed to be used for all those smaller purchases where cash was king, from a lunchtime sandwich to a pint in your local.

Swindon was chosen as the place to trial Mondex and in July 1995, amid a blaze of publicity, the card was launched in the town centre. The first official Mondex transaction was a copy of the local paper, the Swindon Advertiser.

Claudia meets one of the inventors of Mondex, Tim Jones. He tells her about the moment of inspiration which turned digital cash from a bright idea into reality. We also hear from Rob Jamieson whose job it was to win hearts and minds for Mondex among the businesses and residents of Swindon. And photographer Richard Wintle recalls the excitement of launch day, when the eyes of the world were on the Wiltshire town.

Producers: Florian Bohr and Jeremy Grange