DT25016 Smartphones taking over your life. V01 300825

 Copyright The Times

Digital ID compounds smartphone dystopia

Just as the world is understanding how damaging they are for our brains and souls, this plan makes them compulsory

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James Marriott @j_amesmarriott

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James Marriott

Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, as I am hardly the first to observe, was the true prophet of our times. The dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World in which the works of Shakespeare are suppressed and citizens pacified with addictive entertainment technologies is truer to the dark side of the 21st century (at least in the democratic West) than the totalitarian austerity of Airstrip One. And yet “Orwellian” remains the most overused adjective in political discourse.

Well, let me give Huxley his due by remarking that the idea of government-mandated personal entertainment devices has something not Orwellian but “Huxleyan” about it.

One effect of the government’s digital ID card proposals will be to make smartphone ownership virtually compulsory. The ID card, essential for the right to work, will be held as a digital file in a virtual “wallet” on your smartphone.

Bizarrely, at the very moment society is waking up to the harms addictive digital devices are inflicting on children they may become mandatory for adults.

I swapped my smartphone for a “dumb phone” a couple of years ago and count it one of the best decisions I have ever made. I estimate I have already redeemed thousands of hours of useful reading, writing, deep focus and thinking from the hypnotising vortex of the screen.

Those who still believe the antismartphone position is Luddite, snobbish, fogeyish or crankish (I’ve heard it all) haven’t been paying attention to the accumulating data. Smartphones’ persistent, focusshattering distractions and the infantilising diet of “brain rot” content they feed users is fuelling a major crisis of human flourishing and intelligence.

Since the widespread adoption of smartphones in the 2010s, Pisa scores (the renowned international measure of student ability) have begun to fall. The OECD reports that adult skills in literacy and numeracy “declined or stagnated” in most developed countries over the same period. IQ also seems to have begun to decline.

As is more widely understood, the isolation and relentless social comparison fostered by phones is causing a mental health catastrophe.

Teenage girls are famously on the front line: a recent survey found most of them experience “persistent sadness or hopelessness” and that 30 per cent have considered suicide.

But few people are totally immune. A University of Texas study found that blocking the internet from phones improved users’ mental health so dramatically the effects were comparable to antidepressant medication.

No government will ever ban phones. But at the very least participation in the unfolding calamity of phone addiction must be optional not compulsory.

The greatest fortunes are staked on keeping you glued to a screen

The chance to opt out of smartphone ownership entirely is vital because phones are not, as I am still sometimes told, merely a “neutral technology” or a “tool”. Though it is true that smartphones are useful — few people are more vividly aware than I am of the advantages of Google Maps — they are also engineered to consume your entire life. We know this because Silicon Valley whistleblowers have been telling us so for years.

Screen addiction is the foundation of big tech’s ad-based business model.

The more time you spend online, the more ads you see and the more algorithms can track your movements to serve you even better ads. Some of the greatest fortunes in the world are staked on keeping you glued to your screen whatever the cost to the rest of your life.

As the former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris put it, every time you try to put down your smartphone “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen” who have been paid enormous salaries to stop you.

A sophisticated array of push notifications, infinite scroll technology, short form video and auto-playing content keep us hooked. Notifications arrive piecemeal rather than in regular batches because psychologists know random reward patterns reinforce compulsive checking behaviours. It is counterintuitive to people unfamiliar with behavioural psychology that such apparently trivial stratagems should overwhelm that grandsounding abstraction “human willpower”. But it is so.

The average Briton now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen.

For Gen Z the figure is nine hours, even as clear majorities tell surveys they don’t want to use their phones so much and almost half say they wish TikTok had never been invented. Modern students, The Times estimates, will spend 25 years of their waking lives on their phones.

It is rarely enough to fall back on willpower or to delete a few of the most pernicious social media apps. In the battle against your smartphone, you are not supposed to win. Even seemingly benign apps like Gmail are designed to build compulsive habits.

Features designed to limit phone use are deliberately pathetic.

It’s true that digital ID may never happen. And if it does, exceptions may be made this time round. But the direction of travel is clear. There is talk of digital passports and digital driving licences. Many companies, especially banks, are determined to drive customers on to apps. A friend has to use his phone to get into his office.

Most people will not get rid of their smartphones. Work or family responsibilities already make quitting unrealistic for many. Some people even appear to be immune to screen addiction.

But I believe a resistance movement has a future. Good alternatives to smartphones are increasingly available — my dumb phone even has Google Maps. Judging by the number of emails I get from young readers wanting advice on quitting their phones there is appetite for a fightback. Brave New World must remain optional.

DT25015 The Rocky Horror Picture Show. V01 250925

 

Nell Campbell as Columbia

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It was the hit play that became a flop film, only to grow into a cult phenomenon. It was a homage to old horror films that became a celebration of queerness. And it only came about because in 1972 Richard O’Brien, having just become a father, was sacked from the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, found himself in desperate need of money and work, and wrote a musical for the Royal Court Theatre in London to pocket the £200 writing fee. Now his son Linus O’Brien, 53, has made Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, a documentary that follows the 50-year journey of not only the play and film, but his father too.

“I first saw the stage version of Rocky Horror when I was four, at the [long-gone Kings Road cinema] Essoldo,” Linus says. “The cast acted as usherettes, directing everyone to their seats while wearing these clear plastic masks, and I remember feeling it was ominous, threatening … and incredibly exciting.”

He is speaking from his apartment in downtown Los Angeles while his father joins us from his home in Tauranga, New Zealand. In 2017 a bronze statue of Richard’s character, Riff Raff, the resentful servant of Tim Curry’s mad scientist Frank-N-Furter, was erected in Hamilton, the town where he grew up, about 50 miles from where he now lives. It’s a sign of just how far Rocky Horror has come; of its enduring influence against the odds. Fifty years after a critically and commercially disastrous initial outing, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has become the longest running theatrical release in global history. Going to see the film in a cinema dressed as your favourite character, talking back at the screen and generally whooping it up is a rite of passage — particularly on Halloween — while its themes of sexual liberation have been embraced by the LGBT community. A 4K remastered version is screening at cinemas this autumn.

“My first reaction on seeing the documentary was relief,” says Richard, 83. “Companies all over the world had been approaching me about making one, but I was worried that they would come with an agenda. That’s why I was pleased when Linus said he wanted to do it.”

That agenda concerns Richard’s complex relationship with gender. Having felt conflicted about his sexuality since childhood, now he believes he is 70 per cent male, 30 per cent female. “None of us have asked to be born male or female, none of us asked to have blue eyes or brown eyes, and none of us have asked to be born straight or gay. It just happens,” Richard says. “When I was six and a half, I said to my brother that I wanted to be the fairy princess. The response made me bring down the shutters for decades.”

I wonder whether father and son discussed this when Linus was growing up. “All I knew was that there was a deep level of frustration in my dad until he could proclaim how he felt,” Linus says. “It was sad to see at times.”

“In a binary world, it’s a curse,” Richard confirms.

He tackled the issue in Rocky Horror, albeit in a fun, campy way. It is the Adam and Eve story with a bit of Frankenstein thrown in: two innocents, Brad and Janet, enter an old dark house to be seduced by Frank-N-Furter, a metaphorical snake in fishnets and high heels, who is busy making the perfect muscle man after an earlier creation, a rock’n’roll biker played in the film by Meat Loaf, goes horribly wrong. Barry Bostwick’s Brad is the all-American male who ends up in an orgy in a swimming pool; Susan Sarandon’s Janet is the repressed good girl who discovers her freedom. As Sarandon says in the documentary, “Janet wants to be loyal to her idiot boyfriend while opening herself up to sexuality. I think the film is about saying yes.”

Before the film came the musical: a product of experimental theatre, the emerging gay rights movement and glam rock. Curry, Patricia Quinn (Magenta) and the costume designer Sue Blane first met at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, the groundbreaking centre of experimental theatre in Britain at the time. In 1971, Curry and Blane worked on an all-male production of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Citizens. A year later, Blane received a call from Harriet Cruickshank, former manager of the Citizens, who had taken over the 63-seat Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. Cruickshank had agreed to stage a production of The Rocky Horror Show with the Australian director Jim Sharman on board, but now there were only two weeks to pull the whole thing together.

“Harriet said she was desperate,” Blane remembers. “Jim Sharman was plaguing her to find a costume designer for this rather odd musical. An hour later, Jim, who had directed Richard O’Brien in Jesus Christ Superstar, arrived in a pair of white platform boots. That’s where it all began.” Blane brought a corset she had designed for The Maids to use for Frank-N-Furter’s outfit in Rocky Horror, and put the whole look together on a very small budget.

The Royal Court had a tradition of high-minded experimentation, but Richard was a lover of B-movies, comic books and rock’n’roll.

“With the exception of Little Nell Campbell [who plays Columbia], a tap-dancing busker who was working as Jim Sharman’s cleaner, we were all actors,” Richard says of the original team. “I had been to the Actors’ Workshop, but I was a lowbrow who thought entertainment was divine. The Royal Court was about muscular theatre, serious social issues. Yet the most famous production to have emerged from it is Rocky Horror.”

Rocky Horror opened on June 19, 1973, and was an instant hit. The record producer Jonathan King came to watch it on the second night, having read a glowing review by Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail, and offered to put out the soundtrack, which he recorded with the cast in a day and released two weeks later. In a review for Punch, Barry Humphries called Rocky Horror “impossible to overpraise”. London’s gay community embraced the musical, while Vincent Price, David Bowie, Rudolf Nureyev and Elliott Gould were among the stars who came to see what all the fuss was about.

Mick and Bianca Jagger attended what should have been the last night at the Royal Court, but the performance was cancelled because, according to Quinn, “Raynor Bourton [Rocky] was in agony after getting glitter under his foreskin. It was made of powdered glass in those days.”

The record producer Lou Adler turned up to Rocky Horror at the behest of Britt Ekland, his girlfriend at the time, and immediately saw its potential. “The ambience, the usherettes, the outfits … It was an event,” Adler says. “I thought, this could run for a long time in LA. Maybe for ever.”

Adler duly staged the musical at the Roxy, a music venue on Sunset Strip, casting Meat Loaf as Eddie. Los Angeles audiences did indeed love the glam theatricality of it all, but New York was a different story. In 1975, the production moved to the august Belasco Theatre on 44th Street and bombed, not least because it was dismissed as a vulgar LA import.

If Susan Sarandon mentions getting pneumonia again, I’ll scream

“New York sees itself as chic and LA as a tart,” Richard reasons. “They have the Met, after all.”

The real problems began with the film, which was shot in England. Adler had the good sense to use most of the play’s original cast and crew, which meant the Americans Bostwick and Sarandon were entering an unfamiliar, close-knit world, mirroring the experience of Brad and Janet. Everyone worked day and night because budget constraints made the three-week shoot at Bray Studios in Berkshire preposterously short, and after shooting the orgy scene in the swimming pool Bostwick and Sarandon became ill, getting little sympathy from the hardy Brits.

“Susan Sarandon has dined out on her pneumonia for 50 years,” Quinn says with exquisite dismissiveness. “If she mentions it again, I shall scream.” Quinn also had to deal with shooting the lip sequence that opens the film, miming to Science Fiction/Double Feature with her head clamped in a vice to stop it going out of frame. When her husband called in the middle of the shoot to ask for a divorce, she shouted, “Tell him I’m clamped!”

The film came out in 1975 and was a flop. There the story should have ended. But a year later, The Rocky Horror Picture Show landed a midnight slot at the Waverly Theatre in New York, where a young actor called Sal Piro started the “shadow cast” phenomenon in which audience members would don make-up, fishnets and high heels, answer lines and generally become a part of the show. The cult of Rocky Horror was born.

“My dad talks about how seeing the shadow cast with the film playing in the background created something altogether new,” Linus says. “It was a unique form of performance art.”

What, then, is the enduring appeal of Rocky Horror? “At least 50 per cent of it is the music,” Linus says. “At every screening, fans get to sing and dance together to their favourite album. Then you have Tim’s incredible performance. Throw in the Fifties B-movies, the sexual liberation and the sense of connection for people who have felt marginalised and you can see why it has become a phenomenon.”

“I suppose it’s: ‘Don’t dream it, be it,’” Richard concludes, quoting the film’s most famous line. “In Rocky Horror there is no judgment on the way people look or the way they choose to live. It is a homage to the lowbrow, a hymn to the ordinary.”
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is in cinemas on October 

DT25014 Barry Kelly - Polymath V01 190925

 

When the polymath and wit Barry Kelly was at medical school at Queen’s University, Belfast, his younger brother Owen lost his A-level revision notes. They finally turned up, with the “pages mysteriously cut up and stitched back together again with black thread’’. Thinking they were scrap paper, Barry had been practising suturing in anticipation of a glittering surgical career.

His dedication reflected “an extremely conscientious’’ student who, Owen said, “always did his homework straightaway — even on a Friday — so that he would have more time to revise for an exam that was still months away’’.

It was, finally, as a radiologist, writer and speaker that Kelly made his mark. According to his Bristol consultant colleague, Dr Paul McCoubrie, the author of Rules of Radiology, Kelly was “the Stephen Fry of radiology’’. He was credited with bridging the gap between what the novelist CP Snow called “The Two Cultures’’ — “the gulf of mutual incomprehension’’ between the sciences and the humanities.

His well-reviewed volume of short stories, The Docameron, published this January, highlighted the breadth of his interests, including Irish mythology, geopolitics, quantum physics and medical ethics.

Binding together art, poetry, literature, history, philosophy, science and medicine, his talks and lectures reflected a lifelong love of learning and an unwavering commitment to the founding principles of the NHS.

In 2019 he became only the third radiologist since 1827 to deliver the annual oration to the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast (RVH). Medical lectures rarely have such alluring titles as “The Rime of the Ancient Imager: Plato’s Cave and Other Shadows’’. Acknowledging his paraphrasing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the title, Kelly said that, ‘“like the flawed and wizened old mariner’’, he would present some pointers to a rapidly changing future.

Underlining the critical importance of compassionate medicine in a world of algorithms, he called upon his student audience to respect the critical importance of appropriate language to treat patients. He added: “Words are our scalpels. We need to be careful with them.”

A staunch advocate for professional wellbeing throughout his career, Kelly also emphasised the need for doctors to look after themselves, pointing out that the General Medical Council had struck off more than 170 doctors in the previous year, mostly “for reasons we don’t like to discuss”.

Kelly added: “At least 10 per cent of medical students and doctors have significant psychological issues. These are widespread and various but include addiction, personality issues, stress, burnout and so on. Two per cent of us are bipolar and we know that 1 per cent are potentially suicidal.

“This problem is increasing, particularly for junior doctors, due to what has been named the ‘toxic environment of uncertainty’. In their earlier school and university days there was always a solution and they would find it. In our chaotic world of 21st-century medicine with its multifactorial problems, understaffing and budgetary restrictions, they can crumble all too easily.”

Kelly’s talks would bind together art, poetry, philosophy, history and literature

Barry Kelly was born in 1961, the eldest of four children of Owen Kelly, a writer, podiatrist and teacher, and his wife, Mary (née McGerrigan).

Excelling at St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School, young Barry read medicine at Queen’s, initially specialising in surgery.

Switching to radiology he became, in 1995, one of the few Catholic consultants at the RVH.

He met his wife, Susan (née Clarke), a nurse, while working as a surgeon. They had two daughters: Katie, a dermatologist in Glasgow, and Rosie, a foundation doctor completing postgraduate medical training in Aberdeen.

Kelly’s easygoing, charming but commanding manner and formidable intellect was a prerequisite for high office, including stints as dean of the Faculty of Radiologists and Radiation Oncologists at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; and as president of the Ulster Radiological Society. He was also honorary reader in radiology at Queen’s University Belfast, and a professor at the University of Ulster.

A central figure in European radiology, he not only helped design and implement the European Society of Radiology (ERS) audit scheme but also establish radiation protection standards in collaborations with bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Susan said that she and her daughters benefited immensely from his love of scholarship. He encouraged her to obtain her history degree, master’s and PhD. Kelly also loved the seaside family house in Donegal where he would garden, paddle-board, write and sit by the fire with Maple, the family dog.

He documented many memories in Donegal, including a talk in Dublin to an audience full of doctors recalling how much money they were making from private practice. As he was about to introduce Kelly, the chair said: “Remind me again, Dr Kelly. What is your speciality?” Kelly replied: “Radiology for the poor.”

Barry Kelly, doctor, was born on June 14, 1961. He died of cancer on June 22, 2025, aged 64

DT25013 A film about Porridge V01 150925

 

Kevin Maher preparing his porridge

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When is a bowl of porridge not a bowl of porridge? The moment it becomes the star of a lovingly crafted film about a Scottish cooking contest — and a sly metaphor for a nourishing retreat from the mania of modernity into the arms of community and human warmth and decency.

No, really, porridge does all that in The Golden Spurtle, a documentary about the World Porridge Making Championship. Set in the quaint Highlands village of Carrbridge, it follows eccentric contestants from around the globe as they attempt to capture the most exquisite combination possible of water, salt and untreated oatmeal to snag the coveted Golden Spurtle trophy.

“I’d just like to mention that I cook mine the Scottish way, which is with water,” says the Carrbridge stationmaster, Chris, early in the documentary, while staring into the camera. Soon an Australian contestant, Toby, frets: “I just don’t know if my porridge is good enough.” A former champion called Ian proudly announces: “Medium oatmeal, soaked overnight, and the salt goes in at the very end. That’s all there is to it.” Then the competition’s chief organiser, Charlie Miller, asks: “Why is there no monument to porridge in this land?”

"The pinnacle of porridge making is the holy trinity: water, oats and salt

The tone is often slightly tongue in cheek but always affectionate.

Carrbridge, the competition and the villagers are filmed by the 35-year-old Australian opera director Constantine Costi as if he’s capturing a fairytale milieu — like something, he says, from The Wind in the Willows. Costi is a “friend of a friend” of the film’s Aussie oatmeal enthusiast, Toby, so when he heard of the competition in 2022 he flew to Scotland, drove to Carrbridge and was instantly beguiled by the overwhelming sense of kind communal values among the mostly ageing populace (roughly 700-strong).

He knew immediately that he had to make a documentary here, he says, but one that did more than just chart the progress of the porridge contest.

“I’ve seen a million competition documentaries and they can be quite formulaic,” he says, referring to a genre that includes Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom and The King of Kong.

“Hopefully the joy of this film for audiences is that it’s part of that genre but it also takes it somewhere else.”

Charting the 2023 competition, Costi constructs his documentary like a Wes Anderson film, with lots of gorgeous, colourful and artfully designed frames featuring deadpan contestants delivering some standout and real-life one-liners that would sit comfortably in any Anderson screenplay. The former champion, Ian, fretting outside the venue, says: “I mean, I was into the martial arts big time. And now I’m standing here thinking about porridge.”

Costi says that he’s flattered by the Anderson comparisons (“a great, great director”), and though he was also influenced by Peter Greenaway and “lots of Bruegel paintings”, the point of the film was not about the look but the heart, as well as to show busy, bombarded contemporary audiences a quiet place that understands, even cherishes, the honour of simple pleasures.

“We’ve shown this film around the world, in everywhere from Sydney to Copenhagen, and the emotional response from the audience is always the same,” he says. “At a time of global chaos they seem to be connecting to the actual place in the film and to what it appears to offer, which is something that we want and potentially miss at the moment.”

And no, he doesn’t mean a bowl of porridge. Although he has refused to eat porridge since making the film.

“My problem is that I have eaten genuinely the best porridge in the world, you know? You can’t go back to a shitbox car when you’ve been driving Ferraris all day.”

We drift on to the subject of traditional rights and wrongs in the oatmeal game. Alongside the main Golden Spurtle competition is a section for “speciality recipes” with additional, say, smoked fish and spinach. Costi didn’t cover that in his film because he didn’t have the running time and, well, “it’s just less interesting when you can throw anything into it”.

I ask him for his opinion on my daily porridge fix, which includes golden linseeds, chia seeds, raisins and coconut oil, and he replies, smiling kindly, “The question is, when you start drowning it in so many different ingredients, when does it stop being porridge? Whereas the pinnacle of porridge making is really the holy trinity of those three ingredients — water, oats and salt.”

Costi also reveals, with a halfglazed look of ecstasy, that the best porridge he tasted while in Carrbridge was made by the competition finalist Nick Barnard, co-founder of the food company Rude Health. “When you taste porridge at that elite level it’s something more akin to risotto, where it doesn’t get that gluggy, pasty texture. There’s a bite to it, while it’s sitting in a kind of broth. It’s quite delicious.”

Costi, who is juggling two new films with a repertoire production of La bohème for Opera Australia, says that, underneath everything it suggests about porridge and quaint village life, The Golden Spurtle is really asking: “What happens when you do quit the rat race or when you retire? What’s at the heart of this film is the question of what will actually fulfil you. And, of course, there’s no real answer to that.”

The Golden Spurtle is in cinemas

Serves 2 

Ingredients 
1 cup oatmeal (jumbo oats) 
2 cups oat milk (oat milk on oats! Exceptionally oaty!) 
I cup raisins 
1 tbsp coconut oil 
2 tbsp golden linseeds 
1 tbsp chia seeds 
2 tsp cinnamon 
¼ tsp rock salt

Method 
Dump it all in a saucepan, bring it to the boil, simmer for 1 to 10 min depending on urgency, then eat.

DT25012 Ranking and Sacking V01 070925

 

Copyright The Sunday Times (070925) 

How would you feel if your boss told you that, no matter how well the company does in the next year, those deemed the worst-performing staff will be out the door?

This is the reality facing thousands of Lloyds Banking Group staff after it was reported last week that the UK’s largest high street bank is overhauling its “performance management” programme, with about 3,000 people among the bottom 5 per cent potentially facing the boot. Despite outrage on social media — one LinkedIn writer said they felt “sickened to see human beings ... reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet” — the truth is that performance management has been around for decades. This HR process, used by organisations to set goals and track progress, was very severe when popularised by Jack Welch, then boss of General Electric, in the 1980s . He had a “rank and yank” approach where staff were graded on a curve. The top 20 per cent were then rewarded, the middle 70 per cent developed, and the bottom 10 per cent fired each year. He argued that this relentless culling kept GE lean, competitive and packed with top talent.

Where GE led, others followed. It is thought that management consultants, law firms, investment banks and some of the world’s largest tech firms, including Amazon and Uber, have used “up or out” models. Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder, is said to favour the “keeper test” where managers regularly assess whether they would fight to keep an employee; if not, the individual is let go with a generous severance package.

But what place does such tough love have in today’s business environment? Proponents say rigorous performance management is vital for competitiveness.

With UK productivity growth still sluggish and employment costs at an alltime high, many leaders want more bang for their buck and feel they cannot afford to carry staff who fail to deliver.

Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, said she is “not against” this HR process if it is “transparent” and “objective” — and not “all about who does the best job of catering to the boss”.

One argument in favour of these schemes is that if high-flyers see weaker colleagues shielded indefinitely from the consequences of poor performance, confidence in the system collapses. Taking decisive action against consistent underachievers, this thinking goes, protects those who deliver. “If you’re a high performer, you don’t want somebody who’s ... just skiving along and getting promoted,” said Francke.

Another factor is that for many firms, their revolving doors have stopped spinning and few employees are leaving or new ones arriving. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the Lloyds story, the bank is keen to increase staff turnover, which is now thought to be about 5 per cent against a historic rate of 15 per cent. A decent level of churn is thought preferable as new staff bring fresh perspectives, skills and ideas into a business, which can prevent stagnation and foster innovation.

However, critics warn that cutting a fixed percentage of staff is a blunt instrument. In a tight labour market, it risks forcing out capable people simply because the “curve” demands it.

Collaboration between colleagues can suffer, too, as they feel pitted against one another in a “survival of the fittest” culture, said David D’Souza at the CIPD, the professional body for HR staff. “It creates an environment where you are trying to out-compete the people around you because you don’t want to be in that bottom category and you want the rewards from the top category.”

And it’s not easy to get it right. The latest Management and Expectations Survey for the Office for National Statistics found that British companies score just 0.42 out of 1 on using key performance indicators, such as setting formal targets, regularly monitoring progress and acting on the data accordingly.

Despite the potential pitfalls, a tightening labour market could mean other organisations follow in Lloyds’ footsteps. Employment fell by 0.5 per cent in the three months to August — the largest decline since 2021 — according to a survey from the Bank of England published last week.

“In the pandemic, all the power was with the employee, but now everything’s tightening,” said Francke. “There’s also the rise of AI and all of that is creating greater concern about job security, which means the balance is shifting back in favour of the employer. So this kind of performance management culture, I think, will come back.”

The smart approach seems to be not toughness for its own sake but fairness and clarity. That means setting clear goals, giving timely feedback and addressing underperformance with coaching and support, before moving to staff departures. A system that develops people while acting decisively when improvement fails is more sustainable than ritual sackings.

This means the firms most likely to thrive will be those that stretch people to excel — and know when to let go without turning performance management into a bloodsport. hannah.prevett@sundaytimes.co.uk

DT25011 Meeting AI Assistant V01 040925

 PCPRO October 2015

Barry Collins is available for meetings between 7pm and 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, chiefly in the pub. Book in with his AI assistant at barry@ mediabc.co.uk. @bazzacollins

One of the many things I don’t miss about working in an office is the meetings. When I edited PC Pro, at least half my day was spent in meeting rooms. Meetings with my publisher, my team, the ads team, marketing, subscriptions, press briefings. I once had a meeting where the athlete Roger Black brought doughnuts to my desk. This was the point I decided to give up drinking. 

That was getting on for 15 years ago. Nowadays, you’re probably not shuttling from one glass cubicle to another, but sat in front of your screen, jockeying between Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. Maybe a Slack Huddle or two in between. You don’t have to make polite conversation by the watercooler or loom like Reggie Kray at the door to hurry up an over-running meeting in your booked room, but the meetings drain is still real. It’s just moved online. 

Little wonder, then, that people are increasingly tempted to send an AI proxy to their meetings. Services such as Otter, Teams and Google all allow you to log into a meeting, switch off the camera and have an AI assistant transcribe the meeting, delivering a summary of all the key takeaways and action points once it’s over. Why bother going at all? 

Otter.ai plans to take this even further. It already allows you to have an AI assistant sit in on your behalf, able to field questions. And before long, the company hopes the AI will be capable of interjecting by itself, because of the knowledge it’s garnered from sitting in on all your company’s meetings. None of the bags of atoms in the meeting can remember what the Q4 advertising budget was? Otter’s AI should be able to pipe up with the answer.

The irony is that, without my AI assistant, they probably got less attention than they would otherwise

Of course, the backlash has started. Hand-wringing pieces lamenting the fact that people are turning up for online meetings to find they’re the only human in the room. I attended a meeting recently where the host demanded all AI assistants be switched off, so that “I have your full attention”. This person clearly missed their calling as a primary school teacher. 

The irony is that, without my AI assistant, they probably got less attention than they would otherwise. Otter.aiallows me to be more present in meetings, not less. My shorthand was never very good; now it’s about as readable as the leaflet they put in packets of paracetamol. When I’m scribbling notes in briefings or meetings, I’m not really paying attention to what’s being said, I’m trying to remember what was said ten seconds ago and get it down before I forget. Because, as I edge recklessly closer to what the Sunday supplements insist on calling “middle-aged”, my memory is about as reliable as West Ham’s back four. 

With Otter.ai in a meeting, I need not fret about jotting down important information. I can see it’s taking down everything said in the meeting, as the transcription streams across my screen like the Grandstand vidiprinter while someone is talking. It records the audio, in case the transcription falters or I need to go back and check something later. And at the end of the meeting I’ll not only have a superbly formatted summary of the discussion, but be able to ask the AI questions about what was said. It means I can engage fully in the meeting, not be constantly scribbling away, only half-conscious of what’s just been said. 

When people moan about newfangled AI assistants in meetings they’re really moaning about centuries-old human failings

The advent of AI meeting assistants has made me a more active participant, and it’s improved the quality of my interviews, because I can think about what question to ask next based on the previous answer, not just blather something out because I’m still jotting down the previous response. It’s one reason we now run in-depth and (I hope) interesting Q&As in the news section. 

Now, of course there’s a flip side to this. If people are using AI assistants as a pure proxy in meetings, those meetings are going to be as much use as Matt Hancock. I can only ever recall doing this once, when I had to rush out of an online meeting to pick up my daughter from school and left the AI assistant running, so I could later catch up on what I missed. 

But I wouldn’t have the audacity to use an AI stand-in in 99% of meetings I attend, because the whole point of me being in those meetings is that I’m making a contribution. I wouldn’t have many clients left if I tried to palm them off on my AI helper, no matter how well it knew my business, because they’re paying for me, not a hollow facsimile of me that isn’t empowered to make decisions. 

So when people moan about new-fangled AI assistants in meetings they’re really moaning about centuries-old human failings. Laziness, chiefly. If it makes no difference whether you or your AI assistant attend a meeting, you either shouldn’t be in that meeting in the first place, or you’re about to be replaced by someone who should

DT25010 Collectables V01 040925

 PCPRO October 2025

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro . He will hold onto the drawer containing everyPsion Organiser, so don’t even ask. dickpountain.co.uk

Idon’t really have the collector’s instinct. When I was a kid my father was a serious stamp collector, and I briefly made a feeble effort to become one too. I was slightly more interested in my album of labels from exotic canned goods, but that soon petered out. In adulthood I’ve accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection. I have owned ten motorcycles over 60 or so years, but only ever one at a time. Books don’t count: I started accumulating those as a student and continued as a book reviewer, but all were obtained to read and never sold (there are around a thousand of them, none rare). 

When I’m not writing about computers here, I review books for a political journal, mainly ones about political economy and sociology. An author who had a big influence on me was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose best-known book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Tasteexamined taste as an act of social status building, drawing on huge amounts of data gleaned from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews. 

Two former associates of Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, published a 2014 paper called “The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets”, which is the best, most interesting account of collectability I’ve seen. The authors describe the way that all the things we manufacture, purchase and use pass through three phases of ownership, which they label the “standard form”, the “collectible form” and the “asset form”.

The aesthetic appearance and quality of workmanship of computers is so low that few people want to collect them

Consider a lemonade bottle from before the First World War with one of those stoppers that’s a caged glass marble. A mass-produced item, made as cheaply as possible, reusable and returnable for a penny. It served its purpose of containing and dispensing lemonade, then eventually got thrown in the bin (standard form). Years later someone found it in a tip; it ended up in an antique shop, sold for £15 to a middle-class couple as a kitchen ornament (collectible form). Their friend was a famous film director and it became a key prop in a very successful movie, and ended up sold for £5,000 in a sale of memorabilia at Christie’s (asset form). 

An ancient Roman olive-oil jar might follow a comparable trajectory, with prices several orders of magnitude higher. A drawing done on a napkin to pay for supper by a famous painter ditto, but its asset form might be in millions. In the asset form, things are no longer used, may often not even be displayed but stored in a vault, a hedge against inflation or financial crisis, a store of value. 

What has this got to do with computers, you may be wondering. Well, nothing actually, and that’s the point. Computers, along with much of the rest of the merchandise of the digital world, seem to defy the three-phase classification scheme by being stuck forever in the standard form: they end up in a skip, then get ripped apart to recycle a few chips and some gold-plating. The aesthetic appearance and quality of workmanship of such goods is so low that very few people want to collect them, and what’s more those few who do face insurmountable problems in keeping them working, due to the rapid and haphazard evolution of firmware, software, ports and storage media, plus the lack of effective documentation, and the rapid disappearance of smaller manufacturers prior to the monopoly era we now inhabit.

I have a room full of digital junk that I can’t get rid of. Digital junk that those nearest and dearest to me would love to see dumped in a skip

If you think you can detect a faint tinge of animus in that last paragraph, you’re correct. I have a room upstairs full of digital junk accumulated over my 40+ years of computer journalism that I can’t get rid of. Digital junk that those nearest and dearest to me would love to see dumped in a skip to reclaim the room. I can’t bring myself to do that. Along with some quite notable historic hardware – first-gen IBM PC and Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes, NewBrain, Epson HX20 – there are shelves full of software both famous and obscure that I have a hunch I may perhaps be the only person to still have, given my privileged status as recipient of review materials. 

The early history of the UK personal computer scene is sitting up there, and no-one appears to want it. I’ve tried all the various computer museums people have recommended, and none is interested in collecting the lot (I no longer have a car). All the reasons I mentioned above render it enormously hard for them to get this stuff working, and once they do it’s hardly entertaining. I do feel, though, that someone ought to document this history before skips claim it all. dick@dickpountain.co.uk