Interview with Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory Cellan-Jones was born in 1958 in Wales. He says of his hyphenated surname: “My great-grandfather was a plain old Jones in far West Wales. He appears to have added on the Cellan, which is a village near Lampeter.  Like a lot of Joneses in Wales, there was an urge to differentiate oneself, and you did that by sticking a place name in front of Jones.”

Rory’s mother was a director’s assistant at the BBC. She left her husband after the war, and went to London with her young son. Working at the BBC, she had an affair with a younger man. Rory was a result of the affair.

Rory was brought up by his mother in a flat in South London. He has an older half brother. From his mothers archive of every letter she typed and received at the BBC, Rory is discovering more about her history, he says: “It’s an amazing archive of an extraordinarily determined and brave woman who was a serial single mother; she twice brought up sons on her own.  People used to say to me, ‘How come you’ve grown up so normal?’ Both my mother and my elder brother were slightly eccentric to say the least. As I get older, I think I’m beginning to inherit my mother’s eccentricity but I’m hoping I’ve inherited some of her determination as well.”

Rory attended Dulwich College prep school and Dulwich College. His free place was supported by the Inner London Education Authority.  Rory says of the school: “It was a good school. It was quite a machine-like school, processing as many people as it possibly could towards Oxbridge, which it did with me.  It got me to Cambridge eventually. It was sometimes dull, it was sometimes fun. Overall, reasonably positive.”

Rory was drawn to the arts and studied modern languages.  He studied one science (physics) at O Level, along with maths and further maths. He then chose French, German and economics for his A Levels.

 It was at Dulwich College that Rory encountered his first computer in the science block.  He says: “There was a computer in that block which seemed to me to fill a room. The only way one saw it was on open days because the only boys that were allowed to go near it normally were those studying physics A Level. They had to approach it wearing white coats and feed it with tickertape, as far as I understood. The rest of us had to stay well clear of this dangerous and exciting machine. Even back then, I always thought that sounds quite exciting.”

 At the end of his formal education at Dulwich College, Rory stayed to complete a “seventh term entry” to do the Cambridge entrance exam for a place at Jesus College. He says: “Then in 1977, in the height of the Cold War, I did something which was incredibly formative.  I went on a project called ‘Meet Berlin’ joining 40 other young people who were going to study German at university. We were taken to West Berlin as it was in those days, and given jobs and accommodation. I worked in a kindergarten.”

The experience was organised by the Deutsch-Britischer Jugendaustausch, the German-British Youth Exchange.  Rory adds: “I loved it.  It was incredibly liberating and exciting. It was my first taste of independence. I learnt how exciting it was to live in another country and to learn about another place’s history.”

The venue for the first two weeks was a centre on next to the Berlin Wall and border with East Germany. Throughout their six month stay, Rory and his friends would obtain day visas to visit East Berlin.

In October 1977, Rory went to Jesus College, Cambridge to modern languages. He says: “I didn’t like it too much at first. It was all-male; although that changed during my time at Cambridge. It was very much a rowing college, which was not my thing. However, I had a ready-made selection of friends, who had all been in Berlin with me, and I hung out with the modern languages crowd and had a great time.”

Having seen his first computer at school, Rory did not encounter a computer at Cambridge, he says: “It seems extraordinary now, but I don’t have any memory then of computers at Cambridge.”

Rory left Cambridge in 1981 and joined the BBC. He worked first as a researcher in Leeds before moving to London to work as a producer on TV News and then Newsnight. He says: “I was doing general news, so anything and everything.  I didn’t specialise.” Rory then moved to Wales Today, the Welsh national television news, as an on-screen reporter and presenter.  In the late Eighties, Rory returned to BBC in London and started specialising in business.

Despite seeing a computer at school which was reserved for use by physics students only, Rory’s first real encounter with a computer was in 1983 while working at BBC Breakfast Time. He says: “I was sent down to Lime Grove where they were starting breakfast television, and they were using a computer system, which I was trained on.  We were typing the scripts into this computer system and they came out on shiny paper in a reel from the top of the machine and were rushed to the studio.”

This technology had not yet reached the main newsroom which saw producers writing their scripts in longhand and then dictating them to typists. Rory adds: “A year or so later, there was an earthquake in the newsroom when the BBC announced it was going to bring in a computer system to the main television newsroom. I and the rest of the newsroom went out on strike. We were not going to have these infernal machines. There was a ritual where we had to turn up at work, the editor of the whole shebang asked ‘Are you prepared to work normally?’  which meant working with the computers.  You said, ‘No sir.’  And you were then suspended. So that happened with me.  So, one of my earliest interactions with computers was to go out on strike over them.”

The strike ended after ITN journalists were given £1000 to work with computers in the newsroom, the BBC followed suit. Rory concludes: “Eventually, we settled, we got £300 each and peace reigned. That’s when I finally entered the computer age at work and quickly found that this was the future. It was a much more efficient way of working and it was also liberating in certain ways because you didn’t have to go to a typist to get your script done; you could work more independently, at your own pace.”

Rory gravitated towards technology reporting after a business trip in 1995 to New York to cover for the business correspondent. A trip on which he interviewed Bill Gates and was given a signed copy of his book The Road Ahead, and on which he saw the start of the dotcom boom/bubble. Rory says: “There was a feeling that this new era was dawning. Over the years following that trip, I was a business correspondent covering anything and everything, but I found the technology stories the most interesting in particular the rise of the dotcoms in the late 1990s, which were far more interesting to me than reporting Marks and Spencer’s annual results for the fourth time.”

“Until the 21^st century I was exclusively a broadcast journalist.  The BBC’s website got under way reasonably early to mid-1990s, but culturally there was an idea that doing the website material was a really low grade job, which has only just gone away.  Telly is the most important thing, and radio, but writing online was seen as something much less important. So I didn’t start writing until, probably 2000 and shortly afterwards.”

Asked which of the many people he has interviewed was the most charismatic, Rory says he interviewed Steve Jobs a few times but always in very constrained situations for five minutes and was not able to go into any real depth, however, he adds: “The single most charismatic and amazing performance that I’ve witnessed was Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone. … I had two sort of reactions to this. … I was cynical at first but I was won over by, not just the performance, but by the product that he unveiled, which is one of those moments where you think, wow, that’s going to change the world.”

Of his experience of interviewing Elon Musk five years ago, he says: “I only had one encounter with him, but it was a really substantial encounter and absolutely fascinating. To interview Musk, Rory drove from Las Vegas to LA in a Tesla, which he describes as: “an exciting experience in itself.” He continues. “Musk was nothing like as famous then. He was well-known in the technology field but hadn’t broken through to the wider field, but I was excited to meet him. At first, I thought it was going to be a bit low-key because he seemed to have a kind of mumble-y voice, be dressed in black, and not be that exciting. But I could tell the interview was going to be good as soon as he started speaking because he had such great lines.  For instance, we were talking about autonomous driving and he said that in the future, owning a car that you had to drive yourself would be like owning a horse.  It would be a nice emotional choice, but it would not be a practical thing, it wouldn’t be necessary. He eventually used the line ‘when we are a multi-planet species’, and I thought ‘we’ve got it here’. He was a fascinating interviewee, but also an incredibly flawed person. I think that has become apparent in terms of his incontinence on social media, and his enthusiastic pumping of various cryptocurrencies, which I am deeply sceptical about.”

With many stories being offered to BBC reporters from public relations specialists, Rory talks about two stories, one of which he saw “behind the façade and how things go wrong.”

He explains: “There was a company called SpinVox, which was billed as one of the bright young technology companies of Britain. It translated voicemails into text and was apparently one of the early AI triumphs. I had featured it a couple of times; I had swallowed the PR.

“Then I got an email from somebody who said that they worked at SpinVox and wanted to tell me a story. What they showed me was fascinating. They showed me that the claims that translation of the messages from voice to text was actually mostly being done by people in call centres in Egypt and other places around the world. This had huge implications.  Firstly, security implications, people’s very sensitive messages were actually being listened to overseas. Secondly, the company was effectively built on a lie, it wasn’t an AI business at all, or its AI didn’t really work. Thirdly, this was disastrous for it financially because employing all these workers in these distant call centres, who were not being paid and Spinvox would flee from one call centre to another, which meant that the company was unsustainable. That was a really good story which made the Today programme and I did a lot about it online.  It didn’t make the television news bulletins because it was not big enough, but I think it was an important story in what it said about too much of the tech industry being built on hype.”

He highlights how his YouTube video of Raspberry Pi helped demonstrate the idea had legs. Rory explains: “I was in on the birth of Raspberry Pi because I knew one of the founders, David Braben. He and Eben Upton came to show the prototype of what became the Raspberry Pi which they said could transform the way children saw computing.  It looked like a little USB stick with a bit of circuit on it. I told them it was not the kind of story I would get on the television, or even the radio at that stage, but I might blog about it. So, I took a video on my phone, stuck it on YouTube and it went viral over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people ended up seeing that video. Eben Upton, who went on to lead Raspberry Pi, said that was the moment that they realised that the idea had legs.”

Rory says of his mistakes: “I have been over-enthusiastic about products that never came to anything. I think it’s important to get excited about new technology and it happens at greater intervals these days. I was excited about the iPhone.  I was excited the first time I could interact with a voice-activated speaker, that struck me as extraordinary, and I was very excited when I saw the demo of Google’s Google Glass, this augmented reality headset.

“I eventually managed to persuade the BBC to get me one and then wore the thing for three months solid wherever I went, while my colleagues, my friends, my family, told me I looked like an idiot. Eventually I realised I did look like an idiot and stopped wearing it. That actually betrayed a bigger truth about the product, which is however clever the technology, the look and feel of it is incredibly important to its eventual success.

“I’ve also been wrong, although, I still believe I might be right in the longer term, about the extraordinary valuations placed on certain companies. Tesla is a point in case.  Tesla is currently valued at a level which is more than the rest of the traditional car industry combined.  It’s got a huge multiple which to me makes no sense, but I’ve been saying that for two or three years and it continues to go up. The same has happened with bitcoin, so, I’ve been wrong about that.”

Having covered Y2K as a news story, Rory says: “It’s difficult to remember now just how much of a panic there was about that and I keep changing my view of it.  At the time, it felt like this was being over-hyped.  We covered it and then nothing really happened when the clocks turned on the year 2000. However, in retrospect, I’ve got a lot of time for those people who argued that the reason nothing went wrong was because of the sheer amount of preparation that was put in and that was money well spent.”

In 2000, Rory wrote Dot.Bomb which examines the rise and collapse of the dotcom industry. He says of the experience: “The book was an extraordinary project to be involved in. I was commissioned by a publisher to write a book, this was a terrifying experience because thousands of words had to be laid out, huge volumes of white space had to be filled. Where as television, which was my main business then, is all about telling a whole story in a couple of hundred words; there’s zero space.”

He adds: “My book was about the very short and much more constricted British dotcom bubble.  The American one had started with Netscape in the mid-Nineties and involved a lot of companies which arrived from nothing and were worth a fortune and then were not.  The British bubble, which was very small-scale but pretty interesting, started with a company called Freeserve, started by Dixons. That sparked this extraordinary bubble where we caught up with the United States in a slightly ridiculous way and companies which had virtually no revenue were suddenly worth more than great titans of the stock market.”

In his book, Rory looks at the way the bubble grew, starting initially with the type of people of whom he says: “younger versions of the same people who had always done well, smart people coming out of Oxbridge, who would normally have gone into investment banking, the media, or whatever, seeing others making apparent fortunes in a hurry and thinking I could do that.”  He notes that it did change later, but adds that of that initial phase: “much of it was very frothy, it was marketing-based companies rather than a hugely sophisticated technology play. In the background, more sophisticated companies were eventually being born in places like Cambridge and they survived the dotcom bubble, which wiped out most of the frothier companies when it burst.”

Rory’s latest book is Always On: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era, in which he looks at ‘the conflicting emotions we have felt during an era when technology became more personal. The hope was, it would liberate us, and make us wealthier and happier.  The fear was that it would endanger our children, undermine our democracy, and make giant unaccountable technology companies even more powerful.’

 Rory says that he believes technology “has the power to liberate us, the power to enrich our lives in all sorts of ways, it’s enriched my life in all sorts of ways.  But I do worry massively, in particular about the sheer concentration of power on the west coast of the United States, and about the unintended consequences of letting those giant monopolistic corporations thrive without regulation, which we’re now coming to grips with. However, I also think that we’ve had this panic about every wave of new technology and we learn to adapt to it, we learn to control those giant organisations eventually.  But, it’s certainly been a pretty dark few years for those of us who worry that technology can help to undermine democracy, for instance.”

Asked if AI will take over. Rory says: “That it’s an interesting question and one that is under current debate at the Reith Lectures called ‘Living With AI’, by Professor Stuart Russell.”

Rory highlights how an interview he did with Professor Stephen Hawking, in 2014 caused alarm when Hawking predicted that AI would mean the end of the human race. Rory adds: “ When that was broadcast a lot of people who were more knowledgeable about AI than Stephen Hawking, said this is slightly hysterical, these are not immediate concerns.  I shared that view.  But Stuart Russell, whose field it very much is, tells some interesting stories about why we should be worried, and we should be worried now.  He uses this great parallel of what happened in terms of the power of nuclear energy and tells a story about Rutherford, the British father of that field. Rutherford gave a speech in which he said, there was no need to worry about this, because nothing’s going to happen in terms of unleashing the power of the atom for many, many decades. The very next day, having read this in the Times, a Hungarian scientist suddenly came up with the theoretical basis for effectively unleashing the nuclear age. Professor Russell’s warning is that it may feel like we’re a very long way from artificial general intelligence, from machines that can not do one task brilliantly but can do anything brilliantly, but human ingenuity is such that don’t bet on it.”

Rory goes on to speak about trust in computers. He highlights the Post Office IT scandal, and says: “One of the lessons is that we should be very careful about assuming that computers are always right when they’re in conflict with humans.  The post office computer system, Horizon, which it claimed was virtually faultless, kept throwing up examples of where it said individual postmasters had a shortfall of many thousands of pounds in their accounts.  It was coming up with different numbers from the postmasters themselves. The Post Office investigators believed the computer system and didn’t believe the postmasters. That ended up with hundreds of people being prosecuted, quite a lot going to jail, and several of them taking their own lives.  An extraordinary wave of human misery caused by excessive faith in computers.”

Asked if he is in favour of a more regulated social sphere, Rory points to the Government’s Online Safety Bill, which he says has thrown up an extraordinary problem regarding what is considered harmful but not illegal and who decides how something is defined. He explains: “ If it’s illegal, that’s fine. You may disagree with the law but if you break the law, you pay the penalty.  But, for instance, who decides that a certain company is encouraging abusive behaviour to a certain degree and therefore should be punished? There are all sorts of questions about a balance between free speech and avoiding harm.  I’m slightly cynical about those who always rush to free speech. What this is all moving towards is a very, very powerful regulator, making extremely difficult decisions. I don’t envy that person.  That person is likely to be in Ofcom whose job gets ever more important as the years go by.”

Having left the BBC in October 2021, Rory is working on numerous projects including some consultancy work, podcasts and the creation of a Substack newsletter. He says: “I’m taking a great interest in health tech.  I’ve got a couple of health challenges. I’ve got Parkinson’s which I was diagnosed with about three years ago, and I’m going to be doing some journalism around that. All in all, it’s proving enough to keep me quite busy at the moment.”

He says: “Around 1990, we got an Amstrad PCW 9210 word processor at home, which was revolutionary for us, but was not an interesting machine.  I couldn’t see why you would get obsessed with it in any way.  It was a functional machine, it was basically a glorified typewriter.”

Rory compares it to the situation at work, adding: “I wasn’t yet senior enough to be doing these stories, but the computing revolution was beginning to impinge. By the early Nineties I was beginning to cover some computing stories. It was in ’94, ’95, that I acquired our first proper home computer a Macintosh Performa 630, with a 250 megabyte hard disk.”

Rory and his wife chose an Apple Mac on the advice of a neighbour who was a graphic designer.  He adds: “I had been left £2,000 in a relative’s will, and we spent the whole lot; £1500 on the computer, £250 on a printer, and some more on a modem. Eventually, and this is from a person with absolutely zero background, I worked out how to get it online. Me, my wife and our five-year-old son gathered round the computer and watched in wonder as I found my way to the Louvre’s website, which was one of the very early websites, and found that a picture of an old master would animate on to the screen line by line. It felt like a miracle.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley