Prof Hannah Fry brings her irresistible enthusiasm to the BBC for The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two), a documentary series about the seemingly simple everyday objects or ideas that we tend to take for granted, and how clever they really are. Fry, a mathematician by trade, who hosts podcasts, writes books and adds weekly cheer to Lauren Laverne’s morning show on 6 Music, is a host who is winningly awestruck at the facts she uncovers and the experiments she conducts. Her interest in finding out everything about everything is hugely contagious.
In this first episode, she looks at the humble bank card, though naturally, it turns out to be not so humble after all. There is a lovely brisk pace to the show, which takes in history, science and technology, tracing as many elements as possible back to their roots. It begins with the Fresno Drop, in 1958, in which the Bank of America introduced a credit card to its suspicious customers and kickstarted a technological revolution. It whizzes through the introduction of the magnetic strip, via an acronym-friendly segment on how the CIA worked with IBM on inventing a new form of ID, and follows the money through to online shopping, chip and pin, contactless and what a biometric future may look like.
