Peter Rhodes on educated animals, early adopters and the fascinating lure of the bacon slicer

Having seen The Traitors progress from start to climax once, with its promise of “detection, backstabbing and trust,” I'm not much interested in watching the well-hyped second series. Been there, done that.

As it happens, I'm a bit of an expert on one-trick ponies. When I was four or five my father took me to a performance, in a barn, by an “educated animal.” I recall it fondly although, given the tricks that memory plays, sometimes I remember it as a pony and other times as a dog. The owner would ask it simple sums and the creature would neigh (or possibly bark) the answer. That was the only trick it knew.

This was back in the days when hardly anyone had a telly and a community's proudest boast was that “we made our own entertainment.” Some of that entertainment was so dire it made the educated pony/dog look like the star turn at the London Palladium. Consider my home village in the Yorkshire Dales where, in pursuit of excitement, the young things would walk three miles to the butcher's in the nearest town to gaze at the bacon slicer. Now, that's entertainment.

Early adopters are those risk-taking, trendsetting folk who take the plunge into new technology while the rest of us are dithering on the sidelines and muttering that it'll never catch on. Early adopters are to be applauded because they spur technology, but pitied for landing themselves with solar panels full of water, Betamax TV recorders and hideously expensive first-generation DAB radios with a 500-page instruction manual. Today brings more bad news for the early adopters.

According to a BBC report, a new breed of heat pumps will dramatically raise the temperature of water pumped into radiators. While early customers shiver (apart from their warm glow of virtue), people buying the latest kit will be complacently snug and enviably smug. Progress – whoever said it would be fair?