Stuff Meets… TV tech guru Suzi Perry on the next incarnation of The Gadget Show and seeing Abba in concert

TV presenter Suzi Perry is perhaps best known for her prominent role in motorsport, covering Formula 1 and then MotoGP, but who could forget her eight amazing years on The Gadget Show, alongside Jason Bradbury? In this interview we chat to Suzi about getting the gang back together to celebrate The Gadget Show’s twentieth anniversary, her love of live music, flying the flag for Wolverhampton and much more… 

I cover 20 MotoGP races a year.

I’m basically away from home for half of the year working and travelling – that’s the part of my job I find very difficult, particularly since Covid because it all takes so much longer than it used to. If I could teleport so I could just be at the track, that would be perfect! I still love doing my job as much as I did 28 years ago but I really, really detest the travel part.

I was genuinely excited to be back with Jason Bradbury all these years on, talking about tech.

 I left The Gadget Show at the end of 2011 – obviously a really long time ago now – after eight years. I think I was quite lucky in that we had the best time and the biggest part of the show, when it was most popular, and we were doing The Gadget Show Live at the NEC and packing in 20,000 people a day. Afterwards I focused more on motorsport and went to the BBC to do Formula 1, and then back to MotoGP. I got a call at the start of the year from the original producer of the show, Ewan Keil, saying “Do you realise it’s 20 years since the start of The Gadget Show?” – which just made me feel old – and he said “I’ve got an idea for a podcast, what do you think…?”

Within five minutes of sitting down with Jason again I was crying laughing.

It’s so rare – I’ve had a bit of a tough time in the last few years, and I don’t think I’ve done that for years – actually gone hysterical crying, from being happy. So that’s how we started off the podcast, and it kind of stayed like that. It was great, it was joyous and I learned a lot. We worked with the same people – it was a bit like getting the mini-gang together again.

Back in the day, Jason and I being so competitive used to result in me ending up in hospital sometimes.

We had great chemistry on screen, but we were like brother and sister – we used to bicker as well. We were pitted against each other all the time, as it was like Top Gear for gadgets. The podcast is very different – we’re older, we’re much more relaxed and we have slightly different roles, in that I kind of defer to Jason’s knowledge more. I would never have let that happen back then! I’m a bit more of a journalist, really, asking the questions.

I was completely blown away by the quality of the Apple Vision Pro.

The Meta Quest headsets are good for so many things, but this was another level – classic Apple, coming in top price for the market but in two or three years it will come down to something more affordable. It was so different to anything I’d experienced before, and it has come on so much. I guess with AI now, people are running businesses in a room and dipping in with the headset.

My views on AI are two-sided.

From the day-to-day – writing things down for you, organising and almost becoming another app to your phone – I see it as time-saving and fantastic. But on the bigger scale, the dark side of it – security, privacy and the global aspect – that terrifies me as I don’t know how it can be policed.

I’ve been obsessed with music all my life.

My dad played the saxophone in a band when he was a teenager in Wolverhampton. He then became a promoter and managed a rock band in America called Trapeze, so I grew up with that – outside of London they were probably the biggest promoters during the ’70s and ’80s. He promoted all kinds of people: David Bowie, Tina Turner, Abba, Genesis…and even the Sex Pistols came to his nightclub. He used to come home and give us loads of singles that hadn’t been released yet, stuff that had been sent through as demos, so my brother and I would listen to music ahead of the game.

I went to see Abba when I was nine.

We got to go to all these live concerts as well, which was so fortuitous as kids. The Abba Voyage concert in London is actually based on the tour I went to as a child. It’s just fantastic growing up like that.

I worked in the theatre when I was 15.

I worked part-time, for five or six years on and off, doing follow-spots, sound and stuff like that behind the scenes. I was doing all this while I was studying, so I was around music all the time and it was just great. To this day, my favourite things are to go out with friends, to a gig – there’s nothing like it.

I thought I was going to go into music promotion.

I went to polytechnic [now the University of Wolverhampton] to specialise in marketing. I did a business and finance degree. I thought I was going to do that but things changed and different doors opened, and I decided to explore other routes – and obviously never ended up doing it. When people say “If you didn’t do this, what would you do?”, I always say that I would have promoted music. I know it’s so different now to the way they used to do it then, but I love the whole vibe about it.

Wolverhampton Uni gave me an honorary degree in engineering.

I’m an Honorary Fellow, and they honoured me in their hall of fame as well. I do bits and pieces for them – awards, talks for students – and I’m really proud of the kind of things they do, particularly the vocational stuff, which I think is massively overlooked generally.

Find out more about Suzi at suziperry.com.