))
The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you.. ...
…
continue reading
For this bonus episode of The Shift, I’m delighted to welcome a very special guest: the award-winning author of ten bestselling novels, Barbara Kingsolver. Every so often, a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you meet. For me, Demon Copperhead, is one of those books. A reimagining of the Dickens classic, David Copper…
…
continue reading
We’ve all had those moments in our lives when everything feels… darker, colder, a little (or a lot) less hopeful. Those emotional winters were perfectly encapsulated by today’s guest, Katherine May in her transatlantic bestseller, Wintering, the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Her new book is another soothing antidote for the way we l…
…
continue reading
If you were a teenager in the late 80s you only have to hear the name Neneh Cherry to conjure the image of Neneh, seven months pregnant, on the Top of the Pops stage performing her hit Buffalo Stance. She was the epitome of cool. She made teenage girls everywhere believe that anything was possible. Now, almost 40 years later, the award-winning sing…
…
continue reading
1
Bella Freud: "I've definitely got more daring with age"
1:00:48
1:00:48
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:00:48
My guest today is the fashion designer Bella Freud. Bella launched her eponymous label in 1990. Over thirty years later it remains resolutely independent, one of the very few that hasn’t been subsumed by a fashion conglomerate. Bella’s clothes are for wearing and have become a byword for women who want to be glamorous but not girly with a bit of ad…
…
continue reading
My guest today is a woman who is credited with putting poetry back on the map, Donna Ashworth…. Donna came to prominence in 2020, when a poem she wrote about lockdown was read in a viral video to raise money for the NHS. She subsequently self-published her first volume of poetry, To The Women, which sold over 100,000 copies. Unsurprisingly the publ…
…
continue reading
1
Baroness Lola Young: "you can't be what you can't see, but somebody has to go first"
1:02:12
1:02:12
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:02:12
My guest today is one incredible woman. Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey is an actress, academic, campaigner for social justice and a cross bench peer in the House of Lords. By anyone’s standards she has achieved. She studied at the New College of Speech and Drama and started her career as an actress in the 1970s and 80s, before becoming professor of…
…
continue reading
My guest today is the forensic psychotherapist Dr Jennifer Cox. She trained at the Tavistock and now has an extensive practice specialising in treating women with undiagnosed anger. As part of this work she developed the Women are Mad approach to help women who can’t afford therapy to “think below the surface” about where their rage might be coming…
…
continue reading
My guest today is Louise Doughty, the woman behind some of the knottiest thrillers to grace our bookshelves and TV screens in recent years. Her bestseller, Apple Tree Yard about a sensible middle aged woman who makes a very unsensible decision (involving sex in the house of commons!) sold over half a million copies and was turned into a smash hit B…
…
continue reading
1
Kate Weinberg on the kindness of women & living with a mother-shaped hole
1:03:40
1:03:40
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:03:40
Today’s guest is a personal favourite. I first met Kate Weinberg (the bestselling author of The Truants) when I was stricken with long covid and a mutual friend put us in touch. “You need to talk to Kate,” she urged. “She’ll be able to help. Kate was able to help - and did. Thanks in large part to her I went from feeling like my old, functioning li…
…
continue reading
My guest today is the broadcaster Vanessa Feltz. Ever since the mid-90s, Vanessa has been a fixture on British TV and radio - and also, for better or worse, our front pages. She became known as the “British Oprah” and that applied not just to her consummate skills as a broadcaster and talent for saying the unsayable, but also what she describes as …
…
continue reading
If you sometimes worry you’ve left it too late to follow your heart, today’s guest should give you hope. At 40, Jane Campbell got a divorce and took herself off to university where she trained as a group analyst. 40 years later, at the age of 80, she had her first short story was published, after she sent Cat Brushing to the London Review of Books …
…
continue reading
1
Marianne Power: how to build a happy single life
1:04:46
1:04:46
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:04:46
My guest today knows a thing or two about being single, and she’s hear to tell you that there’s more than one way to live an emotionally fulfilling life. Marianne Power is a journalist who made a perfectly decent living testing things so you didn’t have to - mascara, spa retreats, you get the gist - until the decision to spend a year testing self h…
…
continue reading
My guest today is author, endurance athlete and ex BBC breakfast presenter Louise Minchin. Louise is, of course, best known for her twenty year stint on BBC Breakfast’s sofa but she has also been main news anchor on the BBC News, presented The One Show and participated in a host of reality TV shows including I’m a Celebrity get me out of here. Sinc…
…
continue reading
1
Moon Unit Zappa: "We're all just growing each other up"
1:01:48
1:01:48
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:01:48
Today’s guest is the American actress, writer and singer Moon Unit Zappa. Moon shot to fame in her early teens when her vocals featured on her father Frank Zappa’s unlikely hit Valley Girl. Subsequently she has been an actor, singer, presenter and artist. I’m about a year older than her and I know I’ve pretty much been aware of her ever since But s…
…
continue reading
My guest today is a woman who has truly come into her own in middle-age. A broadcaster, engineer, statistician and entrepreneur, at the age of 63 Carol Vorderman is now best known for fearlessly calling power to account. Sick of the sleaze and corruption she saw emanating from our politicians she decided it was time to speak up. And her million twi…
…
continue reading
My guest today is Bella Mackie. Until her mid-30s Bella was a journalist, then she wrote a book called Jog On and her trajectory changed - dramatically. Ostensibly a book about running, Jog On was actually a soul-baring account of Bella’s battle with anxiety, OCD and depression and how, ultimately, running saved her. It was one of a wave of books t…
…
continue reading
My guest today is the award-winning… well what is she? Writer? Content creator? Blogger? Influencer? Ruth Crilly is all of the above. She started her blog A Model Recommends in 2010 - before it was really a thing - and became one of the UK’s first social media stars. She’s got 500k followers on YouTube and instagram and unbelievably she’s - gulp - …
…
continue reading
My guest today is the creator of the global bestseller and smash hit TV adaptation, The Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness. Now, I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I’m a bit obsessed with all things witchy, and I’ve been a devotee ever since the proof of the first book landed on my desk and I tumbled headlong into the world of Diana Bi…
…
continue reading
1
Fearne Cotton on the joy of embracing her second chapter
1:01:05
1:01:05
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:01:05
Today’s guest is the queen of embracing the second chapter. Fearne Cotton started young. She became a children’s TV presenter at 15, presented Top of The Pops at 19 and took over Jo Whiley’s mid morning show on Radio One at just 27. But it’s what she’s achieved since turning her back on live radio and TV that’s really remarkable. In 2018 she launch…
…
continue reading
1
Lindsay Nicholson on resilience, recovery and the pursuit of perfection
1:02:24
1:02:24
Відтворити пізніше
Відтворити пізніше
Списки
Подобається
Подобається
1:02:24
I have known today’s guest for quite some time. Decades in fact. To begin with she didn’t really know me, because she was close friends with my first ever boss. During the time I sat on the sidelines of Lindsay Nicholson’s life, the unimaginable happened and her husband and then daughter both died of a rare form of leukaemia. Then she picked hersel…
…
continue reading
1
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: "Everyone taught me to be afraid of middle age - I wish I could have started in it!"
51:56
If there’s anything more daunting than interviewing a professional interviewer it’s interviewing an award-winning professional interviewer. Today’s guest Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff-writer on the New York Times and a legend amongst journalists who often find themselves on the monosyllabic side of a celebrity. (Her interview with Bradley Cooper…
…
continue reading
I can’t be cool about today’s guest, so I’m not even going to try. Ever since I started The Shift I have had a Wishlist and high up on it from day one was Dame Zandra Rhodes. Yes, that Zandra Rhodes. There can only be one after all. For over 50 years, Zandra has been a leading figure in the British fashion industry, renowned for her prints and her …
…
continue reading
In the last of our FROM THE ARCHIVES episodes, I'm revisiting one of the most important conversations I think I've had on this podcast (not to mention one of my favourites) - with Terri White, the brains behind the award-winning podcast, Finding Britain's Ghost Children, which explored why so many children are missing from Britain's class rooms. Ea…
…
continue reading
There are plenty of famous women who we think we know all there is to know without ever having met them. Women we judge based on some random unsubstantiated headline, but there are few women that applies to quite so much as Katie Price. Katie has been in the public eye for thirty years. She started as the glamour model Jordan at just 17 years old a…
…
continue reading
I'm not sure there's anyone quite like Kate Mosse. The driving power behind the Women's Prize for Fiction which is now in its 27th year (the winner was VV Ganeshananthan's Brotherless Night) and now the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction (whose inaugural winner was Doppleganger by Naomi Klein), she also manages to write a book a year (and they're not sm…
…
continue reading
