For our second and final bonus episode this season, I bring you the dulcet tones of actor Jamie Dornan. Most recently seen in The Fall (currently on Netflix and BBC iPlayer) playing a serial killer with an incongruously happy family life, Dornan is also well-known for starring as Christian Grey in all three of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie adaptations, which brought him to the worldwide attention of millions.He joins me to talk about failures in acting, failures at school and a failure to sit s...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 8 min
It is such an honour to welcome the extraordinary Claudia Rankine to the podcast. She is a poet, playwright and essayist, a woman who's life's work has been devoted to the interrogation of race and white supremacy and to the discovery of what connects - and divides - us as human beings.Her 2014 book, Citizen: An American Lyric is the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the non-fiction category. It also won the Forward Poetry Prize. Her latest work, Just Us, explores a series of...
Oct 28, 2020•56 min
Yes, it's the SEASON FINALE - I know, I know, it comes around so quickly doesn't it? But fear not, for we have an excellent guest in the form of James Acaster: comedian, podcaster, author and music enthusiast (specifically enthusiastic for anything released in 2016, which he claims in his book, Perfect Sound Whatever, is the best year for music dot dot dot ever).As well as being the only British stand-up to have fronted a four-part Netflix special, James co-hosts the Off Menu podcast. He joins m...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 3 min
[TW: contains discussion of sexual assault]You asked - and we listened. Welcome to one of the most requested podcast guests of all time, the wonderful Nadiya Hussain. Baker, tv presenter, author and all-round good egg, Nadiya joins me to talk about her failure to enjoy life, her failure to finish university and her failure to speak out on issues she subsequently realised were important for a public figure to tackle - such as race, identity and the issues we face as a country (such a self-aware f...
Oct 07, 2020•1 hr 4 min
***SPECIAL EPISODE KLAXON***To mark the publication of my new book, Failosophy, I take a trip down memory lane and share my favourite moments from the How To Fail archive, featuring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mo Gawdat, Alain de Botton and many, many more. AND I discuss the three personal failures that many lovely listeners sent in - they're funny and insightful and moving (best have a hankie nearby, is all I'm saying).Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to write in and to all of you for ...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 8 min
I'VE GOT A TEXT...MESSAGE. This week's guest is Ovie Soko, a man who entered the Love Island villa in 2019 and rapidly became iconic by uttering this phrase. But he's so much more than a reality TV star: famed for his laid-back charm and wise advice, Ovie is also a professional basketball player and a soon-to-be-published author. His debut book, You Are Dope, is out next week.Ovie joins me to talk about almost getting expelled from school, cheating on a girlfriend and being caught stealing from ...
Sep 23, 2020•51 min
I've wanted to get this guest on for ages and now - hooray! - here she is: the inimitable Ruby Wax. Ruby started out as an actress at the RSC, took a side-step into comedy and had a hugely successful television career, interviewing everyone from Madonna and Imelda Marcos to the Spice Girls. But, after living with depression all her life and a series of breakdowns, she got a Masters from Oxford University in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy and is now a mental health campaigner and author.Ruby...
Sep 16, 2020•1 hr 2 min
At the age of 80, Annie Nightingale still manages to be one of the most forward-looking and future-facing people I've ever interviewed. She is the legendary Radio 1 DJ - the first woman ever to get a job at the station and now the BBC's longest-serving presenter and a vital force in British music.Annie joins me to talk about confronting sexism, breaking the mould, getting the best of of interviewees and what it's like to have met everyone from David Bowie to Paul McCartney to Eminem and Jim Morr...
Sep 15, 2020•50 min
Mohsin Zaidi's memoir, A Dutiful Boy, is one of the most powerful and emotive books I've read this year. It tells the story of his upbringing in a poor pocket of east London, in a devout Shia Muslim community. His family were close-knit and religiously conservative. From a young age, Mohsin knew that his sexuality was a secret he had to hide in a household where being gay was viewed as an inconceivable taboo. Despite these personal struggles, Mohsin became the first person from his comprehensive...
Sep 02, 2020•59 min
IT'S SEASON NINE AND I FEEL FINE, BABY! And we open with a humdinger - the podcasting king, comedy legend and all-round thoroughly decent bloke that is...[drum roll + X Factor announcer voice]...ADAM BUXTON.Adam joins me to talk about misdirected perfectionism, dropping out of university, mid-life crises and what it means to be a parent after the death of your own. We talk about privilege, being sent to boarding school aged nine, whether he feels rivalry with his astonishingly successful friends...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 7 min
GLORIA STEINEM. Gloria ACTUAL Steinem. For this very special bonus episode, I had the absolute honour of interviewing one of my all-time heroes, the feminist activist, writer and icon, Gloria Steinem. And yes, I'm still pinching myself. We talk about her failure to understand her mother, her failure to be at her father's deathbed and her failure to learn lessons quickly enough - yes, we go deep... She also talks to me about how, at the age of 86, she is joyfully outliving society's expectations ...
Aug 05, 2020•59 min
It is the SEASON FINALE, BABY! I know, I know - it goes so quickly doesn't it? But here we are, two months after we started season eight, with a truly phenomenal guest. Bernardine Evaristo was the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, with her stunning novel, Girl Woman Other. She joins me to talk about her failure to be an actor, her failure to drive from London to Australia (hey, it happens to the best of us) and...brilliantly...her failure to be a lesbian. Along the way, we talk about wr...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Siena Castellon is my youngest ever guest. She's a 17-year-old activist and mentor. She is autistic, has dyslexia and dyspraxia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. And she's just published her first book.Her book, The Spectrum Girl's Survival Guide: How to Grow Up Awesome and Autistic, is a brilliant guide for neurodiverse girls navigating a neurotypical world. It is packed full of information and insight into many of the challenges that autistic teen girls face. There are sections on ...
Jul 15, 2020•59 min
This week, I bring you the utterly sensational Glennon Doyle. She is the author of three books, the latest of which, Untamed, is a memoir that defies easy categorisation - somewhat like the woman herself. Untamed is thrilling, original and brave. In it, Glennon dismantles our socialised preconceptions of what women should be and challenges us all to look at the boxes we're trapped in that are not of our own making. She joins me to talk about all of this, and about why women are taught to 'look o...
Jul 08, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Today's guest is someone I fell in platonic love with by reading her work. Julia Samuel is one of the country's leading psychotherapists but she is also well-known as an author. Her first book, Grief Works, was a Sunday Times bestseller and is routinely cited as one of the most helpful and compassionate books on bereavement you will ever read. Her second book, This Too Shall Pass, Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings, was published just before lockdown and could not have been a more ...
Jul 01, 2020•1 hr
Scarlett Moffatt was working at the checkout in Asda when she and he family got the chance to be on Channel 4's Gogglebox. She rapidly became the show's break-out star with her brilliant one-liners. Television fame followed - she co-presented with Ant and Dec, won 2016's I'm A Celebrity and now hosts the official podcast for Rupaul’s Drag Race UK. But with her overnight celebrity also came increased scrutiny and criticism. She joins me to talk about becoming an accidental famous person and deali...
Jun 24, 2020•51 min
Matthew Syed is an acclaimed author, newspaper columnist and broadcaster. He is also, in many ways, is the father of failure. I mean that as a compliment, obviously. Through his seminal, bestselling books - Bounce, Black Box Thinking and his latest, Rebel Ideas - he has shown again and again that failure can actually be the richest seam of data acquisition. His interest in making mistakes in order to evolve started, incongruously, with table tennis. He was the British number one in 1995 but late...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 1 min
*This episode was recorded before recent tragic events in America. There are links to useful Black Lives Matter resources and ways to help below*You know when you read someone's work and feel like you'd be friends in real life, and you become basically a little obsessed and Google them to inhale all the online content that is out there about this person and their work and THEN you get to to meet them and despite thinking they couldn't possibly live up to all your overhyped expectation, they actu...
Jun 10, 2020•59 min
*This episode was recorded before recent tragic events in America. There are links to useful Black Lives Matter resources and ways to help below*WE'RE BAAAAAACCCCKKKK just like Backstreet, The Mack, and the toilet roll that's now in stock again in Sainsbury's. And what a guest I have for you! It is the one, the only, Jessie Ware. Not only is she one of my favourite singer-songwriters (four Brit nominations to her name, three top-ten albums and a whopping 120 million streams on Spotify for one of...
Jun 03, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Ok, so I said I was done with the special lockdown episodes but, forgive me, I CHANGED MY MIND. The reason for this is that I watched Normal People and thought it was the most exceptional piece of television I've seen in...well...an absolute age, and I basically hunted down Daisy Edgar-Jones like the obsessive fan I was until she agreed to be interviewed by me.And so here it is: Daisy Edgar-Jones, who gave the performance of a lifetime as Marianne in the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney's acclaime...
May 20, 2020•1 hr
In the last of four special episodes specifically designed to help you through lockdown and Covid-19 anxiety, I welcome the fashion designer Henry Holland onto the podcast. This week, How To Fail returns to its usual format of discussing three failures but I've chosen to make this a special episode because one of Henry's failures will speak directly to a lot of people right now. It is the failure of his business, House of Holland, a failure linked to the impact of Coronavirus and which has left ...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min
For this extra-special listener episode, I asked you to get in touch with your stories. And you did not let me down. I received so many responses that when I printed them out they ran to over 100 pages of typed text. I wished I could read every single one of them out, but that would have taken quite a long time, so I did the best I could and picked a selection of the most moving, most eloquent, most reassuring, most funny, most inspiring, most heroic stories you are ever likely to hear. I burst ...
Apr 15, 2020•55 min
In the second of two special episodes, the renowned philosopher Alain de Botton, returns to How To Fail With Elizabeth Day to talk about how to be human and how to stay (relatively) sane in the grip of a global pandemic. We talk about the fact that, right now, it's rational to be a little demented and how we should all take lessons from our childhood and be less ashamed of bursting into tears when we really need to. He tells me about the merits of stoicism, the comfort that comes from admitting ...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr
Hello. I hope you're all doing ok out there. Bit of a strange time isn't it? It can feel overwhelming to be living through a global pandemic, but there are things all of us can do - small things that can have big impact. We can stay at home and save lives. We can distance socially and help the heroic health carers working on the frontline of this disease. We can spread a little positivity. We can refuse to panic buy toilet roll. And I, at least, can make podcasts so that you can listen to them a...
Mar 23, 2020•1 hr 14 min
SURPRISE! Here I am, clogging up your podcast feed again. Yes, I know I said that Frankie Bridge was the last episode in season 7, but I might have slightly not been telling you the whole truth because here I am with a brand, spanking new BONUS EPISODE all fresh and ready to be listened to by your gorgeous ears.This week, I talk to Ella Mills, aka Deliciously Ella, the woman who launched an empire of plant-based foodstuffs, delis, bestselling cookbooks and fitness apps, all designed to make you ...
Mar 04, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Frankie Bridge is probably best known as a member of one of the UK's most successful girl bands of all time, The Saturdays. But, more recently, it's as a mental health advocate that she has been making headlines. Her new memoir, Open: Why asking for help can save your life, is a brave and unflinchingly honest attempt to destigmatise the conditions that so many of us struggle with in private. Frankie lives with treatment-resistant depression. Initially, she struggled in silence but when she was h...
Feb 18, 2020•59 min
So. This podcast episode almost didn't happen because I'd forgotten to put it into my iCal (I find any diary that isn't paper so confusing, don't you?) and on the allotted day, I had a text from sound engineer Chris saying 'We're outside!'. Needless to say, I was not inside. I was half-an-hour away having breakfast with my friend Viv.It is a testament to Adam Pearson's kindness that, when I spoke to him, harassed and sweating as I ran for the train, he didn't seem remotely put out. 'It's very on...
Feb 12, 2020•56 min
Marian Keyes is one of those people who you think can't POSSIBLY be as lovely and talented and nice as everyone says she is. She must have a hidden dark side, I thought. Maybe she's a terrible diva who will demand bowls of blue M&Ms and want my toilet freshly re-painted and scented with vanilla before she deigns to use it?But then you meet her and - lo and behold - she is not only as lovely as everyone says she is, but in fact EVEN NICER than that. This is a woman who has sold millions of book, ...
Feb 05, 2020•48 min
Eniola Aluko is a former footballer who bears the notable distinction of being one of only 11 women to play for England over 100 times and the first ever female pundit on Match of the Day. Born in Nigeria, she was raised on a Birmingham council estate, where her talent for football was obvious from a young age. At 15 she signed up for Birmingham City Ladies. Later, she played for Chelsea and Juventus, gaining a First Class law degree along the way. Later still, she was a whistleblower for racist...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 1 min
This week, the podcast welcomes its first ever Michelin-starred chef. Yes...it's Tom Kerridge! And what a chef he is. He failed at school, but found his way in catering college after the death of his Dad. He climbed the ranks of the profession, working hard and partying harder. Professional success followed, at the same time as personal failure - the long hours triggered a drink problem and he became unhealthily overweight. Faced with his own mortality, he gave up alcohol and went on a fitness r...
Jan 22, 2020•57 min
