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 added wit. Her iconic word jumpers are one of the most covetable individual fashion items bar none. (As her instant-sell out collaboration with M&S ...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr•Season 15Ep. 216
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 publishing industry came a-calling. Now The UK’s best selling poet, Donna has written eight books, including the bestsellers Wild Hope and I Wish I Knew a...
Nov 26, 2024•58 min•Season 15Ep. 215
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 Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. In 2001 she received an OBE and became an independent peer in the house of lords in 2004, where she has act...
Nov 19, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 15Ep. 214
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 from. Sounds like it might be useful? I thought so, too. Jen is also the co host of the Women Are Mad podcast and has written a book called Women Are...
Nov 12, 2024•54 min•Season 15Ep. 213
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 BBC series starring Emily Watson. She was also the brains behind the breathtaking BBC drama Crossfire that starred Keeley Hawes. Of course What you don...
Nov 05, 2024•59 min•Season 15Ep. 212
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 life had gone forever, to regaining more than a semblance of normal. Whatever that is. Because Kate is not only one of the first people to experience an...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 15Ep. 211
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 her “pernicious public cycle of yoyo dieting.” She cut her teeth on This Morning, interviewed stars on the Big Breakfast Bed and hosted her own hit sh...
Oct 22, 2024•56 min•Season 15Ep. 210
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 on a whim. As a rule they don’t publish fiction, but less than three weeks later, they did just that. Cat Brushing became the title of her debut short...
Oct 15, 2024•49 min•Season 17Ep. 209
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 help books changed her life in ways she’d never expected. The resulting book, Help me! Has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies, been translated ...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 15Ep. 208
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. Since leaving the sofa, she has chaired the Women’s Prize for Fiction, honed her skills as an endurance athlete (she qualified for the Great Britain Age-G...
Oct 01, 2024•58 min•Season 15Ep. 207
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 she was never quite able to step out of the shadow of her “music genius” father Frank and mother Gail. The eldest of four siblings, Moon says, she was ...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 15Ep. 206
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 twitter followers and listeners to her LBC show listened. Why? Because she’s one of us. An ordinary kid from a working class background, brought up by a ...
Sep 17, 2024•54 min•Season 15Ep. 205
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 that blended memoir with motivation and was a big and unexpected hit. Then, a couple of years ago she wrote the brilliantly titled How To Kill Your Fam...
Sep 10, 2024•57 min•Season 15Ep. 204
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 - over 40! I know. Ancient! And before all that, Ruth was a successful model and it’s that experience that forms the basis of her first book How Not To ...
Sep 03, 2024•56 min•Season 15Ep. 203
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 Bishop. Can you say, ob-sessed? But before all this Deborah was a scholar. A historian who teaches the history of science at the University of Southern ...
Aug 27, 2024•56 min•Season 15Ep. 202
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 launched Happy Place podcast, which has since amassed over 50 million downloads and expanded into a festival, bookclub, app and publishing imprint. As an au...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 15Ep. 201
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 herself and her younger daughter, Hope, up from the ashes and rebuilt their lives. Already a successful editor she became editor of Good Housekeeping where ...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 15Ep. 200
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 refusing to be interviewed for is a masterclass.) Her debut novel Fleishman is in Trouble was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and then, ...
Aug 06, 2024•51 min•Season 15Ep. 199
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 use of colour. Over the years she has dressed everyone from Princesses Diana to Freddie Mercury, Diana Ross and Debbie Harry, and collaborated with ev...
Jul 30, 2024•51 min•Season 15Ep. 198
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. Earlier this year, the podcast took home Gold at the ARIAS (industry Oscars etc) as well as a host of other commendations... My guest this week has come...
Jul 23, 2024•49 min•Season 14Ep. 196
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 and is now a bestselling author and businesswoman. She has published six autobiographies, 11 novels and two series of children's books, released her ow...
Jul 17, 2024•41 min•Season 14Ep. 197
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 small!) The latest of which, The Ghost Ship, is just out in paperback. In tribute I thought we'd replay one of the earliest The Shift conversations with...
Jul 16, 2024•44 min•Season 14Ep. 195
It's Gabby Logan's summer. First there's the Euros and then the Paris Olympics are hot on their heels. Plus, she has a new book, The Midpoint Plan, out so it seemed like a fine time to revisit my conversation with her from a couple of years ago... My guest this week has hosted everything from Final Score to the Six Nations to the Olympics. Formerly an international gymnast, Gabby Logan moved into broadcasting in her early 20s and neither she – nor the male-dominated world of sports broadcasting ...
Jul 09, 2024•49 min•Season 14Ep. 194
It's season finale time! And my guest today is the whirlwind also known as Kathy Lette. Australian Kathy smashed her way into the global bestseller lists at the age of 17 with the novel Puberty Blues. Since then she has turned her irreverent, en pointe pen on the peaks and troughs, triumphs and total BS of female existence. I first read her with Girls Night Out and The Llama Parlour in my twenties and met Kathy when I was features editor of New Woman (yet another resident of the magazine graveya...
Jul 02, 2024•46 min•Season 14Ep. 193
My guest today is the teacher, musician and writer Molly Roden Winter. Molly hit the headlines earlier this year when her memoir More was published in the United States and caused… let’s just call it “a storm”. Why? Because Molly’s book is an incredibly candid account of her open marriage. Which, lets face it, shouldn’t be that big of a deal in 2024. But something about a woman - a married woman, a mother, and one no longer in the first flushes of youth - talking so frankly about sex and self-di...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 14Ep. 192
CONTENT WARNING: There are many moments of joy in this conversation, but please be aware that Liz talks candidly about grief and the sudden death of her son, which some listeners may find upsetting. My guest today is the writer and climate activist Liz Jensen. Half Danish and half-anglo Moroccan, Liz started out as a journalist, working in radio before becoming a BBC producer. Then, Liz turned her hand to novels. She has now written nine, perhaps the best known of which is The Ninth Life of Loui...
Jun 18, 2024•54 min•Season 14Ep. 191
I first came across today’s guest, Dr Emily Nagoski, on this very podcast, when my then guest Sarah Knight (creator of the NoFucks Given franchise) raved about the transformational power of her runaway bestseller, Come As You Are. I hunted it down and, like millions of women the world over, I was blown away. A sex expert speaking our language? Taking the pressure off, rather than piling it on? Never! So when I heard that the Kinsey-educated sex educator had turned her attention to long term rela...
Jun 11, 2024•56 min•Season 14Ep. 190
My guest today is a fashion editor on a mission to improve the representation of all women over 40 - not just the thin white ones with a ton of spare cash! Anna Cascarina has worked in the fashion industry for over 25 years, first as a fashion editor and stylist, then as a teacher. But as she got older and so did her body, something rankled. Yep - she was starting to feel like she and women like her (ie women over 40 and not a size 10) were not welcome here. In the stores she’d always shopped at...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 14Ep. 189
My guest today has blazed a trail through the British poetry scene ever since her work was first published in 1991. Born in Edinburgh, Jackie Kay MBE was brought up in Glasgow by her adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay, of whom much more later. She has had countless poetry collections, short stories and novels published to acclaim, as well as her glorious memoir Red Dust Road which tells the story of meeting her birth parents. The winner of over 20 awards, Jackie is a professor of creative writ...
May 28, 2024•1 hr•Season 14Ep. 188
My guest today is the writer, actress and comedian Helen Lederer. Helen began as a stand-up comedian in the “comedy swamp” of the 1980s, where women were like hen’s teeth and rose to fame with her sloaney girl at the bar in the BBC Comedy ‘Naked video’. Then came Saturday Night Live, The Young Ones, French and Saunders and Bottom with Rik Mayall. But she’s probably best known as Catriona the dippy journalist in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous. It was after writing her first novel, Losing It, t...
May 21, 2024•54 min•Season 14Ep. 187
