THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.189 - SAMIRA AHMED

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

Adam talks with British Asian journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed about conkers, Mary Whitehouse, white noise makers, Star Trek and much else.This conversation was recorded face to face in London on October 4th, 2022Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSSAMIRA'S BLOGCENTRE FOR WOMEN'S JUSTICEDISGUSTED, MARY WHITEHOUSE - 2022 (BBC)Edwardian, prude, Christian disruptor, Cassandra of digital technology? Samira Ahmed assesses the life and legacy of Mary Whitehouse through her diaries and those who knew her.SAMIRA'S VIDEO FOR THE NIGHTINGALES (FROM 'KING ROCKER' DOC Directed by Michael Cumming, presented by Stewart Lee) - 2020 (YOUTUBE)SAMIRA AHMED INTERVIEWS PAUL McCARTNEY - 2021 (YOUTUBE)HOW I FOUND MY VOICE PODCAST (INTELLIGENCE SQUARED)THE ART OF PERSIA - 2020 (BBC)Samira Ahmed goes on a remarkable journey to places rarely seen, as she travels through Iran, telling the story of a complex and fascinating people, culture and history.I DRESSED ZIGGY STARDUST - 2013 (BBC)Samira Ahmed meets British Asian women who, like her, were inspired by the ever-changing London pop star David Bowie. From 2013.MY NOISE (BACKGROUND NOISE APP) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here, crunching my way across a carpet of acorns

on a farm track out in Norfolk, East Anglia, UK, in the second week of October 2022. It is a beautiful day, I've got to tell you. It's spectacular. Quite blustery, but the sun is out and it's warm. I'm wearing not just shorts but gym shorts. Sometimes on a weekend I like to put on gym shorts first thing in the morning thinking that it'll encourage me to do some exercise. Sometimes it works but other times it just means that I spend the whole weekend wandering around in gym shorts and a fleece. Still, I think, I'm not really like that. It's just what happened today. Someone else who's getting a little set in their ways is Rosie, my best dog friend.

Rosie, my best dog friend, for the third week running. She is not accompanying me on the walk while I record the intros and outros for the podcast. She just doesn't really like going for walks in the afternoon anymore. I mean, you wouldn't know if she was here or not, really, would you? I'd just say, oh, she's up ahead bouncing. I could be lying to you, but I've never lied to you about that before, So I wouldn't want to start now. She likes evening walks now. But I've got to get this done earlier than that. How are you doing anyway? Not too bad, I hope.

Let me tell you a bit about podcast number 189, which features a rambling conversation with the British journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed. Samira Fax, born in 1968 in Wandsworth, South London, Samira graduated from Oxford University with an English degree at the end of the 1980s, with an English degree at the end of the 1980s, whereupon she became a trainee journalist at the BBC, working mainly on current affairs shows, honing her skills and rising up the ranks over the next few years.

She joined the Channel 4 news team in 2000 and became one of the on-screen journalists on the show for nearly 10 years. Her 2009 special report about so-called corrective rape of lesbian women in South Africa won a Stonewall Award for Broadcast of the Year. Since then, as well as writing for publications like The Guardian, The Independent and The New Humanist, Samira has returned to the BBC, where her presenting duties have included the TV series The Art of Persia, about the culture and history of Iran, and radio programmes like Radio 3's Nightwaves, and Radio 4's PM, The World Tonight, and currently their arts programme Front Row. I love Front Row. Always a staunch advocate for equal rights,

Samira filed legal proceedings against her employers in 2019, protesting the pay gap between genders at the BBC. And in 2020, the London Central Employment Tribunal unanimously found in her favour. Samira is also on the board of trustees for the Centre for Women's Justice, whose aim is, quotes, to hold the state to account and challenge discrimination in the justice system around male violence against women and girls. She's also a sci-fi nerd, and in 2019 Samira won the Celebrity Mastermind Champion of Champions while wearing a costume in the style of Gerry Anderson's live-action sci-fi show Space 1999, which has got to be one of the nerdiest sentences of all time. was recorded face-to-face in a studio in London just a few days ago, as I speak.

We were supposed to get together and record a ramble ages ago, but she's busy. Sometimes I'm busy too. But finally we were able to meet just before the episode was due to go out. So this is an unusually fast turnaround for this podcast. Not that our conversation ended up being especially topical. We spoke about the radio programme Samira made about Mary Whitehouse, which came out earlier this year, in which she considered the legacy of Whitehouse, a British ex-art teacher who became a vocal campaigner

in the 60s, 70s and 80s, against what she saw as dangerous cultural permissiveness and the undermining of Christian values in the media. I watched a TV show at 6.35pm last Thursday and it was the dirtiest programme that I have seen in a very long time. I think she was talking about the Adam and Jo show. But Samira also gave me a few cultural recommendations

to broaden my horizons from just music documentaries. And phaser trigger warning, there was some Star Trek chat towards the end. I will be back for a small extra slice of waffle, but right now with Samira Ahmed. Here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, up have you got a mic check patter that you do, Samira, when you're in studios?

They always say, what did you have for breakfast? But I don't say that. I just ask them an interesting question. Oh, look at you with your interesting questions. Have you got a standard interesting question or you just think of one off the top of your head with your mind? Well, if it's someone that I'm going to be interviewing, I might ask them something I can't ask someone.

And it might be something really simple like, you know, when is the show actually opening or, you know, how long did you live in Baltimore? Cassie, I've brought you a present. Have you?

Do you want to see it? Yes, please. Don't get your hopes up. Listeners, I should say that I bought Samira a present as well, an Adam Buxton podcast mug still in its

protective sanitary sleeve you can choose, I live on a street with loads of chestnut trees so I brought you a load of conkers and several of these I actually picked out of the conker shell myself so you can see they're extra shiny

Samira's brought me a selection of variously sized conkers. Seven conkers. One of them is big. I know. You can have a few. I need one. Because I'm going off to meet a friend to go to the theatre.

So I want to take him a conker. Is he six? No, but look, I think the day you walk past shiny conkers on the ground and you don't feel the urge to pick one up is the day you are dead inside. Absolutely. Well, these are beautiful conkers. You can see this one. I just, it's got shiny ears.

And I like the ones which are flat underneath. Well, they're easier to pierce and put the string through, right? So I have to confess, I never did the conkers game. I just like collecting shiny things. I treat them more like stress stress toys i like to just stroke them and then the shine wears off overnight then you you chuck them in the food recycling and then you pick more yeah you could make a nice little conchory um necklace out of them or as you say sort of worry beads yeah you could trade them i could trade your currency you know when britain

becomes this post-apocalyptic society, which isn't that far off. We will be trading conkers. It'll all come back to conkers again. In which case, I'm going to be a millionaire with the selection you have presented me there. You're welcome. Yeah, how are your stress levels these days? Well, they're quite

good since I stopped listening to most news at the start of the pandemic. I listen to News Hour on the World Service every day day and I listen to the radio bulletins. But essentially, I listen to Radio 3 in the morning. Yeah. Just changed my outlook on life. So Radio 3, that's music and classical music. Not much political chit chat?

No. And are you de-stressing now that you're spending more time with Radio 3? Has it made a difference that you can quantify? So, OK, I'm an abe right now, but when I interviewed Michael Palin, he had written this book, Erebus, about, you know, one of the ships that got lost searching for the Northwest Passage. And I was asking him about Brexit, and he said, if you think about history and you think about our place in things as individual lives,

in a weird way, it's quite calming to realize all things must must pass he didn't mean it to trivialize when people are suffering stress levels but actually in the grand scheme of the planet there's no point stressing yeah so um i'm sort of i sort of feel i'm trying to think of myself as a dot in history and that's quite helpful yeah sure shadows on on the wall, as George Harrison said. But the thing is that certainly when it comes to things like climate change or the climate emergency, you're told, actually, it's not the same. History has nothing to teach us about these things. It's all different. It's all way worse. You should be much more stressed out.

Well, you know, I have to say I am getting ready to interview Greta Thunberg at the end of October. Now you're saying Thunberg, that's the way I said it, but then someone said, no, it's Thunberg. Okay, I will find out for sure before I meet her. Okay. I'll make sure of that.

She's got a big new book out called The Climate Book and it's all about what you can do and there's loads of different scientists and experts who've all written essays about what we know about climate science and what we can about climate science and what we can do as individual citizens and as politicians and the rest of it so i just thought to actually meet her and put questions to her that my children's generation as much as my generation

are interested in would be amazing yeah really amazing give me so do you have a think give me a question for greta you can always think of one and toonberg what to ask her does she ever have any doubts like does she ever think well maybe some of these dire predictions may not materialize that's a good question um but is it better just to carry on behaving as if they will like my personal view on that would be yes you should behave as if the worst is going to happen because like what's the downside you're just going to improve the environment and you might clean a nicer place yes exactly i understand that people feel the downside would be economic hardship and sort of curtailing freedoms that they don't want curtailed, right? Well, I don't think that many people really feel that.

I think a few very rich people feel that. People who run oil companies feel that. But I mean people who want to go on holiday and don't want to be told that they're killing the planet by getting on a plane. Yeah, although I think there's a case to say individual choices aren't really the issue. Anyway, I'm not Greta Thunberg. I wouldn't ask her that, but it's a good question. Yeah, it's more of a top-down thing, isn't it?

How's life at the big British castle, a.k.a. the BBC? Well, my little corner of it is fine. I sometimes joke with people. It's like being in the last stage of the Weimar Republic. Like I'm in the cabaret and having a really good time. But outside, I think it's a bit scary. So we don't know. Are you able to express yourself straightforwardly when it comes to the BBC? Or are you mindful that actually it's politically fraught? fraught um to be honest i'm too small a fish for anyone to care what i think but i um i always think my job is to make the best programs i can and i present a program called front row which is daily arts and culture program so we you know i interviewed viola davis yesterday about the working how cool is that and you know i'll grill a government minister about their arts policy

sometimes or we did a piece the other week about how sylvia anderson's name has been disappearing from her own co-creations all the thunderbirds and the super marionations and that there's a whole issue for itv to address about why that's happened and her and her royalties which her daughter's fighting for so that was a big investigation that i did you know we do what we can to put out good stories and all my bbc colleagues who work very much in hard news i I don't really work in hard news anymore apart from Newswatch, you know, they often tell me what they're working on.

And they're doing amazing stories, you know, about how the Rwanda deportation asylum policy, you know, has all kinds of problems with it and all the evidence of human rights abuses in Rwanda, or how can we be deporting people there? You know, all that work is going on

on a day-by-day basis. So I just think sometimes that's all you can do is fight it on that level. And then hopefully politicians and the public will fight the bigger picture about the BBC's survival on another level. Does it frustrate you though when you come across criticism from people talking about BBC bias? There seems to be an equal number of people on the left and the right who are absolutely convinced that the BBC is either a mouthpiece for the government or is full of lefties trying to peddle their lefty propaganda.

Yeah. I mean, the good thing about Newswatch is on a case-by-case basis, you get complaints on a story. And you can see when there's a point that it's not so much there's a conspiracy, I would argue, by the BBC, But sometimes journalists and editors get it wrong and they should have the guts to admit that they got it wrong. And that can happen on all sides. And some of it is really embarrassing stuff when they show footage of a person and it's not the right person because they can't tell the difference between two Bollywood stars or two black actors. You know, that kind of error is revealing in its own way, isn't it? But I love working for the BBC. Yeah.

I liked it there. But I did feel, you know, you are dipped in the madness somewhat of that effort to try and do the right thing. I mean, that's generally what it is, right? Is people desperate to do the right thing or be seen to do the right thing? That's different. is people desperate to do the right thing or be seen to do the right thing. That's different. So I would argue that the grassroots of the people who are the backbone of the BBC,

so the producers and the reporters and the actual editorial staff, a lot of whom are very, very low paid. Their salaries have shocked me what some people's salaries are. And they're the ones who make all the great content. I think especially there is a gap between the people who actually make the great content, the BBC and the kind of people in charge. Let's put it that way and leave it at that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I never really, obviously, I wasn't operating at a particularly high level at the BBC, me and Joe. You made a program about Mary Whitehouse not long ago. She was a woman who was passionately engaged with what she believed was making a positive change in the world, or at least trying to hold back negative changes, right?

So I spent, during lockdown, I spent several months in the Bodleian Library in Oxford reading Mary Whitehouse's campaign diaries from 1968. And what made you want to do that? I found out that the diaries had just been deposited and I was about to go into my employment tribunal and I thought I need a project for afterwards regardless because you never know you know I might find I have a lot of time on my hands depending on the result and I had been made an honorary fellow at my old college and so I could get a Bodleian reader card without having to pay for it so I just thought I should get on with this so and also I was the same age as she had been

when she started her campaigning against BBC over filth on television. And I thought, well, there's something about getting into your 50s and not putting up with shit anymore. You know, whatever your beliefs. And I thought I'd be interested to think, would I reassess that? As a child in the 70s, I was always taught to view her

as something to be mocked and laughed at. She was always being satirized on television. So I read the diaries, and you know, she was a religious fundamentalist. So there's lots of stuff that I think still seems very extreme. She didn't believe homosexuality was natural, which is the biggest reason why people don't want to hear anything about her. But she was right about porn. She absolutely anticipated that digital technology would enable abusers to groom children, to spread violent content, and that violent content coming into people's homes unregulated would have a corrosive effect on society. And I think we have seen plenty of evidence of that. And the fact that there's an online harms bill, which in theory is going to go through Parliament to try and tackle some of that,

And the fact that there's an online harms bill, which in theory is going to go through parliament to try and tackle some of that, is stuff she was warning about 40 or 50 years ago, which is incredible. I found speeches she gave to the computing industry in 1974 or 5 at a big conference in Rome, warning that, you know, you don't know how some of this technology is going to be abused and you have to think about it ethically. So I just think people can be right and wrong about things at the same time. Now, someone did say to me, that's like saying Hitler was nice to animals. And I say, all right, the Hitler comparison, that's coming nice and fast. I completely respect LGBTQ plus people who say there's nothing that woman has to say that I think is worth listening to. I respect that. But I would say if you look at the research she did, her political campaigning, I've interviewed lots of politicians who knew her, John Major, David Mellor, who was at the Home Office, even people who satirized her, like Graham Gardner wrote an episode of The Goodies

that was called Gender Education. And it had Beryl Reid, I think, playing a version of Mary Whitehouse's Mrs. Desiree Carhart said, actually, if you go and look at her debating on YouTube, you find all clips of her. She's so smart. She wasn't anti-free speech. She had very particular targets, but she framed them all in a Christian religious way, which was already very, very unfashionable. Yeah, but she also did, I mean, setting aside the whole strand of homophobia that there was there.

Yeah, and I'm not mildly setting it aside. I'm not saying anyone should set it aside. No, no, no, I know. I'm setting it aside just for the moment. But even though that is, that's like the most obvious flag, I suppose, with her that you just think, oh, well, I can discount most of what she says because she's so wrongheaded about that. Yeah, exactly. But then also she would do things like not actually watch the programmes

she was talking about. Oh my God, I know, I know. Well, I mean, the programme I made, it was an archive on four called Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, and you can find it on the BBC Sounds app. But I'm really proud of it. We focused on the private prosecution

of the Romans in Britain play at the National Theatre. And she didn't go and see it. She sent other people to see it. And there was all this thing about whether they could see a penis on stage or, you know, because there was a gang rape on stage. And what's really interesting about the play is it's never staged because actually it's a really distressing thing. And there are questions about it as a, you know, how good it is as a play.

That's not to say it should never be staged. But it was really interesting how I don't think you could stage that play now the way it was staged then. So I think it reveals something about the 70s and the early 80s when there was, I think, quite a... There was this whole thing to say that porn culture is just culture. And you went from one extreme to the other where there was this attempt to completely normalise quite hardcore pornography. And you think about films like Blow Up, not the Branda Palmer film, but there was a porn film. And Deep Throat, which was a porn film

that got a mainstream release in the States and it never got a release here. But there were attempts to say, this is just cinema. Anyone should be able to see this. And there was even talk about abolishing certification. So it was in that climate that she was really pushing back against some of this extreme attempt to break the traditional boundaries of culture. And I would argue that neither extreme was ideal.

But people don't understand. It wasn't like now where, you know, I think people are really careful what language they use, how nudity is depicted, how women in particular are depicted none of that a lot of that is her legacy I would argue she talked about sexploitation about women actors being the ones

who were always nude and not men you know that this was exploitative so yeah and yet of course there are many things in mainstream movies

and TV shows and music and culture in general which we will or society will be shocked by in another 10 or 20 years and look back on and say, how are they allowed to get away with that? And they're all things that seem reasonable to us now. Like I'm thinking of especially gun violence, right? The

way that that is totally normalized in mainstream culture. And there are a few films and TV shows that deal with the reality of what guns do and what people with guns do, but not on the whole. On the whole, it's still very much guns are exciting and men with guns are going to sort things out. And that's exciting. Have you ever held a gun? A real one? Yes, I have. I think it was an antique gun that was being auctioned at Sotheby's. It probably belonged to someone famous, but I can't remember. It was like a flintlock or something. You can tell I really cared because I cannot remember.

Yeah. It is a spooky thing to pick up a gun, a loaded gun. It feels horrible. To me, it feels horrible. You know, I'm feeling unpleasant even just imagining holding one. But lots of people I know have said, oh, it's amazing. I don't like guns they are scary and horrible but it does feel amazing because it's i suppose a feeling of power isn't it like you're

holding a powerful deadly thing and there's something thrilling about that perhaps i mean clearly there is because people love guns on tv and films. And it just seems that there's a real weird dissonance in a lot of modern culture between the kind of things that you were mentioning, like people being much more thoughtful about the way people are portrayed on film and, you know, things like smoking. You don't see smoking in films. People have to think carefully about a character smoking on film or in a TV show now. We had a whole discussion in front row about it. Right. Because when there is a lot of smoking, you know it's a deliberate choice. Yeah.

And you ask about why. And also how actors feel because people don't grow up smoking necessarily now. It's a minority thing. So it's like a dangerous thing you have to learn to do. Yeah. The other thing I was going to mention was knives. So Britain's always taken knife crime quite seriously. And you know when Buffy the Vampire Slayer used to be on TV,

one of the reasons that scheduling was all over the place and it would be moved from 6 in the evening to 11 at night was because of the amount of knives in it. And of course in America they think that's no big deal at all. amount of knives in it and of course in america they think that's no big deal at all but it's it's a huge deal in in um the way that british offcom thinks about censorship right but this sort of these kinds of conversations for some people some people will be listening to this and going oh this all sounds a bit dodgy like even talking about this kind of thing, even you making your program about Mary Whitehouse, for some people is like, well, you're just an apologist

for these sort of censorious, intolerant views. So what kind of response did you get to the Whitehouse? Well, overwhelmingly positive, including from people who had been concerned about it before. And that was because it wasn't hagiography. It was a really critical program. And I had access to her family, so they didn't have any control editorially. But I interviewed her granddaughter, who was the same age as me, and would have arguments with her grandmother

about homophobia and say, you know, why do you care what people get up to in private, but could also see her grandmother's arguments about porn culture. And so it was quite a nuanced program. And the other big thing that I put in the program, which really convinced people, like Keith Flett of Tottenham, who has a letter in The Guardian every week, he's kind of quite a well-known kind of left-wing letter writer, was we covered the fact that one of Mary Whitehouse's closest advisors, John Smythe QC, her barrister, who led the prosecution of gay news and was instrumental in the prosecution of the Romans in Britain, but suddenly pulled out from representing her just

before the court case, turned out to have been a long-term serial violent abuser of boys. And he used to target them at Christian camps. And he got found out in the early 80s. And he suddenly says, oh, I can't represent you in court. he doesn't say why and the latest investigation to that case only came out in January and my program I made was making about March. Hello fact-checking buckles here fact-checking Santa's on holiday sorry for interrupting I just felt that I should mention when I was speaking with Samira about John Smythe QC she mentioned the name of the school where he had abused boys in the 1970s and 1980s. She accidentally said it was Westminster School. In fact, it was Winchester College. So that's the school that she's talking about here. Thanks. The headmaster knew because boys had reported it.

And they got this man to sign in a gentleman's agreement where he said he wouldn't work with young people and to get some help. And of course, never did. Moved to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Continued to abuse boys. Killed at least one, it's thought. Oh my God. I know, I know. And he used to beat them bloody. And this was the guy who was going to represent the White House.

So I showed how she was obsessed about the way that child abusers would find ways to get access to children. And the idea that she didn't, and she didn't know. I honestly believe her diary shows no indication she had any idea that this man who was posing as a devout Christian was actually doing exactly what she was campaigning against. And I say in the documentary, I explain the whole thing about what he did and how it was found out.

It was only exposed properly in 2017, shortly before he died. But I also said, I think if she'd known, it might have shaken her belief in a lot of things, including her trust in the leadership of these institutions. So it was quite, you know, a nuanced discussion about her. Yeah, it really was. It was great. I liked hearing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, thank you. I like things like that. I do think that you can... Oh, can I just say? Yes. So her eldest son got in touch with me. He's found another box of her papers. Oh, my God.

And I'm going to go and have a look at them. The stuff she set aside because she knew it was totally beyond the pale. No, no, she wrote her diaries for public consumption. Oh, yeah, did she? Yeah, she said, I know these. You won't find any gossip here about my family. Although there are a few touchy things like she has new false teeth fitted. You forget how terrible people's teeth were in the 50s and 60s and 70s.

And she talks about the pain. It's a whole new set of false teeth. Oh, mate. You shouldn't be so homophobic then. They gave her the homophobic false teeth. God's punishment. If she hadn't been so horrible, they would have given her nice, comfortable teeth. But that's good that you didn't get too much craziness thrown at you.

I didn't get much. There was some complaint. I wrote a big feature for the BBC News website called. I didn't get much. There was some complaints. I wrote a big feature for the BBC News website called, I didn't write the headline, can I just say, but the headline was, was Mary Whitehouse right,

which you can imagine is the kind of headline that would provoke. And it was focused very much on her campaigning about pornography. And people like Peter Tatchell said, oh, this is rubbish. But they didn't tag me in.

So, I mean, I got a few complaints. And but I just stood by the piece. It got a million hits. It was trending on social media, which in terms of promoting my doc did the job. But also it's provocative. It was saying, look, maybe we need to reassess this woman on this aspect. But she there's a really good reason why people didn't listen to her. She didn't she didn't make alliances with feminists.

She was, you know, in that sense, she was foolish. If she'd allied herself with the feminist movement, she might have been taken more seriously. But she didn't like competition. She was quite an ego. Well, she would have been in trouble with the sex positivity. Well, yeah, but if you look at the 80s, I interviewed Claire Short, who, of course, led a big campaign

to try and specifically ban page three type photographs in so-called family newspapers and got a huge amount of abuse. And if you listen to the parliamentary debate at the time, you know, they laughed at by MPs, you know, joked at the whole culture of politics. I mean, I know it's not great yet, but it was even worse then. And Claire Shortwell, you know, is not remotely interested in rescuing the reputation of Mary Whitehouse. She thinks she was a terrible woman who did terrible things. But they were both campaigning on similar grounds in some way. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I mean, everybody intersects with everybody else nowadays. You know, there's like a weird circle of the left and right that kind of joins at the top in certain areas.

Well, oh, you flip it around. And my big point, and I say this a lot when I go and talk to young women in schools in particular, is if you will only talk to people who you agree with on everything, you are never going to get anything done. So if you look at there was a cross party alliance in parliament, including people who are anti-abortion, people who are very religious and people who are kind of very left wing humanists and feminists who campaigned to get non-fatal strangulation put on a bill as a specific criminal act. We know it's often a precursor to killing a female partner. Now, that's a great piece of legislation to have got through. It means that men can be prosecuted for violence before they actually kill someone. That only happened because people compromised and got through on something they all agreed on, but they disagree on lots of other things. So I would say

that's the way forward. You have to start finding things you agree on. you just can't do anything but saying, well, I can't deal with you because I don't agree with you on this, so I'm going to shut you off and I'm going to block you. As we get older, I'd like to think we get, in some ways, more relaxed about it. I know when I was young, I was very rigidly, had very strong views. And to some extent, you have to understand that people in their young have strong, passionately held views, and that will partly change as they get older. Yeah, that's true, isn't it? That's one of the nice things about getting old. See, all things will pass change as they get older yeah that's true isn't

it that's one of the nice things about getting all things will pass it all comes back to that it all comes back to george harrison yeah i'm so glad you talked about george harrison did you like him he was my favorite are you a beatles person did you not know that no i don't think i did so i got to interview paul mccartney at his book launch at the royal festival hall oh yes with the lyrics yeah i got an email at the blue saying oh you know heney at his book launch at the Royal Festival Hall. Oh, yes. That was one of the nicest days of my life. With the lyrics. Yeah. I got an email at the Blues saying, oh, you know, he's doing this book launch. And it was someone from Penguin Randolph.

I said, I thought you might be really good. And I said, yes, I would. Yeah. I wrote an email in that kind of voice. And then they sent me the book in August. And the event wasn't until November. So I had the whole summer to sit and read and think about it and listen to all the music and it was great you know 90 minutes on stage with Paul McCartney. Were you happy with the encounter? Yeah I got done you know what sorry

I'm going to say this yeah his daughters Mary and Stella were there they came up to me afterwards and they said that's the best interview my dad's ever done. Except for Adam Buxton did they say that? It was before he'd done yours to be fair. I think it was after. Okay, sorry. Sorry, I feel bad now. You weren't, he was great with Paul. You got all those insights into what he watches on telly. No, I'm really sorry. But yes, I am a big Beatle fan. I'm working on a couple of other stories related

to the Beatles, which we'll see if I'll get off as documentaries. What was your favourite moment then in your conversation with Paul? When I asked him about why he loves buses so much. And he has a huge story. He really does love buses. I made, some years ago, the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper. I did a whole day of programmes for Extra with my brilliant producer, Luke Doran.

And we dug out old archive interviews as part of it. And there's an interview with Paul McCartney said, when you were on the bus home from Lewis's, it'd be a long ride home. Because he lived out in the suburbs in the department store and so you know you could take the record out the bag and the idea is you'd have something to look at so he was thinking about the teenager going into the department store to buy the record and on the bus journey home having something to look at because he spent like they all did all the grammar school boys he spent you know half an hour 45 minutes every day maybe more each way

going in and out on the bus so So it was all that thinking time, dreaming time. He met John on the bus. George did the audition on the bus. And then it turned out his grandson had written his university thesis about, is it the 1948 Public Transport Act that Peter Mandelson's dad, Sir Herbert Morrison, brought in? I love that you're asking me this as if I might possibly know. Basically, the huge network of nationalised bus routes enabled this whole generation, the baby boomer generation of people like Paul and John and George and Ringo,

to travel for almost nothing, all the way across cities, between cities. And that's how you could go across town to learn a new chord or to audition someone for a band or to get to gigs. They used to take big buses and things. And his grandson, I think, interviewed Paul McCartney about how he used buses and he got a first for his degree. There you go.

I mean, nowadays, of course, the experience is totally different because there's so many ways to entertain yourself and distract yourself on public transport. You know, you're just looking down, right? Fair enough. That's what I do. But yeah, he's right. Like when I was taking the bus in the late 80s, when I had my first job, I had a Walkman.

So it would just be staring out of the window and listening to music. I can still remember the stuff that I had on cassettes that you'd listen to repeatedly. Yeah. Someone, some cultural journalist wrote a thing about that's the moment when people are first able to live in an alternative reality. Yeah. Walkmans. Yes.

Because, of course, it transforms your everyday commute to a glamorous, you could be in a film. That's exactly the way I felt. I would sort of saunter along. I think me and Joe may even have done a tiny sketch about it on our TV show years ago of walking down the street and feeling that you were just the coolest person. Listening to this music, feeling like 10 foot tall. And then every now and again, you catch your reflection in a shop window or something and you'd be reminded, oh, no, I'm not like that. But anyway, it was still fun. Yes, it was like being in your own movie and soundtracking your life. Sometimes I worry that that was a clue to how sort of narcissistic and self-absorbed I was, that I needed to feel I was in a movie about me.

Do you know what I mean? No, it's good. It's adolescence reforming our identities. The thing I find amazing, if you think back to the 50s and 60s, You know what I mean? No, it's good. It's adolescence real forming our identities. The thing I find amazing, if you think back to the 50s and 60s and everyone, you know, everyone talks about

this amazing mythical time and the birth of rock and roll. You couldn't consume any of this music unless you went out and bought the record or you might be able to listen to

particular radio stations on a really dodgy signal late at night. But, you know, so often when you see films and documentaries about that era, it's all soundtracked nonstop with these great songs,

as if it would be pouring out of every building and shop. And it wasn't. You know, it was a really precious commodity that you had to buy and then you would play it repeatedly in your home. And I think we've, you know, it's that whole thing about you get it for free. The same way that news, because it was free online, people stopped buying newspapers and they don't seem to value it. I mean, I still have all my records.

I love them. And I love that I brought my kids up to value them and play them. I remember seeing my daughter sitting underneath the dining room table when she was really little with the Prince Charming album and studying the lyrics and looking at this picture of Adam Ant. She didn't know who he was. And it's like getting into this whole new world. What does what diddly quack quack mean, mummy?

No, the one my daughter asked me was, what does hot tramp mean, mummy? Hot tramp. I love you so. And that's when I thought we have to stop playing certain David Bowie songs at home. How did you explain hot tramp? It's just someone with too many coats on. Yes. Who's got no home.

You know, it was the first thing I ever wrote for the internet when I was at Channel 4 News. And we just sort of launched a website. I thought, you know what, I'm going to write you a piece about, it was his 60th birthday. And I thought, I can write you a piece about 10 things you could, how to raise your children the David Bowie way. It was a list of 10 top tips because I'd raised my children entirely listening to David Bowie music and giving them life lessons from David Bowie's life. Really selective ones. That never even occurred to me. I'm a big Bowie music and giving them life lessons from David Bowie's life. Wow. Really selective ones. That never even occurred to me. I'm a big Bowie fan. So I like, well, sometimes they made them up because they just love David Bowie. So we'd be

sitting at breakfast and my son wasn't eating. He's about six, my daughter's about four. And we tried to say something like, oh, David Beckham always eats good breakfast, as if my son cared about football. And Lakshmi, my daughter, piped up, David Bowie always eats a good breakfast before he goes to parties. And I thought, you know, I'd love that you thought that through. And there's a probably kind of logic to it. It was probably just red peppers and milk. Red peppers, milk and some Charlie. Yeah, we didn't fill in what he ate for breakfast but I liked before he goes to parties

but my daughter features and she's the first voice you hear I made a documentary called I Dressed Ziggy Stardust about me and all these other

Asian girls who grew up obsessed with David Bowie and the first thing you hear on the documentary that's just a brilliant idea of my producer Alice Block

the first thing you hear on that documentary is my daughter who's tiny singing ground control to Major Tom in a really sweet voice.

And then me asking her about her favourite lyrics and her saying it wasn't just the words, it was the music, it was spellbinding. I listened to that show as well. That was good. Did you? Yeah, yeah. And I really liked the fact that

your daughter was singing there as well because I'm always worried about involving my children in stuff I do. I haven't done it often. No, but I like it. I really I always think like, would I be annoyed if I was listening to someone else and they wheeled their child in and did this? I usually would be. I don't.

I mean, it depends. It's like if they're showing off about something, that's annoying. But if it's a genuinely sweet moment, then that's nice. Yeah, I think that was nice. She now hates it. She says, oh, mum, I sound so posh. I say, that's because you went to a posh school in South London. Tough luck.

Tough luck, lady. But yeah, she's a cool lady. The thing is, you never see this. Your kids see what you do, and they absorb it in different ways so yeah i once took luxury to her first feminist conference when she was about that age i was about eight it would be seven and one day a couple of days later i saw she'd lined up all her barbie dolls by the radiator and she was combing their hair they look really like scrubbed up well and i all of them like she had about a dozen i said what's going on she said they're going to a feminist conference, Mum.

Oh, my goodness. And she's played feminist conference all day and they had speeches and they had a feminist buffet and the fairy godmother from Cinderella was giving a keynote speech. And the second waivers fell out with the third waivers. Oh, I can tell you, my little ponies got involved. It all got ready for action. Yeah, gender-critical Barbies came in and it was carnage.

Hey everybody in the modern time, they got to get themselves a podcast. I will do yours and you'll do mine. We're sorting out the problems of the world so fast. I was looking the other day at a story about talking about Spotify and streaming and the amount of money that can be made up there through music being very easily available. But the big thing now is white noise and calming sounds. So people uploading ocean sounds, rainfall, thunder thunder and lightning i do love the sound of a thunder so do i i love it that's great but now a lot of artists music artists are getting annoyed with the streaming services because loads of money is being paid over to people who upload

these short not especially well produced, and they're monetized, and people just leave them on a loop at night to get to sleep. So they're just racking up millions and millions and millions of plays and getting quite a good amount of money from all this. Meanwhile, people aren't listening to so much music, the theory goes. I don't know if the two are mutually exclusive. It's a complicated business, isn't it?

The economics is changing everything. It's funny. I've turned know if the two are mutually exclusive. It's a complicated business, isn't it? The economics is changing everything. It's funny. I've turned to one of those people who realise that not adopting technology could be your smartest move. Like, having held on to my record player and all my records, I'm now cool. It took about 30 years. Yeah. Wait long enough, it'll come around. Wait long enough, it'll come back.

You know, you've got to do what you love. I don't know what the answer is. Ban everything. Maybe. Stop. Blow the answer is. Ban everything. Maybe. Stop. Blow up the internet. Ban everything. Live in caves and make toys out of twigs. Do you ever use a white noise app?

No. There's other noises. See, I live in the suburbs, which I never thought I'd do. I lived in central London. I lived above Baker Street Station for several years. I can hear the Tannoy announcements. And I lived opposite Baker Street Station after that for several years. And when I finally moved back out to the suburbs where I grew up, it had changed. It had become really nice. And it's quiet. And I hear birds. I also hear the traffic from the bypass in the mornings. But I don't need white noise because I have the sound of the suburbs. It's actually quite a nice place to be. What about if you're on a noisy train or plane? Earplugs. Earplugs.

Sometimes you put in earplugs and then you put your headphones over it if you need to listen to something just to drown out the drone. I used to work a lot of night shifts as a reporter. So I'm living above Baker Street Station when you're working night shifts. You just learn to put on blindfold,

earplugs, nice snug ones. Just the foam ones foam ones from boots do but get them in nice and snug and you know you basically get blackout and you don't need white noise you just have to create the appropriate environment and then set an alarm for when you want to get up well i believe you but the other day i found myself very grateful for my noise app what do you listen to it's got all the different noises and you can customize it. Many apps are available. I'm not sponsored by these people, I would like to point out.

But the one I downloaded was called My Noise. I think it's free. And so it gives you an ocean. These are the sort of default ones. Yeah, see, wouldn't you notice when the loop loop comes around you'll start to notice the same lap no i think that they're fairly well randomized a lot of them work on kind of randomization algorithms um so you've got uh what about birdsong you got rain i mean they're all much of a muchness, really. It's just a sort of soft roar. Bird song.

Do you think it lowers your appetite for appreciating the real thing? Like, is this the kind of porn of natural noise? It's only when the real thing isn't available. It's when you're trapped. That's what we say about porn. Well, that's true. But, yeah, it's only when you're trapped in the horror of modern existence. That's so intense. You'd be

lucky to hear that out of a garden window even if you lived out in the country, unless you live somewhere really remote. It's got an EQ on it so that you can mix the frequencies. I can take down certain sounds. I can lose the B's or keep the B frequencies. I can take down certain sounds. I can lose the bees or keep the bees. You can make it just bees.

You can make it just that guy. But my favorite, you can customize just regular. Maybe some people don't know what white noise is, but it's just a sort of shash. It's like interference, static. Who's that? Who's that buzzing? who's that who's that buzzing what's your computer is it somewhere else in the building i don't think it's my phone where's that coming from no it's not my phone oh what's going on is it i'll tell you what that sounds like. It's like when I accidentally phone the emergency services.

Oh, my God. That's the most horrific. Have you done that? Yeah, I've done that, and I got through, and they were really pissed off. Right there. Are you sure it's... What's going on?

Is it a vibration coming to the floor? I can't tell. Oh, no, It's the noise app You know it's not been very calming right now is it No that was stressful I got very I'm sorry Fuck you noise app So you'd be better off stroking one of these conkers

That's the binaural beat machine That doesn't sound good That's very science fiction None of of this is natural, Adam. Well, that's not the one I use. Okay, I'm really sorry about that. Everyone, I'm so sorry about the binaural beat machine. That was a nightmare. But it's over now. Stop. Okay, crikey. The one I like is... I thought it was an emergency. This is my customized white noise, which is like waterfall plus rain plus, I love it. I made my first pop video.

Did you? Yeah, I was in that film the Nightingales did, you know, King Rocker. Yes, loved it. Oh, and so Stuart said, would you come and do something? And I didn't quite appreciate lip syncing to a song. Did you make that video that plays at the end yeah oh that was great yeah and i i got advice and i before i went on social media and i said okay advice from people who've ever made a pop video do you actually sing out loud as you're filming or do you just mouth the lyrics and i got contradictory advice so reverend richard

cole's ex of the communards said you can just mouth it. And other people were saying, no, no, you need to say it out loud. Sing it out loud. So, you know. It looks more natural if you sing it out loud, I would think. And then I realized that the thing is, one, these lyrics were delivered almost like a conversational voice. But also, I don't have a Wolverhampton accent. So even in lip syncing, you have to elongate your mouth in a certain way just to make certain sounds that look like you're lip syncing oh yeah because you're singing some of the song aren't you yeah yeah

yeah it's really fun i thought that's another thing tick on my to-do list i've got done yeah pop video made a good music video for the nightingales no less i know it's so nice what's your favorite pop video of all time adam gosh. I think the one that pops into my head is Let Forever Be, the Michel Gondry video for Noel Gallagher and the Chemical Brothers. Okay, I mean, I see. How does it feel like? You know the one with the, with the... No, I haven't seen the video.

It's a good... You haven't seen the video for that? No. Should I? Is it worth seeing? Yeah. Okay. It's really incredible and it holds up we showed

it not that long ago i think a bug i mean i find an excuse to show it whenever i can because it it is magnificent and it's all just these very clever um in-camera illusions playing with perspective and the only effects in there are very old school camera split screen effects and it's really mad so you've got to see it okay what about you what's your favorite music video so it's probably the ones i just biggest influence on me um boys keep swinging by david bowie because i remember where i was one of my favorite bowie videos so lovely um quite a lot of madonna videos have had a big impact on me um express yourself which is the kind of metropolis style one oh yes blondies atomic videos which could genuinely scare you i remember it was about doing a concert after a nuclear bomb

is dropped they're all wearing plastic bags and they're slightly radioactive and i like you know i mean they do count if you look back at them are those promotional films that the beatles made yeah like the one for paperback writer the one for penny lane strawberry feels forever they're great beautiful yeah michael lindsey hogg did a lot of those ones he was extraordinary in that in the um get back thing get back yeah but he was good those those videos that he made were fantastic. What are your cultural highlights at the moment? I saw The Woman King the other day. Oh, yes.

Do you know? I just thought, imagine if when I was a kid growing up, there'd been loads of films with women just being brave warriors and, you know, bonding together. Sometimes I just need guys just stop and think of a world in which you will never see yourself represented on screen and you are always outnumbered yeah and that's what it's like growing up as a girl so films like this are really changing things and i don't know if you ever seen it's one of those things i saw on social media you know in

the disney theme parks they have characters who wander around and do things. They have actors dressed up as those women warriors from Black Panther with the spears and, you know, Wakanda and everything. And you just see little kids who are so excited and they get them to perform little, you know, ritual movements and things. So there's something about this whole generation of children who now have this whole new range of strong women and women of color as part of their their heroes how was viola davis you interviewed her yesterday she's i mean what can i say she's just fabulous how long do you get with these people when you sit down with them for a show like front row front row i mean we ask and we usually get 20 minutes sometimes we get them for half an hour so i had her and the director together and we got 20 minutes which was a nice amount of time yeah occasionally they slash it back but you can often talk your way if you're asking if you do your research and one thing I always say about myself is I do the best research and I come prepared with good questions and people

then like your questions and at the end of an interview the best thing someone can say to me is I really liked your questions I really enjoyed that interview and especially in a long junket day so once I was interviewing Quentin Tarantino and I was told in advance we had 20 minutes. And then they suddenly said, they cut it down and they said, you've got 13. And then just as you're about to walk into the room, they say, you've got eight. So what? And people say that Quentin can kind of give long answers. So I said to him almost straight away, look, we thought we had 13. We've now got eight and I've got eight questions. I would really like to get through them. You went, oh, okay, so you don't want me to waste time.

And I got a brilliant answer for every question. I got through everything. Oh, that's great. And I probably got more like 10 minutes. So sometimes, you know, if you just set up your parameters, they are really generous with you. You didn't go off on a tangent about movie violence like Krishna and Guru Murthy. No, there was a way to talk about

violence. But, you know, you do things your own way. I still don't understand exactly why Tarantino got so defensive. I guess he was just he'd been asked the question too many times because it's a pretty legitimate question, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I think it was just in the aftermath of something. Right. OK, maybe it was the aftermath of a massacre or something. And I think people feel comfortable if they're linked to something as if there's a causal thing. Okay, yeah, yeah. You know, that can be problematic. But I did ask about, it was the aftermath of, you know, that American Muslim couple who left their kid in daycare and then went off and carried out a massacre?

I don't remember that. Yeah, it was in California. And I remember saying to him, have you ever thought about making a film looking at some of this kind of contemporary violence? We just riffed about it being interesting. But I asked Viola Davis about a Quentin Tarantino question. So, you know, Inglourious Bastards, it's a kind of Jewish revenge fantasy. You get all these soldiers who get to kill Hitler. And there's actually something cathartic about seeing it in a fantasy film. And the thing about The Woman King, which is set at the time of slavery, when, you african kingdoms were selling their

their enemy captives to white slavers but some of these women warriors get taken captive and there's a big fight in this slave port and you just see these women warriors go in and you know there's some really visceral you know punching these white slavers in the face till they're they're dead kind of thing yeah and i asked about whether there was a sense of a cathartic revenge fantasy about filming scenes like that and And I think she said, yeah, there kind of is. But another thing I would really recommend is a book, Alif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees, which is set in Cyprus around the Civil War, and then in London, where this couple have come to escape the violence and have brought up their daughter. couple have come to escape the violence and have brought up their daughter. And what's really fascinating about this book is it's been shortlisted for lots of awards. I don't think it's won any major awards, but it's been on the bestseller list. And it keeps cropping up at sort of like eight or nine on the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list. Because I think the word of mouth

about this book, like Hamner, is so brilliant. I can't recommend it highly enough. And one of the things is I bought a copy to give to a friend who's an actor. And in the book, there's this thing about this film that was being shot in Cyprus at the time of the war. And they had to abandon it and flee. And it turned out that my friend had been one of the actors in that real film. No way. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? And so it's a nonfiction book, is it?

It's a fiction book. But it's got some facts in it. Oh, I see. And a lot of it is about environmentalism, like what's being done to the environment in Cyprus. It's got some facts in it. Oh, I see. And a lot of it is about environmentalism, like what's been done to the environment in Cyprus. So there's something about violence against the environment and violence in terms of conflict, which kind of connected.

Is it a romp? It's a love story. I only like romps. You like romps. Give me an example of a romp book. I'm being silly, but. It's a lovely book. Okay.

I'm going to get it because you told me see I I have to say uh personal advice is never ask someone especially like a partner never ask them to read the book that you love because the chances are they weren't like yeah it's right it's true and it's true because it's connected with you for so many mysterious reasons I just advise in general be really careful when you're in a new relationship telling someone what your favorite book is yeah they might go and read it and then they might think what exactly now you've been you said to me before we met up that you've been interviewing lots of 90s pop stars yeah i have you know i mean so um so Mickey Bereni. Yeah. Her new memoir. From Lush. Yeah, God, it's such a searing book. I mean, real, real abuse and neglect.

I mean, talk about horror of a 17-year-old. I thought this was going to be a good light tangent that I was thinking. But it's also really fun. She's really funny with it. Okay. She's really funny about being neglected. I can't tell you how well written it is. I mean, I got such an advanced copy. And I honestly, I said to her, you have written, I can't believe how good this book is.

It's so good. And then I said, I'd love to get you on front row. So we got her on front row. Were you a Lush fan? Yeah. Okay, so you did know the music. Yeah, although I have to confess, it's really the last album, the one that was the kind of very poppy album with, you know, all the hit singles on it. Yeah, I don't know much about Lush.

But I also read the music press at the time and they wrote about her and Lush as if in this unbelievably disparaging way. But at the time, I was in my 20s and the 90s, I think like you, and you could see straight through, hang on, they only stopped repeating Benny Hill a few years ago and now it's back with quotation marks around it. Yeah. You know, so the 90s was a great decade and also wasn't a great decade. Has an interview gone badly south, though, that you've done? And you just thought, oh, there's nothing I could have done. Yeah, well, I wouldn't say badly south. I mean, sometimes guests don't like what you ask them, but sometimes you have to ask them things they don't like.

So Jeff Pope, who's a very renowned, respected drama maker, makes a lot of documentaries about true crime, and made a drama about Shannon Matthews, the girl who was fake kidnapped by her own mother oh yeah and hidden for 10 days and you know anyway the family because she's being raised by her grandparents said we don't want this drama made you haven't asked us we don't think this is helpful she'd only just turned 18 it was 10 years since it had happened and so when i interviewed him i said why do we need this and he started saying all the stuff about how oh it

would be informative for her like as if it would educate Shannon Matthews about her own experience and I just gave him a rigorous set of questions which he didn't like and I had a few people

say they had to stop the car and listen to the end because it was so tense but if you're asking fair and reasonable questions

and allowing people to answer them I'm not afraid that's my big thing is if you're asking fair and reasonable questions yeah and allowing people to answer them i'm not afraid that's my big thing is if you've done your research then you have no reason to be afraid as long as you're being polite and it's clear why you're asking things sometimes you have to ask tough questions and you also um what's the phrase embrace the silence when they might they might have nothing to say because they hadn't thought about it or they don't know what to say that's part of the interview too so you don't So you don't feel obliged to jump in and smooth things out and paper over the awkwardness? No, no, it's very important.

I did a course once, I got settled at Channel 4 News for neurolingual programming. You heard about this? Oh, NLP. Yeah. So all those strategies about mirroring behavior and particularly I think for women, it's quite useful. Noel Edmonds was a big proponent. Yeah, I'm not saying that it's something that everyone needs to do a course on, but I think it's quite interesting when you realize there are these strategies. Sure, absolutely. The single most

important one is embracing the silence. I wasn't trying to rubbish it by mentioning Edmonds. I just tried to make you feel like, am I like Noel Edmonds? I apologise. Thank you for apologising. I've invoked Edmonds. You've invoked Edmonds, I will not forgive you. But when someone, women in particular, I think, are raised to be polite. We all do a bit from a very young age. And when there's an awkward silence, we try and fill it. And actually, sometimes you don't fill it. It's really important not to. Because in interviews, you are nervous sometimes, especially when you're finding your feet and you're developing your skills as a journalist and realizing, you know, there's a good reason for that silence. What about though, people don't like hearing awkwardness though. That's the thing,

don't you think? Well, listeners sometimes do. You're always thinking why are you doing this interview? And it helps that because I work in a program that's ultimately about public service, I'm doing an interview on behalf of the audience. I'm always thinking about the audience. Yes, your mandate is different from mine. Mine is I'm coming from I don't really have any responsibilities to speak of. I'm just sort of expressing what I find interesting in the world. Yeah, and people want that. That's really lovely that you have that.

Yeah, it's a privilege. I mean, it's nice. I'm glad I don't have to worry about the things you do. Did you see any of David Dimbleby's films about the BBC recently? They were quite good. I happened to catch the last half of the last one. He did three. Days That Shook the BBC, presented by David Dimbleby.

And so he was going back over his career in the big British castle and thinking about where the BBC was at now. And the third episode, a lot of it was about Nick Griffin appearing on Question Time in the early 90s. And it was a conversation about no platforming and the rights and wrongs thereof. Bonnie Greer was interviewed. I remember that well. I watched it, yeah. And she was still saying, Bonnie Greer was saying, I think it's a good thing it happened because it undid Nick Griffin effectively.

But now, you know, we're in a climate where probably that wouldn't have happened. And there were huge protests at the time about the BBC letting Nick Griffin of the BNP appear on Question Time. But, I mean, he didn't come out of it at all well. And it was very much an example of the platform also being a gallows, you know. It's a tricky one. example of the platform also being a gallows you know yeah it's a tricky one i just wonder if the whole climate around those programs has changed that there's much more normalization of those views thanks to social media so maybe would you have him on now because wouldn't his impact be

different right i don't know i remember interviewing tommy robinson on sunday morning live when i used to present that which is the sunday morningics show. And I really enjoyed the interview. You know, it was at that time when, you know, he'd sort of done this, I've made friends with Muslims and... Sort of, yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting. I had no problem with interviewing him in that context. But, I mean, it was a different thing.

The one that bothered me and the guest I complained about was, who's that woman who calls migrants cockroaches? Katie Hopkins? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They put Katie Hopkins on the show without telling me. And I used to flip out at some of these ludicrous people they'd book. And I said, why? And they said, oh, well, she's, there was one of the, because we always debated three subjects and one of the subjects was Syria and she said well she was in the army briefly and I went okay so she so she in theory has got something to comment on that as well as the immigration issue so I thought I'll find we'll give it a go and she had nothing of interest or use to say about the military in Syria nothing whatsoever and I had been I was entirely right we should never have booked her um so I think there was this problem with I mean that was my one experience of working

regularly on your show where they were guest booking to try and stir up controversy they regularly book christian homophobes like people who genuinely homosexuality was you know unnatural and i thought why are we putting these people on air in this way it was sunday morning slots it's nominally a religion slot i'm not sure this is helpful to christianity you know to be picking these people to represent that religion i don't know so it was my one experience presenting a kind of i wouldn't say it's prime time but it was a bbc one show we inherited you know a million viewers from the andrew marshall because that was the time slot i did it for two years you know so in terms of guest booking and how we even used to rewrite the scripts that they would they expect me

to voice i said i'm not saying this. This isn't fact-checked. Or this is really extreme. And I was worried about why they weren't applying proper journalistic standards to BBC content. But it wasn't being made by journalists on the whole. There were some terrific producers on it, I should say. And I made some really good friends, actually, as a result. People who came on as guests on that show.

Right. And, you know, people that I admired, like Jermaine Greer came on. Anne Leslie, the veteran Fleet Street correspondent, came on. You know, I loved hearing views I didn't necessarily agree with. But it was about not just trying to get provocation for the sake of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anne Leslie told a great story in the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile scandal. I met her in the green room at Newsnight. She said, when she was a young reporter,

you know, and men used to just grope you. It wasn't even like they'd ask you or they'd make flirty comments. They would just stick a hand on you. And she said she remembered having to stub her cigarette out on a man's hand as he was trying to push it up her leg. Isn't that amazing? And it was a war story. I mean, she wasn't saying it because she thought women should have to do that now. She was just saying that's how bad things were then, that we didn't even complain about it. That's how we dealt with it. Isn't that remarkable? Yeah. I mean, I guess it still happens in some places. You can't smoke now, so how would you smoke a cigarette outside anyone's hand? You just shoot the hand off.

Extremely interesting. I'm an illogical woman. Now, I know that you, like me, are a trekker, trekkie, trekkist. Oh, I like trekkist. It's like suffragist. I'm a trekkist. Because they're sensitive, aren't they, the Trek people? They say, no, I'm not a Trekker. How dare you? That's offensive.

Yeah, I've never, I've only heard the second hand, but yeah, apparently it's Trekker, not Trekkie. Trekker, right. But you are a Trekker. Yeah, I loved Lieutenant Uhura. So you're an OG Trekker, original series. The classic series, I think it's called. The classic series. What were your favourite episodes?

So Space Seed from the original series. What happens in Space Seed? They accidentally bring out of hibernation a load of genetically modified survivors of the 90s wars. Guys. Led by Ricardo Montalban. Ah. Khan, who basically, they're like Nazis,

and they take over the ship and start threatening to kill everyone on the ship one by one if they don't get their way. Yeah. And the crew resists. It's amazing. It's a really terrifying episode. Yeah.

So there's a reason why that became the source of the film Star Trek Through the Wrath of Khan. Do you love that film? It is a really terrifying episode. Yeah. So there's a reason why that became the source of the film Star Trek, through the wrath of Khan. Do you love that film? It is a good film. There's an amazing bit at the end when they think Spock is dead. Yeah. And he and his former partner and McCoy are all looking out the window

at this new planet that's been formed by the Genesis thing. And he says, I feel young. And there's something about these old people who never thought they'd have to be called out of retirement to save the universe. But there's a kind of optimism in having done your duty again. I find it really moving every time I watch it.

There's some great stuff. And over the years, I've got to interview a lot of Star Trek actors. I've met Luna Schall-Nichols twice. Yes, I saw your interview with her. Or rather, I saw a piece you wrote when she died earlier this year. Yeah, I wrote a piece for the Radio Times. They asked me.

I had interviewed her at the BFI in 2016. So that was one of her most recent interviews. And by then, I think she'd already had a mini stroke. So, you know, she wasn't 100% able to take every question. But you wouldn't know. She was beautiful and intelligent and warm. And my daughter got to meet her. And I still wear my hoop earrings because of her yes and but you also interviewed her in in the 90s with Marina Sirtis yeah so basically when they had the first

Star Trek convention in the UK the first official one at the Royal Albert Hall 95 me and producer Stuart Buckman huge trekkers thought we have pitch. So we pitched to all the different BBC programmes. We made a big thing for World Service television where we interviewed Marina and Nichelle together in the basement of Forbidden Planet where they were doing book signing about being women in Trek. And we overlaid it with bits of film, like bits of Martin Luther King and the Space Shuttle. And, you know, it was great fun. How is she, Deanna Troy? She's good. She's been doing stuff here.

And I keep trying to get her on front row because I was doing a discussion about playing Hamlet. And she'd played Ophelia, one of her first roles. And I thought, let's get Britta Surtis on to talk about Shakespeare. And she's a Brit, though, right? Yeah, she's a Brit. She's brilliant. I like her, but I don't like Deanna Troi. But she said, if you've ever seen interviews with her, you know, it was like they made it empathetic.

Later on, she gets more interesting. she gets to command the ship and stuff yeah and they gave her that really annoying costume with the big band because originally it just seemed like the writers had thought well what are women like um i don't know empathetic okay so she's an empath um what else do they like they like chocolate. Also, they have a fraught relationship with their mums and they like Klingons. What can I just say? So this is the thing. This is the story of women in so much of culture and business is you can only do so much by being in the role. The rest is also down to the network.

So they're going to write you crap lines. There's only so much you can do to fight them. Otherwise, you just have to deliver them. And you think about 70s sitcoms are full of women having to say stupid things or run around in bikinis. It didn't mean that they weren't great actors. Oh, no, absolutely. I'm not trying to impugn Marina. No, no, no, you're not.

But I think, you know, considering what they were up against, I think they made the best of it. And we somehow I think you can see between there's a gap between what the lines literally say and the framing of them and you can just see these actresses are just being strong women almost in spite of it like viola davis it's only just over a decade that she made that film the help it's kind of unimaginable someone making a film of that book now which even though it was all men you know it's about a white woman writing a book about how black maids are treated in 60s america and it's a kind of classic white savior narrative and all these sassy black maids that she rescues and viola davis has said publicly that she regrets

that film however she got to meet all these amazing people and talents you know like the other actors in it amongst other things and other strong black women who were working film and television and as a result of those encounters she's gone on to make amazing films. So sometimes you take what you have or what you can get and then you try and make something better out of it, Adam. I'm going to make a note of that.

Take what you can. And dare I say it, help women to be able to do this. Oh no, that's where I draw the line. No way. Absolutely not. I'm going to embrace that awkward silence. Yeah.

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So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace Yes Continue I'm connecting the bypass circuit now, sir Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was, well, the clip was Nichelle Nichols. Bahura, of course. But before that, I was talking with Samira Ahmed. And I'm very grateful indeed to Samira for making the time.

It was very nice to see her. Not the first time we'd met because, of course, I was on her podcast. How I found my voice. I'm actually in the process of losing my voice, I think, because I got a cold. A gift from my wife. She said, oh, it's not a bad one. Well, no, maybe not for you, but as you know, I suffer far more deeply than you do an assertion she poo-pooed but yes I was on how I found my voice a few years ago talking about mainly comedy music as I recall anyway that was exciting to be asked by Samira and her producer Farrah to appear on that program because I was in good company. I've got a link in the description of the podcast to the How I Found My Voice website

so you can see who they've got on there. I think I was probably the stupidest person they had on the whole thing. Maybe there's a couple who are close to my level. But, you know, you're dealing with Margaret Atwood, David Lammy, Benjamin Zephaniah, Rose McGowan, Tracey Emin, Lise Doucette, Bernardine Evaristo, John Snow,

Richard Branson, Naomi Klein, Jess Phillips, Michael Palin. Good company. And, of course, Michael Palin. Good company. And, of course, Graham Norton. He was on there. And we spoke about that episode last week. It just sort of worked out that way, that Samira ended up being the next episode to go out.

A lot of planning goes into this podcast. Anyway, so you've got how I found my voice in the links today. What else have we got? A link to the Centre for Women's Justice, for which Samira is a trustee, so you can find out more about what they do. We've got a link to Disgusted Mary Whitehouse, which was the documentary that we spoke about

on Radio 4 that came out earlier this year. There's the video that Samira made for the Nightingales, which appears at the end of Michael Cummings' King Rocker documentary, presented by Stuart Lee, of course. There is a link to Samira interviewing Paul McCartney. There's also a link to a TV programme,

The Art of Persia, that we didn't speak about, but that is all about Samira's travels through Iran, telling the story of a complex and fascinating people, culture and history. We mentioned briefly another radio programme that Samira did back in 2013, I Dressed Ziggy Stardust. Samira Ahmed meets British Asian women who, like her,

were inspired by the ever-changing London pop star David Bowie. There's also a link to my White Noise app that I use. It's not just White Noise that it generates, of course, as you heard. I would like to remind you that I'm not sponsored by this app many others are available this happens to be the one that I use and the link in the description I think takes you to the Mac version the iOS version but you can also get it for Android and it is good it's worked well for me saved my bacon on a number of occasions most recently on a bus replacement service it's always a very sad distraughtening time

when what can be one of the most pleasurable relaxing times in modern life, i.e. a nice train journey, turns into a stressful, uncomfortable shit fest. Wasn't too bad, it was fine. You know, at least it was there and it ran efficiently and it didn't add too much extra time to the journey. But still, not ideal and not what I'd paid for. And also, I had not paid for getting onto the coach, which was going to Colchester and was going to be about an hour's drive, only to find that the driver thought it would be a good idea to blast maddening party music at top volume the whole way, even after I'd asked him to turn it down

which he did a tiny bit but even after he turned it down I could still hear it very very clearly over my headphones I kind of thought to myself like surely not everyone on this bus is enjoying hearing i'm blue at top volume sure great to hear eiffel 65 again all of us wish they'd hurry up and put out some new material but this just didn't seem to be the right moment and i was thinking like the right moment and I was thinking like should I just stand up and face the rest of my fellow passengers on the bus replacement service and say who thinks we should turn this music off but then I thought no it's going to turn into Brexit if I do that so I just shut up and switched on my white noise app which completely blocked it all out and it was fantastic okay i'm gonna head back now give rosie a script scratch and get this thing edited

thank you very much indeed once again to samira ahmed for her time thanks very much indeed to rachel holmberg hi rachel if you're listening thank you so much for sorting out a room for us to record in and thanks to the folks at universal for making us feel welcome thanks very much indeed to seamus murphy mitchell for his work on this episode thanks seamus much appreciated. Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for the podcast. Thanks to ACAST and all who work there for their continued support. But thanks most of all to you for downloading this episode,

for coming back, for listening right to the end, for just making it all worthwhile. You're terrific. Has anyone told you that recently? You are? How do you feel about a brief sonic hug with a middle-aged man wearing gym shorts and a fleece?

Come on. Until next time, we connect in outer space. Look after yourself. Keep your pecker up. A bit higher. Higher than that. There you go. That's perfect pecker height.

And, oh yes, I love you. Bye! pecker height and oh yes i love you bye Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a fan when me bums up. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a fan when me bums up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up.

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