- So Fi and Jane,
thank you so much for joining us
for an Audible Session's interview
about your brand new book,
Did I say that out loud?
It's a pleasure to have you both,
introduce me to it.
- Right. Chapter heading.
- Okay, so chapter headings.
Hark at her.
Midlands motels and judging.
Cathedral despair. That's Jane's one about Liverpool,
professional scousers and hotel nostalgia.
Steam clean my Gwyneth. That's one of mine.
That's about self-improvement
and orgasm merchandising.
Who knew that that was ever going to be a phrase.
I mean, back when we were young,
did anyone go, orgasm merchandising
that's on the cards for the future?
- I'd certainly never heard of merchandising.
I'm not sure. Anyway, carry on.
- Exactly.
And then some funny ones,
the fetishization, can never say it, of domesticity
- You wrote it, you can't say it
- Cashing it or making chores look nice.
And there's a fabulous one from Jane. That's called,
Oh, shut up. Roger. Entitlement, chinos and eye tests.
So if, I mean, that's, you know,
- I have a thing about men and chinos and I'm just looking,
that's all right. We're fine.
(laughing)
- What is it about the chinos?
- It's men of, you know, about the same age as me,
who at the BBC, and I don't think it happens
in other parts of the world,
but they have this, I don't know what the problem is.
They can't find trousers that are long enough for them.
They're not even particularly tall,
but they do specialize in the old
- [Fi] That's what you're wearing today
- Yes but on a lady, it's completely different.
- [Fi] I don't know.
- [Jane] These are not ankle swingers.
- [Fi] No, I think you've got to move with the times.
- I've moved right with them.
And that's why I'm wearing these.
I'm not a man in ankle swinging chinos.
And there are a lot of them,
some of them with names a little bit like Roger at the BBC,
or there have been in the past.
I don't want to pin it on anybody at the moment necessarily.
- But potentially still some Rodgers floating around.
- I think that that chapter is really meant to be,
Fi and I are of a generation that grew up with
the expectation that we would listen to men,
that men would do the talking
and we would do the listening
and you wouldn't really be involved
at the higher level of decision-making.
Things have opened up, obviously in my lifetime,
our lifetime,
although as Fi is about to point,
out I am five years older than her
- I wasn't.
- You were.
sometimes it's still difficult for women of our age
and younger to make themselves heard.
And we all know all this stuff about men in meetings,
talking over women,
repeating the ideas a women actually expressed
45 minutes ago.
And then the men get the acclaim and they get the attention
and the women are ignored and
it's still going on.
It was just an attempt to sort of make light of it.
It's not a particularly original concept, that,
although obviously I'm quite proud of it,
now it's out there.
I just, I don't want my daughters to put up with,
to even begin to think they have to put up with it.
- [Holly] Yeah.
- I think that's what I'm keen to make clear.
- Are you hopeful?
Do you both feel hopeful that things are still
progressing in the right direction?
- Yes, I think so.
And actually in that chapter, the shut-up Roger chapter,
which is brilliantly written by Jane.
So the whole point of the book is
one of us writes a chapter
and the other one responds to it, quite immediately as well,
without going away to do lots of research, you know,
to kind of balance out that fact. So we don't do that.
Mine was like
- You made it sound like it was easy darling.
It was very difficult.
- It was difficult. - Ever so difficult
- But my response to the Shut up Roger
is actually one of a more positive take on the world,
because I don't think that the younger generation of women
have quite such a kind of male
edifice in front of them actually.
You know, I think Jane and I,
particularly in broadcasting,
we arrived on air at a time
where there was still a myth in our industry
that women didn't like to hear other women's voices on air.
So there was a survey done only about 15 years ago,
right across the BBC and commercial radio networks
that showed only one in five voices on air were women's.
So, you know, we were there at a time
where you just couldn't shut Roger up,
because if you shut Roger up there would've been silence,
there wasn't anybody else in the room
and that's really changed.
- Can I ask on the, on the kind of
the other side, definitely asking for a friend
is the low level underlying anger,
is that always part of being a woman?
Just at the kind of general patriarchy.
- Gosh I hope not.
I think if your friend is experiencing it already,
because perhaps your friend's in the same ballpark of age as
you are, then that's interesting, isn't it?
Cause I think sometimes older women think that
it's been our preserve to be slightly angry
and that surely were angry because then
we're making it better for younger women
who don't need to be angry anymore.
But if your friend is still feeling that
kind of a frisson against something,
cause that's what it is all the time isn't it?
You're feeling that you are against something
and that's, what's tiring, infuriating, damaging
all of those things.
And that's what men often don't understand.
They don't understand how that would feel
to have a constant exfoliation going on in your life.
So I would be sad if that didn't change
for your friend actually.
And I think also it really only changes by
men having a proper listen.
I think women have been very good at listening
and then we've been very good at shouting
and doing and whatever.
I think men have to listen
and they have to read books like this
and laugh along with us and disagree and
be on a level with us and what we're we're talking about.
So your friend doesn't have to feel angry.
Although angry gets things done.
- Yeah I was going to say,
sometimes anger isn't the worst emotion,
but I am sorry for your friend.
(laughing)
- I mean, I increasingly, as my, I mean Fi has a daughter,
I've got two daughters.
You start to see the world through their eyes as well.
And yes, I can look back to my mum,
my mum's life, my grandmother's lives.
And I realized
the chances I have had, the extraordinary opportunities
I've had in my lifetime.
And it's pure fluke that I was born in 1964,
allowing these opportunities to be possible for me.
My daughters will have amazing opportunities too.
But those, yeah, you're right I'm afraid.
The challenges, the anger, the fear,
and it is fear. And it is.
My youngest daughter's just started university.
And she's quite a long way from home.
Is she going to be, how does she get home?
All of these thoughts are running through my mind.
- And actually that seems to be worse.
- I think it is yeah.
- So you've said always, this isn't life advice,
but do you have maybe like life lessons
or nuggets of wisdom
that you most enjoy sharing
that you most either enjoyed putting down in the book
or just like to tell people that you've learned
over the years?
- Oh God, yes.
- What would you start with?
- So I was really delighted
to be able to admit my shallow vanity
that sometimes doing really nice stuff with my hair
makes me feel good.
- Appalling isn't it.
Said Jane who has just booked in a colorist appointment.
- Yes, you're no stranger to the salon.
- Absolutely not. No.
- I think I just enjoy being able to say,
do you know what, I've really messed up in my life.
If the the shape it should have been,
it's not the shape that my life has ended up being.
And I was quite happy to admit that sometimes that's been
quite painful, but actually by the age of 52,
I'm just really still cracking along,
having a good time sometimes.
And the bad times, I suppose,
that's the absolute joy of getting older,
is to be able to say, hello, bad times,
you'll be here for a while,
but you know, something else might turn up.
I enjoy being able to say that
and I didn't really think before I wrote the book
that I knew that.
- Oh that's good.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- I would say my kind of trademark
in terms of what you might loosely call wit
is self-deprecation and it's served me quite well actually.
And I'm still using it. I haven't dumped it,
but I'm not sure I would advise younger women to go there.
- [Holly] Really?
- I think I have discovered
that the more seriously you take yourself,
the more seriously everybody else
is inclined to take you too.
- But then you get things like,
- [Jane] It's a tricky one
- oh, she's a bit boring.
- Oh, you get that.
And you get people
who don't like over confident women,
we talk about that too.
And in fact, I'm probably one of them.
I mean, that's why I wanted to write the chapter
about women judging other women
because I absolutely emphatically
find myself doing it to my horror.
So, yes I've just contradicted,
well, it's a really, it's a really difficult one.
I wish I did have that blustering confidence of some men.
And it's certainly not all men,
but there are some and they are,
I'm afraid in every generation
who are not encumbered by a shred of self doubt.
And they scorch through life.
Apparently nothing touches them.
There are some leading examples
in British public life right now
of winging it merchants
who've, far from paying a price for winging it,
have seemingly done rather well.
So it's a tricky one for a lot of us to digest really.
- So tell me about the audio book. How was that?
How was narrating that?
- It was good fun, it was in a very spooky place.
Wasn't it?
- It was in a former prison, in the basement,
- Well you got very windy, chilly vibes from it.
- [Fi] I did, but I think I'm in touch with the paranormal
- Well yes.
- A bit more than I'd like to admit, actually.
- That's another thing we could write about in the future,
but Fi has had a few strange experiences.
Most of them in Bromley.
So I don't.
So the audio book is,
I was really looking forward to it cause I thought, well,
I can read out loud.
And I was, but actually reading out loud,
even when it's your own words
is significantly harder than I was expecting.
- But we were glad we got through it
because it would've been so embarrassing
if we couldn't do it.
- If they'd had to hire other people,
People have actually said to me,
who reads your audio book?
And I said, well, we do.
Oh.
- And if we do a second book,
we are thinking of John Humphreys and Edward Stourton.
- I think that would be good. Definitely. Definitely.
Ed, can you be me please?
- I think that we might have a tussle over that,
- But we've also in the audio book,
we've also had additional there's additional content
where we talk about
why we felt the need to write
about the things we wrote about.
- Okay.
- [Fi] So you got a bit of chatter-ama
- So there's a little bit of chatter-ama
about some of the reasons, because we,
that was another thing we didn't talk about
before we wrote it.
We didn't talk about
what each other was going to write about
- Or why
- Or why.
- So it's very genuine.
- Yeah, every Monday morning when
Fi's contribution to the book,
I'm going to be very generous, pinged through,
I wouldn't know what it was going to be about
which is good.
It's a really good energizing, energizing, fun.
- Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds fun.
- Yeah. Because then you'd have to respond to it
and you think, oh, okay.
So we made each other think, which is probably no bad thing.
- Would it be an awful thing to say
that if I was a customer, I'd buy the audio book.
I'd buy the book as a gift
to send to an aunt who lives far away,
but I'd buy the audiobook because
we've written a book as it sounds in our head.
So actually I think the audio book is almost truer
to what we said and how we said it than the book book.
Does that make sense?
- Yes, I suppose it does.
- Yes. Yeah.
- I mean, we are practiced talkers.
- No
- We've been doing it for a very long time.
- Let's say we're good listeners as well.
- Oh we are good listeners.
I met a neighbor on the tube coming over this morning and
she said,
- She couldn't get a word in edgeways.
I don't know what she's up to.
So it was nice to see her.
I'm sure she enjoyed talking to me,
but I think I might've used the expression
]I'm a good listener to her
which is terrible.
(laughing)
- I'm not a bad listener. I'd just rather do the talking
- Ssshhhh
- Well on that wonderful note,
thank you so much for coming and chatting about the book.
It's a really fun read and sounds like a really fun lesson.
So thank you again.
- That's really kind.
- Thank you very much.
- [Jane] This lived up to my expectations by the way.
- [Holly] Oh good, good, so glad.