Local Heroes Podcast

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan are joined by comedian, author and creative writing teacher Justine Sless, the Sunderland lass who left Hendon at 19, ended up on the other side of the world and spent the next 40 years carrying a little piece of home with her. Now living in Melbourne, Justine is back in the North East with her latest novel, Before I Sing You This Song, a story...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan are joined by architect, television presenter and proud Sunderland lad George Clarke, who went from working in a small architect's practice in Washington at 16 to becoming one of the most recognisable faces on Channel 4. George grew up surrounded by builders, grafters and family who weren't afraid of hard work. His grandad built his own fishing...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan are joined by comedian, writer and producer Jason Cook - the Hebburn lad who went from fixing engines in the Persian Gulf to turning his stories into a BBC sitcom. Jason spent seven years as a Merchant Navy engineer on oil and gas tankers, writing sketches on a typewriter in his boiler suit and posting them home in manila envelopes from all over...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan talk to artist, writer and activist Padma Rao. Padma’s story begins in India, where she wrote, performed and worked in radio drama, before moving to Britain in the early 1980s and finding herself having to rebuild not just a career, but a sense of identity and belonging. It’s a fascinating conversation about migration, racism, Britishness, art,...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with Sir John Burn for a fascinating conversation about genetics, medicine, curiosity and a lifetime spent looking for better ways to do things. John talks about growing up in West Auckland, County Durham, in a working class family where university, let alone a career in medicine, was far from an obvious path. After initially planning t...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with Full Circle Brew Co founder Ben Cleary for a conversation about beer, business, community and the fine art of having a ridiculous idea and working out the consequences later. Ben charts the journey from a career in wine and opening Pipstop to falling in love with craft beer and eventually creating Full Circle at Hoults Yard - only...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with chef and street-food entrepreneur Ren Webb for a remarkably open conversation about food, family, resilience and starting again. Ren talks about growing up in Slough, living with a stammer, experiencing racism and gradually finding the confidence to own every part of his story. He shares the huge influence of his Grenadian mum and...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with North East actress, presenter and performer Libby Walker for a conversation about creativity, class, resilience and what it takes to build a career when you come from the North East. From leaving Newcastle for London drama school and an unexpected detour via The X Factor, to returning home determined to help build a stronger film a...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with award winning South Shields restaurateur and storyteller Shah Lolan Amin for a conversation about hospitality, family, food, identity and a changing Britain. From the lost art of great service and the standards learned in the restaurant trade, Shah takes us back to growing up in a Bangladeshi family in South Shields - working from...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan talk to the team behind Acropolis, as they celebrate ten years of turning a slightly wonky Quayside market stall into one of the North East’s biggest street food success stories. It all started with a cigarette, a coffee and the words: “We could do that.” A borrowed gazebo, a second-hand kebab machine, plastic tables, a badly pixelated Acropolis...

In this episode of the Local Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Nic Greenan, custodian of one of the North East’s most loved cultural venues to talk cinema, community, leadership and what it means to be the leading a place approaching 90 years old. We talk about opening cultural spaces up to everyone, bringing younger audiences through the doors, the magic of the big screen and ambitious plans for t...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan are joined by farmer and trained shepherdess Helen Stewart for a conversation about farming, food, family heritage and what it really takes to get something from farm to fork. Helen’s family have been farming on Lizard Lane since 1965, on land that once housed hundreds of soldiers during the Second World War. From her grandfather delivering milk...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan are joined by Sunderland-born designer, photographer and entrepreneur Ian Wright for a conversation about creativity, confidence and what can happen when you’re prepared to back yourself. From spending his early childhood in South Africa and returning to Sunderland in the 1970s, to getting bullied at school and being told by a careers adviser to...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan welcome Richard and Dominic Colman back to the studio to talk about an extraordinary year for one of South Shields’ best-known hospitality families. A century after the Colman family first entered the food business, the brothers reflect on reaching their 100-year milestone, creating an exhibition at South Shields Museum, opening new venues and c...

This week, Chris and Dan are joined by South Shields-born producer, filmmaker and content creator John Nejjy for a conversation about creativity, curiosity and using social media to tell better stories about the North East. From joining the Merchant Navy at 17 and travelling the world, to training as a stonemason, working in bars and eventually building a successful career in the video games indus...

This week on the Local Heroes podcast, Chris and Dan met Luke Smith - a distiller who survived an explosion that blew his hat off, built his first still at fifteen, and once sent Chris home from a rum-making night so happy he nearly ate a slug outside a Newcastle church. Luke is head distiller and co-founder of a Newcastle distillery, ten minutes from Central Station, where he makes white and dark...

Jo Milne and Steve White join us for a conversation about empathy, connection and what it means to truly understand the world from someone else’s perspective. Jo lives with Usher syndrome, a condition that causes both hearing and sight loss. After being profoundly deaf from birth, her experience of hearing for the first time through cochlear implants was captured in a video that went viral around...

Paul Mort is known for his energy, honesty and no-nonsense approach to business and life, but behind the success is a story very few people know. In this episode, Paul opens up about building a business from nothing, surviving depression and suicidal thoughts, rebuilding his life, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. He talks about learning to sell, embracing discomfort, becoming alcoho...

What happens when you lose everything, and have to rebuild your life from the ground up? In one of our most powerful conversations yet, Claire Liddle shares her extraordinary journey from childhood trauma and alcohol addiction to prison, recovery, and building a thriving bakery business that’s changing lives. Claire speaks with remarkable honesty about growing up with abuse, the spiral into addict...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit with Carley Armstrong of Sunderland - producer, filmmaker, and one of the hardest-grafting people in North East film right now. She's gone from runner to script supervisor to producer the hard way, building her own company while refusing to leave the region that made her. Hendon born, Hendon loyal - the kind of place she can still knock on a...

<span;>This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit down with Andy Haddon - beekeeper, baker, accidental troublemaker, and the man Charlotte Crosby once crowned "the David Attenborough of the Stottie." <span;>Andy's the founder of Big River Bakery in Shieldfield, but that's only where the story lands. <span;>We start with bees - the waggle dance, the venom that kills...

This week on the Local Heroes Podcast, Chris and Dan sit with Bobzilla - artist, muralist, DJ, photographer, and a man whose own mum still refuses to call him anything but Robert. The name itself is a tale. Born Robert Page (yes, both off Led Zeppelin), he became Rob, then Bob courtesy of a big lad called Robbie, and finally Bobzilla on a drunken night when a mate needed a DJ name and turned himse...

This week, Chris and Dan set out to talk about what’s been happening in their lives and somehow end up covering everything from decorating disasters and DIY injuries to family diaries, old letters, horror films and the stories that shape who we are. Dan shares his ongoing battle with decorating, including drilling through his own foot, near misses with electrics, and why he may never become the DI...

This week on the Local Heroes podcast, Chris and Dan sit with Cal Byerley of Restaurant Pine - and Gordons (plural) steal the show. Gordon, the podcast mascot, is named after a rock star, carved from a sculpture celebrating Mary Ann McCann's escape from slavery and destined for a bag stool at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Not bad for a bench. There's also a dog called Gordon - named after Ramsay...

This week on the Local Heroes podcast, Chris and Dan sit with Rob Sampson, the man behind "Gan for bait, like?" One of the North East's most-followed food voices, the conversation that wanders from Capri Sun smuggling tactics and a wonky table nicknamed Gordon, all the way to foie gras at the old Cafe 21. Rob talks us through how a lockdown creative itch, fed by Anthony Bourdain, years of writing...