The Shift with Sam Baker

This week we're revisiting one of my favourite episodes from one of the first series. It was back in the day when it was still taboo to talk about menopause, so getting a so-called hardened war reporter to do just that was, well a bit of a coup. Here's Lindsey Hilsum admitting to hiding behind a tank! --- You know when people say you’re “brave” because you’ve got a few grey hairs?! Well, my guest...

Last week, Nina Stibbe joined me on The Shift bookclub (if you're not a member, I've taken the "lock" off for a week or so, so you can check it out on Youtube) to talk about her new memoir, Went to London, Took The Dog - what happens when a 60-year-old menopausal woman does a runner. So now seemed like a good time to revisit the episode of The Shift that was recorded just before she did that runne...

It’s the final episode of the season and all my podcasting dreams have come true. Because my guest this week - by popular demand and a whole ton of begging - is the one, the only, the legend that is Miriam Margolyes. Miriam started her career in theatre and radio, voiced some of the best known ads of the late 20th century (hello Cadburys Caramel bunny), won a BAFTA for her role in Martin Scorsese’...

My guest today is a food writer’s food writer. Beloved by such luminaries as Nigella Lawson, Diana Henry and Yotam Ottolenghi, Bee Wilson may be a bestselling food writer and newspaper columnist (she has published seven books and currently writes the popular Table Talk column for the Wall Street Journal), but she is also a home cook with her own fair share of mess and imperfection. Bee understands...

My guest this week is the crime writing legend, Patricia Cornwell. Patricia wrote her first novel about forensic pathologist kay scarpetta in 1990. Called Postmortem, it was such a hit it became the first book ever to win all four major crime awards on both sides of the Atlantic in the same year. (It also scared the bejesus out of me.) But Kay Scarpetta was more than a hit, she was a breakthrough....

Anyone else feel in serious need a romcom right now? I know I do. And my guest today has your back. Lindsey Kelk’s unashamedly feel good fiction has won her a legion of fans from the queen Marian Keyes and Jane Fallon to Emily Henry and Mhairi McFarlane. Born in Doncaster and now living in LA by way of New York, Lindsey has written 19 novels and sold 2.5million copies. The most recent of which are...

A few months ago I read an article that took my breath away. The author was 102 years old and in it she wrote candidly about losing her partner in life and work after 46 years. Not because he passed away, but because he handed her divorce papers! That would have floored most of us, but despite being sideswiped, Dr Gladys McGarey, picked herself up, started a new medical practice with her daughter...

Today’s guest is the Sunday Times’ Style’s beauty columnist India Knight. Every week thousands of women turn to her column for beauty advice - not beauty junkies, not trend followers, just regular women like you and me who want to know what works, why it works and what’s worth spending their hard earned cash on. Now India has turned that column into a book, “India Knight’s Beauty Edit: what works...

Today’s guest, Tracy-Ann Oberman has made a career out of defying expectations. After training as an actor she went straight to the RSC before deciding to study standup so she could switch between comedy and drama. She has starred in Dr Who, Friday Night Dinner, It’s a sin, amongst many others But It was when she got the role of Chrissie Watts (Dirty Den’s second wife on Eastenders - sorry kids if...

My guest for this very special live episode of The Shift is the entrepreneur, CEO, fashion and beauty expert, presenter and author Trinny Woodall. Trinny, as you know, bounded onto our screens in 2001, with her friend Susannah Constantine, when they created What Not To Wear, a groundbreaking TV makeover show that showed women all over - first the country and then the world - how to look and conseq...

Today we’re celebrating Menopause Awareness month (now there’s a phrase I couldn’t have imagined saying four years ago when I was writing The Shift book and everyone was telling me no-one was interested in menopause or women over 40…) And I’m delighted that my guest is a leading light in the British menopause movement. Dr Louise Newson is a GP and menopause specialist who is passionate about incre...

I’m delighted to welcome back one of my most popular guests ever, Philippa Perry. Philippa is an artist, psychotherapist, agony aunt and TV presenter, but she has become best known for her smash hit book, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read which sold over 2million copies and spent 41 weeks in the bestseller lists. Thanks to that book, and her agony column in The Observer, she has become known...

Today’s guest and I have lived parallel-ish lives. Growing up “ordinary” her in the north, me in the south, Grace Dent and I both spent our childhood eating baked beans, angel delight and funny coloured school custard, we both “thought we were IT” apparently and we both got our first break on the weekly real life magazine, Chat and somehow wangled our way into glossy magazines. But there our paths...

Before I got to know today’s guest, Stacey Duguid, I thought she was a bit scary TBH. Fierce in all the ways. And then I got to know her - when I was editor of Red and she worked on Elle - and discovered she wasn’t. At all. Because Stacey, like so many of us, is just exceptionally good at putting on a front. And that front served her well, until it didn’t. She was 45 when everything collapsed. Or,...

This week’s guest is the comedian, writer, and all-round screen hogger, Sara Pascoe. Host of The Great British Sewing Bee, presenter of Last Woman on Earth and ubiquitous panel-show presence. She has written and starred in her own sitcom Out Of Her Mind (before TV realised women could write sitcoms too!) And she’s also the author of two brainy non-fiction bestsellers, Animal and Sex Love Money.  S...

My guest today is the journalist and human rights activist, Natasha Walter. She is the author of two generation-defining books about feminism - The New Feminism, published in the late 90s and Living Dolls, published just over ten years later, a shocking polemic in which she questioned her own previous beliefs that equality was on the way to being a given and old fashioned sexism was just that, old...

Like most of the rest of the world, I first discovered today’s guest Maggie Smith (no, not the legendary British actress, the American poet) when her poem, Good Bones went viral on social media thrusting her into the news on both sides of the Atlantic, featured on primetime TV and was read at an event by Meryl Streep.  It’s the kind of exposure people dream of, but in Maggie’s own words “my marria...

My guest today is the farmer, business woman, cook, conservationist, mother and now writer, Helen Rebanks. She has been cooking and baking, professionally and domestically, for more than 30 years, and with her husband, has turned the farm that has been in their family for generations into a global beacon for regenerative farming. (No, I didn’t know what that was either - in short, it’s farming in...

My guest today has made history – more than once. Dawn Butler, MP for Brent Central was only the third Black woman elected to parliament, when she became an MP in 2005, aged 37. She was the first Black female whip and then the first Black woman to stand at the dispatch box four years later. You might know her, though, as the person who was ejected from the House of Commons for saying what so many...

Today’s guest is the singer-songwriter Miki Berenyi. If you were a teenager in the late 80s or early 90s with even vaguely alternative taste you can’t have missed Miki and her band, Lush. Miki’s distinctive look and bright red hair was an icon for anyone who didn’t quite fit in. When the band split, Miki went on to build a new career as a - wait for it - magazine sub-editor. A job that on the face...

My guest today is the prize winning author, Leila Slimani. Leila was the first Moroccan woman to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for her spine-tingling novel Lullaby. She has since written three more novels, including Watch Us Dance, the second in a Moroccan trilogy loosely based on her own family history, and two works of non fiction including The Scent of Flowers At Night, about art and m...

Welcome to season 12 of The Shift! Season 12! How did that happen?! My guest today is the actor hyphen screenwriter hyphen comedian hyphen novelist - all the hyphens! - Andi Osho. You might recognise her from Line of Duty or Blue Lights or Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You or Death in Paradise or Shazam! or Good Omens or Sex Education or or or! And as if that’s not enough, in her previous incarnat...

Back in season 4, I spoke to Annie Macmanus just as she was about to make the big leap from mega-DJ to... something entirely new. It's fascinating to see how much of what we talked about has since come to pass. My guest this week is a business woman, broadcaster, curator, tastemaker and DJ. She headlines festivals, hosts one of BBC Radio 1’s flagship shows, was Europe’s biggest female DJ and has h...

Back at the very beginning, when The Shift was still a hair-brained idea, I sat in Emma Freud's kitchen chatting about being old birds. It ended up being the final episode of the first series. Here it is again. Where to start with this week’s guest? Now 58, Emma Freud is a broadcaster, presenter, columnist and fund-raiser, for want of a better way of putting the incredible work she and her partner...

This week we're revisiting cartoonist and creator of the Bechdel test, Alison Bechdel. This episode first ran back in season 4. My guest this week is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Probably best known for the Bechdel test - a tongue in cheek method she came up with in the 80s for assessing gender bias in movies. She became a household name when Fun Home, her graphic novel/memoir about coming out a...