How To Fail With Elizabeth Day

I’m revisiting some of my favourite episodes this Christmas. This week it’s Jamie Dornan, whose episode went out when we were in deepest, darkest lockdown, on 24th November 2020. This is what I wrote at the time: You’ll know Jamie from starring on our screens in The Fall, Fifty Shades of Grey, and more recently The Tourist. He joins me to talk about failures in acting, failures at school and a fai...

I’ve hand-picked some of my favourite episodes of all time to revisit this Christmas, so today’s a very special one. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was my first EVER guest on this podcast when I launched in July 2018. A year after that, almost to the day, I welcomed her back to talk about how her life had changed in the interim [spoiler alert: she’d become a global superstar]. Phoebe talks about the crazine...

It was an honour to record this episode. We overuse words such as ‘hero’ and ‘inspiration’ but Sir Chris Hoy is both. Not only is he one of Great Britain’s most successful Olympic athletes (during a record-breaking career as a sprint cyclist, he won six gold medals, one silver medal, and 11 world championships) but he’s currently living with a Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis. In September 2023,...

When I started How To Fail, I had a list of dream guests. Kirsty Young was on it. Not only because she’s one of the greatest interviewers of all time but also because her style of broadcasting (especially during her time on Desert Island Discs) is the standard I aspire to every week on this podcast. Her intelligence, warmth and ability to listen - both to what is being said and what isn’t - are wh...

Lovely, lovely, LOVELY Luke Evans. I think he’s quite possibly one of the nicest men in Hollywood - a bona fide A-Lister after star turns in Beauty and the Beast, The Hobbit, Fast & Furious, to name but a few. And yet, his early life was challenging. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, he was unable to be open about his sexuality for fear of banishment from the church and rejection by his parents. He l...

Andy Cohen doesn’t just shape the culture. He is the culture. And if you think I was excited-slash-terrified to interview a man who means so much to me (despite us never having met until this moment) then you would be entirely correct. In many ways, Andy is the godfather of reality TV. He’s responsible for the birth of The Real Housewives franchise, without which we would never have had some of th...

TW: self-harm You might know Ella from her leading roles in the hit TV show ‘Yellowjackets’ or Amazon Prime’s ‘Fallout’. She’s been acting since she was a child (and is still absurdly young tbf) and bears the notable distinction of having played the younger versions of Keira Knightly, Margot Robbie and Angeline Jolie on-screen. What a thruple! At 28, she is wise beyond her years and on her way to...

Lashana Lynch has had a pretty incredible few years: she was the first ever Black female agent with a licence to kill in the James Bond franchise, played a ferocious warrior (and performed her own stunts) in The Woman King, became part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and portrayed Mrs Honey in the movie adaptation of Matilda. Now she’s back in a Sky adaptation of The Day of the Jackal, co-starrin...

Dame Jilly Cooper. What a legend. For the uninitiated (where have you been?) she’s a journalist and author most famous for her bestselling Rutshire Chronicle series which includes Riders, Polo and Rivals - the latter of which has now made into a hugely popular TV series starring David Tennant, Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson. In the past, Dame Jilly’s books have been unfairly dismissed as mere...

TW: miscarriage and pregnancy loss You’ll probably have heard of James Blunt. And if you haven’t, you’ve almost definitely heard his most famous song, You’re Beautiful. There was a time in the early 2000s that it was EVERYWHERE. And that’s because James Blunt was absolutely huge. His debut 2004 album, Back To Bedlam, was the biggest-selling album of the decade in the UK, shifting over 12 million c...

It’s been ten years of ‘bear with.. bear with’ but *finally* we’ve got our beloved Miranda Hart back. Due to a long-term undiagnosed chronic illness (which we talk about, of course) Miranda has been largely out of the public eye for the past decade. I was so touched to be the first person she spoke to on her return to work. We covered writing her new book (full of amazing life advice), being an in...

If you’d told the 12-year-old me, listening to Manchild and Buffalo Stance on repeat at school in Belfast, that I would one day be interviewing Neneh Cherry, I wouldn’t have believed you. This woman is so iconic and has shaped so much of our culture - it’s not just her monster hits such as Seven Seconds (with Youssou N’Dour) or the fact that Massive Attack recorded their seminal first album in her...

Rupert Everett is the best type of A-list guest. He’s been through the highs and the lows of fame and come out of the other side wiser, stronger, and with no qualms about speaking his mind. Plus his new book ‘The American No’ was born from failure (a collection of brilliant short stories that were TV and film ideas). We talked about: ‘learning to die’ professionally; his love for fragile but stron...

Well, look, of COURSE I was intimidated. Yuval Noah Harari is one of our most revered thinkers - a philosopher for our age and a bestselling writer of books that have redefined our thinking about humanity. You will probably know him as the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (25 million copies sold and counting). Now, he tackles AI in his latest work, Nexus. Yuval joins us to talk abou...

Diane Abbott is a force of nature - and she needs to be, with so much vitriol directed towards her. She has weathered decades of racist and sexist abuse but has still blazed a trail through British politics as the first ever Black female MP. Not for nothing is she now known as ‘Mother of the House’. We talk about why some people (*cough* white, privately educated men in politics *cough*) are given...

Look, I don’t like to brag but in case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got Kate Winslet on How To Fail this week. ACTUAL KATE WINSLET! The one and only!  And oh my goodness, what an incredible guest she is: acutely intelligent, funny and brilliantly forthright. We covered so much ground - from the media obsession with her body image, to her regret at giving up tap-dancing, her feelings of failure around...

This is a very special one-off edition of How to Fail, where I bring you a peek behind the paywall to hear one of my favourite subscriber editions of ‘Failing with Friends’. If you’re not already a subscriber (and if not, why not, quite frankly?) then this is a little glimpse of what we’ve been up to. Failing With Friends is where my lovely listeners write in and ask for advice about their failure...

Paralympic swimmer Ellie Simmonds OBE has won five - count ‘em - Gold Medals. Amazingly, her first two were at the age of 13 and she’s set two world records. But she happily admits she learned more ‘from the races that didn’t go well’. Ellie talks to me about putting an intense amount of pressure on herself, never being able to switch off and how she still struggles with that now - especially when...

The first thing Guenther Steiner said when he walked into the HTF studio was: ‘Recently your guests have been Shania Twain and Salman Rushdie, are you sure you want me and haven’t made a mistake?’ This tells you almost everything you need to know about the breakout star of Netflix’s F1: Drive to Survive and former Haas team principal: he’s hilarious, he’s modest and he still finds his newfound fam...

TW: contains references to racist abuse and racially-aggravated violence. This is probably one of my favourite episodes of all time, and I don’t say that lightly.  The former championship wheelchair basketball star turned TV presenter, Ade Adepitan, came into the How To Fail studio with an open heart and a moving story to tell. He blew us all away. Ade talks about growing up working-class, Black a...

Considered by many as one of the greatest cricketers of all time, the Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins is extremely well-placed to tell me how he wins but also how he’s been shaped by losing. But his losses have not been limited to the cricket pitch. In an extremely moving exchange, he tells me about his mother dying from cancer and how her death put the rest of his life into perspective. We...

I could listen to Elif Shafak speak for HOURS. The eloquence of this woman! She speaks like most of us would aspire to write. I cannot get over it. Shafak, the Turkish-British author, combines ferocious intelligence with a captivating turn of phrase so it’s little wonder she’s garnered so much critical acclaim. She has been nominated for countless literary awards, including the Booker Prize and ma...

Danny O’Donoghue is best known as the lead singer of The Script and a former  coach on singing talent show The Voice. But the last year of his life has been overshadowed by personal tragedy: the death of his bandmate and best friend Mark Sheehan at the age of 46.  In his first full-length interview since Mark’s death, Danny opens up about how he navigated grief, how he spiralled into alcohol abuse...

In this first episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew discuss coming up with ideas. Just where do ideas for books come from? How do you know if they’re any good, or even if they’re right for you to pursue? Our expert podclass provides answers to all of this - and even a lesson in how to know when your idea might...

Sara Cox is a broadcaster and author. You might have grown up with her on Radio 1’s iconic Breakfast Show. You might remember her being one of the first so-called ‘ladettes’ (and if you do, we talk about how much she hates this word in the episode). You might have read one of her bestselling books - she wrote a memoir in 2019, followed by two novels, the most recent of which, Way Back, was publish...