The Shift with Sam Baker

How can it possibly be season three already?! Time flies when you're locked indoors binge-watching repeats! After full and frank conversations about life after 40 (and I DO mean full and frank!) in the first two seasons with the likes of Marian Keyes, Emma Freud, Jojo Moyes, Jo Whiley, Sara Collins, Bryony Gordon, Jodi Picoult, Gabby Logan and many more, we're back with lots more chat about everyt...

My guest this week has hosted everything from Final Score to the Six Nations to the Olympics. Formerly an international gymnast, Gabby Logan moved into broadcasting in her early 20s and neither she – nor the male-dominated world of sports broadcasting – have looked back. Now 47, she’s launched The Mid-Point, a podcast about midlife career change and becoming more comfortable in your own skin.  Joi...

Feel like your wardrobe has turned against you? Your body’s gone awol and you've mislaid your style mojo? This week’s guest is the answer to your sartorial prayers. Fashion journalist and lifestyle blogger Erica Davies’s career spans two decades: at 24 she was the youngest ever national newspaper fashion editor, on The Sun. At 44 she is a legit Instagram influencer – one of very few representing t...

This week’s guest is the award-winning novelist, Maggie O’Farrell. The author of eight novels, most recently the stunning Women’s Prize winner, Hamnet, and one of my favourite memoirs of all time, I Am, I Am, I am. And now she’s written a children’s book, the absolutely gorgeous Where Snow Angels Go, which is a banker for a Christmas Day teatime animation a la The Snowman if ever I saw one.  While...

This week’s episode comes to you from the Glasgow kitchen of straight talking crime writer Denise Mina. (Lockdown let up long enough for me to leave the house - yay!) She’s written 15 novels, including the award-winning The Long Drop, and her last, Conviction, was scooped up by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Bookclub. But her latest, The Less Dead, based on a real life Glasgow serial killer, f...

This week’s guest has been in the tabloids since her early teens. In fact, like me, you’re probably guilty of thinking you know all about Meg Mathews just because you read about her marriage to Noel Gallagher, her partying with the “primrose hill set” and her journey off the rails and back on again. But she’s set out to prove us all wrong with her campaign to put an end to the menopause taboo and...

This week I’m chatting to a woman who is the very definition of a Bestseller. Jodi Picoult has written 24 global smash hits (including A Spark of Light and Small Great Things) all with her inimitable mix of hard hitting issues and intimate personal stories, and her last eight novels have debuted at No 1 in the New York Times bestseller list. Her new novel, The Book of Two Ways, is a page turning e...

This week’s guest will be no stranger to you but she’s a little bit of a different one for The Shift because, at 40, Bryony Gordon is a mere whipper snapper, but she’s crammed a whole lot of living into those years. Journalism, Mental health campaigning, marathon running, body positivity activism, bestselling books and, as we’ll be hearing, alcoholism.  In her latest bestseller, Glorious Rock Bott...

My brilliant guest for the first episode of this season is a very special one. You may not have heard of Karen Arthur, but you sure as hell will have done by the time she’s finished with you. Because Karen - the founder of Menopause Whilst Black - is a woman on a mission. In the few months since she launched Menopause Whilst Black on Instagram she has become a force to be reckoned with in the fast...

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 Richard Curtis do with Comic Relief. And she’s got four kids. And a bazillion pets (listen on for kittens!). And she lives in my Pinterest board. And she’s not afraid to call a spade a spade. Lots of spades, in...

This week's guest is journalist and author, Kate Spicer. Kate went from “just another journalist” to national treasure and the country’s most famous dog-lover when her dog Wolfie went missing and she enlisted twitter to help find him. That story became a book, Lost Dog (billed as What did Fleabag do next? But equally a story about the love between a lost human and her four-legged friend), and is n...

Career crises are tough at the best of times, but imagine being in the midst of menopause - hot flushes, anxiety, brain fog, the lot - and finding your thirty year career is crashing down around your ears. That’s what happened to this week’s guest, the brilliant DJ and broadcaster Jo Whiley when she was given the job of co-hosting BBC radio 2’s drive time slot with Simon Mayo. She talks honestly a...

This week’s guest this week is the epitome of grown up style - so much so that her effortless look has earnt her almost a million followers on Instagram. At 45, French model and producer Caroline de Maigret is the face of Chanel and co-author of two bestselling books that take a tongue in cheek look at the whole 'cult of the French woman' thing. So how does it feel when your face (and body) is you...

How does it feel to suddenly become ultra-visible just as the world is trying to invisible you? That’s what happened to this week’s guest, mega-selling novelist Jojo Moyes, when the book her old publishers didn't want to publish - Me Before You - became a global bestseller and smash-hit movie in her mid-40s.  Since then every book Jojo has written has been a bestseller and she’s sold the movie rig...

My guest this week will give hope to anyone who’s looking at their work life and wondering WTF? The inspirational Sara Collins was a lawyer and mother of five (I know!) when she looked at her life and thought: no more! (The job, not the kids!) She took a creative writing course and wrote the first few chapters of the book that was to become her debut novel and a runaway bestseller on both sides of...

Ask any group of women to name a woman they love and I guarantee you someone will name this week’s guest, because Marian Keyes is beloved of women the world over. (She won’t believe that, but she is!) And you know why? Because she speaks the truth. She can’t not speak the truth. Which could well be why she’s sold over 35 million books. Her trademark: the silk glove of laugh out loud funny stories...

My guest this week is the ultimate career pivoter, novelist, journalist, screenwriter, (potter!) Tasmina Perry. I’ve known Tasmina (Tammy) since we were both baby editors and stuck on the management training course from hell together. We have been firm friends ever since. She’s since gone on to write 15 (!) novels - 13 as Tasmina Perry, 2 psychological thrillers as JL Butler and is now, “pushing 5...

Sam Baker gives us the lowdown on her new podcast series, The Shift. Check out Sam's new book, The Shift - How I (lost and) found myself after 40 - and you can too: At Amazon: https://amzn.to/2XSzw8h And Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781529329766 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices