The Shift with Sam Baker

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Last but very much not least is my oldest ever guest Dr Gladys McGarey. Dr Gladys was 102 when we recorded this episode. She has sadly since died, in September 2024, two months before her 104th birthday... ---- A few months ago...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up, bestselling novelist Isabel Allende... ---- The main word I can think of to describe this week’s guest is wise. (Well there are other words - fabulous and no-bull for starters - but wise is the biggie.) Bestselling aut...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up, screenwriting legend Lynda La Plante... ---- My guest this week is a woman who - to coin a bit of 1980s jargon - punched through the glass ceiling for women in TV, creating not just one but a series of female lead char...

To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. Next up is Australian literary legend Helen Garner who, in her 83rd year has finally broken out in the UK and US and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for her collected diaries, How To End A Story... --- My guest today is the writer...

• To celebrate the old bird/broad role models who’ve appeared on The Shift with Sam Baker, I’ll be rerunning some of these conversations throughout December and into January. First up Miriam Margolyes... ---- 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...

My guest on the final episode of this season is Anne, Lady Glenconner.  Now 93, Lady Glenconner has lived to put it bluntly, one hell of a life. She was born in 1932, the eldest daughter of the 5th earl of Leicester and brought up in the early 20th century’s rigid social hierarchy on the ancestral estate of Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Which, incidentally, she didn’t inherit because primogeniture, of...

My guest today is the accidental radical Karen Dobres. Until her early fifties, Karen’s life had taken a path familiar to so many women. From modelling in her early twenties, she trained as a counsellor and worked alongside bringing up a family. So far, so familiar. Then, as she puts it, she had her final period, attended her first football match and everything changed. Growing up in the 70s, when...

My guest today is a woman on a mission to preserve the language of her grandparents. Playwright, screenwriter and novelist Samantha Ellis is the author of one of my personal favourites How To Be A Heroine. Sam was in her early 40s and a new mum when it dawned on her that her mother tongue - or milk language - was on the verge of dying out. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Sam grew up surroun...

For many of us losing our memory is our worst nightmare. To be told that that is happening when you are still young (ish) is close to unimaginable. That’s what happened to this week’s guest, writer, teacher and reader in residence at Charleston, Holly Dawson. Holly was just 40 when she started to lose her grasp of where she was. She was ultimately diagnosed with epilepsy. A scan of her brain revea...

If you, like me, have lived most of your life in fear of foundation, this week’s guest is your saviour. Because this woman saved us no-makeup makeup girls’ lives.  Back in 1991, Bobbi Brown was a makeup artist frustrated by the fact that most makeup looked like a mask. So she produced a range of 10 lipsticks that actually matched people’s lips. Shocker! Those lipsticks were the start of something...

Today’s episode is basically a massive treat for me. Hollie McNish is my favourite poet. I first encountered her over a decade ago when I was doing an event for my thriller, The Woman Who Ran, at a literary festival. Hollie was in the big venue next door. The signing queue went on for miles. Let’s just say, it wasn’t for me. Hollie’s poetry speaks to people, women, mainly, let’s be honest. And we...

We talk a lot about women who want out, who want to set light to everything and walk away. But we don’t talk so much about the women who find someone else has put a bomb under their lives and left them standing in the rubble. That’s what happened to Jen Hatmaker…  After 45 years of living life according to the good girl rules, she woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband of 26 years...

This episode of The Shift podcast, with the High Street legend, Mary Portas, is brought to you live from Cheltenham Literature Festival Mary is one of the UK’s most high profile and innovative business women. She made her name transforming dusty old Harvey Nichols into global fashion destination Harvey Nicks (with a little bit of help from Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley and Absolutely Fabulous!)...

My guest today is the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, Lyse Doucet. Since starting work at the corporation almost forty years ago, Lyse has covered all the major wars in the Middle East, reporting from Afghanistan Iraq Iran Jordan Israel Pakistan Egypt Libya and most recently Gaza. And that’s before we get started on the rest of the world. Sudan. The tsunami in Indonesia. And you may well...

(This episode first aired in November 2023) 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 bo...

(This episode first aired in August 2022.) My guest today is the writer Hilma Wolitzer. Born in 1930, Hilma had her first poem published at the age of 9. She then shelved that ambition in favour of marriage and children, as women were expected to in the 1950s. 26 years later she had her first short story published. Then there was no stopping her.  Her first novel was published at the age of 44 and...

(This episode was first published in November 2022.) Today's guest is one of my personal heroes, Caryn Franklin. Caryn started her career in the 80s as a fashion editor before moving into TV where she presented, amongst other things, BBC’s The Clothes Show. Always outspoken, Caryn has spent four decades being a thorn in the fashion industry’s side. Championing diversity of all forms LONG before it...

(This episode first aired in September 2022.) Today’s guest is one of Britain’s best loved novelists, Lisa Jewell. Her career started with a smash hit debut novel Ralph’s Party - which she started writing as a bet at the age of 27 while she was unemployed, and, according to her, “totally lacking in direction and ambition”. It was the book of the moment and for 14 novels it looked like her career -...

Hello and welcome to the final episode of season 18. 18!!!! My guest today is the cook, Thomasina Miers. Despite being taught to cook as a child, Tommi didn’t really embrace her love of food until her late 20s when a trip to Mexico inspired a love of Mexican food that was to change her life. In 2005, she became the first person ever to win Masterchef and two years later she co-founded the successf...

A few weeks ago, I was pootling around on substack where The Shift newsletter lives - https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/ - and I noticed I had a DM from a new subscriber. It turned out to be from one of my favourite crime writers - the award winning Laura Lippmann, who some of you might know from the recent apple TV+ series of her novel, The Lady In The Lake. Laura had been brought to The...

This season is dedicated to helping you pick your summer reads and my guest today is the novelist Charlotte Mendelson whose writing has been compared to “late Shakespeare meets Modern family!” So you know where to turn if you’re looking for a painfully funny, on the nose look at the dynamics of love and marriage. Charlotte worked as a publisher for twenty years before becoming an award winning nov...

My guest this week is the novelist Betsy Lerner.  Now Betsy is here to talk about her critically acclaimed debut novel, Shred Sisters, which takes us from the 1970s to the 90s and tells us the story of two troubled sisters, Amy and Ollie. No less a legend than Patti Smith described it as “moving like a souped up pick up truck” - and who am I to argue with Patti, it does! I loved it. Betsy only tur...

This week I’m delighted to welcome back to The Shift one of my most listened-to guests, Nicola Sturgeon. When we last spoke, at the start of 2022, Nicola was First Minister of Scotland - the first woman to hold the role, the first woman in 600 years to be the keeper of the seal. And During her tenure, she was widely acknowledged to be one of the most impactful politicians of her generation. During...

My guest today is the award-winning novelist Sarah Perry. Sarah is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, but the one you will almost definitely heard of (and may well have watched) is The Essex Serpent. Published in 2016, it sold over half a million copies, and won both British Book of the Year and Waterstones book of the year before being made into an apple tv+ series starring Cl...

What happens when the life you find yourself leading in midlife doesn’t tick all the supposed boxes? That’s the situation today’s guest found herself in. Glynnis MacNicol was 46 - a woman of a so-called certain age who found herself living life without a roadmap when, in august 2021, after almost 18 months spent alone in lockdown, she picked herself up and packed herself off to Paris for a month o...