The Shift with Sam Baker

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...

This week we're revisiting the legendary Jamaican journalist Barbara Blake Hannah. I spoke to Barbara at the start of last year and she blew me away. What. A. Woman. My guest today is the Jamaican author, journalist, film maker and (no exaggeration) living legend Barbara Blake Hannah. Already an experienced journalist when she arrived in London in 1964, Barbara was shocked to discover her achievem...

While we take our summer hiatus we're revisiting some classic episodes of The Shift with Sam Baker. Since I recorded this interview with Tracey back at the start of 2021, she and her partner Ben Watt have released a new Everything But The Girl album, Fuse, that's rocketed them back into the charts. Like many 80s kids, I grew up with today’s guest. Tracey Thorn started early, forming The Marine Gir...

To celebrate the DJ's 27th year of presenting Glastonbury on the BBC, we revisit one of the very first episodes of The Shift podcast, back in 2020, with Jo Whiley 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 we...

For this bonus episode of The Shift, I’m delighted to welcome a very special guest: the award-winning author of ten bestselling novels, Barbara Kingsolver.  Every so often, a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you meet. For me, Demon Copperhead, is one of those books. A reimagining of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, translated to the Appalachian mountains in...

If 18-year-old Sam was here now, today’s episode would be a real pinch-me moment. Back in the mid-80s, I was a student in Birmingham when I first stumbled upon the dark green spine that was the hallmark of a newish publisher called Virago. It started with one book in particular – The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Reading that book changed my life, as I don’t doubt many Virago books have done fo...

My guest today is the award-winning broadcaster Aasmah Mir. Born and brought up in Glasgow, of Pakistani Heritage, Aasmah started in newspapers before moving to the BBC, where she worked for twenty years - most famously as co-host of Saturday Live. She joined Times Radio three years ago, as cohost of the Breakfast Show and is a two-time winner of a Sony Gold Award, kind of like a radio Oscar. She’...

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a woman who was alive in the 90s who didn’t own one of this designer's dresses (or at least one heavily inspired by her from the high street). From the moment they hit the shops, the bias cut slip dress became ubiquitous and it still is. And for that we have to thank Tanya Sarne, the founder of Ghost. Personally I still have five of her dresses and I’m neither a dress g...

Today’s guest is the comedian Josie Long. Josie started early – and I mean EARLY. She has been performing standup since she was 14, and by 17 won the BBC New comedy award. She was the first woman to be nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award three times and is co-founder of the education charity, Arts Emergency. Josie is also a regular on those terrifying panel shows where you just know you’d thi...

My guest for Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 is mental health campaigner, psychiatrist and bestselling novelist Joanna Cannon. Jo left school at 15 only returning to complete her A levels when she decided to train as a doctor in her late 30s. She specialised in psychiatry before leaving medicine to write in her mid-40s. (How many life shifts can one woman handle!?) But Jo’s passion for psychiatr...

OK, I admit it, I’m a bit in awe, because today’s guest is someone I’ve wanted to get on The Shift for the longest time. You might know Ruby Wax as a successful comedian and presenter, one of the funniest women of her generation. Or you might know her as a mental health campaigner and best-selling author. One thing’s for sure, she has been using humour to make the rest of us feel better for decade...

How does it feel to walk into a room and know that everyone already thinks they know all there is to know about you. That’s the position today’s guest, Melanie Sykes has found herself in repeatedly over the last thirty years. After starting out modelling and then moving into TV and radio presenting, Melanie decided she’d well and truly had enough in her 40s, and stepped back from broadcasting to r...

This week's guest is the rural poverty campaigner Natasha Carthew. Natasha was born and brought up in Cornwall, in the 19th century fishing and farming village of Downderry where the Carthews had been resident from the very start. Natasha has spent her life noisily campaigning to give working class writers a voice. Where some might tire of banging their heads against the closed door of the affluen...

I first encountered today’s guest, Marina Benjamin, when I was researching The Shift book and stumbled across her memoir, The Middlepause. An insightful look at what middle age means today, it was prompted by Marina’s own sudden menopause after a hysterectomy. The sense of dislocation she described was the first time I’d ever seen the way I felt put down in black and white. She followed it up with...

My guest today is the bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld. I first came across Curtis when both our debut novels were named “ones to watch” by Time Magazine. They turned out to be right about one of us. It wasn’t me! Since that first novel, Prep, hit the big time, Curtis has written six more novels and two short story collections. The most famous of which is the transat...

Today’s guest is the anti-guru behind the massive No F*cks Given franchise, Sarah Knight. What started life with the Marie Kondo pastiche, The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving A F*ck, now comprises 7 guides and three journals which have sold three million copies and a TED talk that’s notched up ten million views.  But Sarah wasn’t always the queen of giving zero f*cks. Scroll back to her mid-30s...

Today’s guest, Anita Bhagwandas, is that rare thing, a beauty journalist who’s prepared to call out the beauty industry. Anita B, as she's known, is currently a beauty columnist on the Guardian. But throughout her career she has worked on some of the biggest names in women’s magazines and consulted for some of the most famous brands. It’s not exactly the CV of someone you’d expect to see campaigni...

Today’s guest is one of the most stylish women I know, but I also know that she won’t mind me saying, it wasn’t always that way. Now Fashion Director of The Times, I first met Anna Murphy when we were both regular stalwarts of the second row at the biannual ready to wear fashion shows. She was then editor of the Telegraph magazine Stella and I was editor of Red, both magazines deemed not quite fas...