Mad, Sad and Bad with Paloma Faith - James O’Brien: The Therapy Session That Changed My Life

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

From speaking to opinionated callers on his radio show, to taking down Nigel Farage live on air, James O’Brien has dealt with his fair share of mad, sad and bad. Me and my Mum are also huge fans of his, so I was super excited to invite him over for a chat.In this episode, we delve deep into James’ early life; from being born to a young single mother and his subsequent adoption, to his experiences of corporal punishment at Catholic school. We discuss how these early experiences shaped him, and how therapy helped him to address some of the coping mechanisms and prejudices he had carried through childhood. He is open, vulnerable, deeply honest, and is the epitome positive masculinity.We also discuss being our therapists’ favourite clients, and James takes the liberty of dishing out some parenting advice to me! This conversation was political, hilarious, and deeply refreshing!#JAMESO'BRIEN #PALOMAFAITH #MADSADBAD—Find us on: Instagram / TikTok / YouTube—Credits:Producer: Jemima RathboneAssistant Producer: Magda CassidyEdit Producer: Pippa BrownEditor: Shane O'ByrneVideo: Jake Ji & Grisha NikolskyVideo Editor: Joel Sommazzi & Josh BennettOriginal music: BUTCH PIXYSocial Media: Laura CoughlanMarketing: Eleanore BamberExec Producer: Jemima RathboneExec Producers for Idle Industries: Dave Granger & Will MacdonaldSenior Exec Producer: Holly Newson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Paloma Faith and this is my show. Each week I welcome someone fantastic into my home to talk about what makes them mad, sad and bad. Roll recording! Mom, I'm having James O'Brien come round today. What do you reckon? Well, I think you're really lucky to have to spend some time with him because I would love to meet him but I think he's amazing.

Have you ever called into LBC? No, never, but I do... Why? Not really particularly. I like actually quite little like listening to what, you know, other people are asking him. What do you think I should speak to him about? Definitely how he copes with not getting over annoyed. Because he does have a lot of people phone in who really are,

they really don't know much about what's happening. And then he gets very in-depth. He really analyzes why something has happened. I mean, most people throw their hands. up in horror, oh my God, that's terrible. And silence everything. Yeah, but then he really, particularly the last one, he really does get into why things happen.

I think what strikes me about James O'Brien as well is like he's really avidly, like, emphatic about truth and about facts. Yes. I want to know when I speak to James what you think is the, might, should be like my main aim in this interview. we hear so much about his opinion on LBC, what do we really want to know about the man? But another thing I think is great is this new word woke.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being woke. What is wrong with it? Why is it a negative? Why is it a negative? I mean, being woke, you're anti-racist, you're anti-war, you believe that everyone gets the... The chance. Yeah.

I don't really understand how that was allowed to really have such a negative connotation to it. We could ask him that because he speaks to so many different people on his show. I mean, people from all walks of life. Like what's wrong with woke culture? Yeah. Why is that negative? Yeah. When it's become a negative. But it isn't. Whereas in my day, everyone was, you know, you threw away your bra, you were feminist, you were anti-racist. There's the door. That's James. So, James. I love you to see you. I'm nice to see you. How are you? Come in. I love it here.

I came the wrong way. I came the wrong way out of the tube. Oh, you got the tube? Because I was worried about cabbies. Can't read it, can't. Do you ever see? Well, I thought it was because they'd recognise your voice and then say, and another thing.

No, because I was very anti-humour. I went from a period of getting free cab rides. Or every time I got in, they say, thanks for sticking up for us against Uber. I won't take your money, James. But I got the train, too. To you, he's the best-selling author of How They Broke Britain, and host of Full Disclosure, the podcast which features fascinating conversations from the world of politics, news and entertainment.

I've been on it. He's an award-winning presenter dealing calmly with a parade of opinionated callers every day on his LBC radio show. Or perhaps to you, he's the man who savagely took down Nigel Farad live on air. But to me, he's the father I never had. Rational, reasonable, fair, and more importantly, willing to work on his own failings. I actually wish more men were like him. It's James O'Brien. Blimey, thank you.

You're welcome. I just don't know what to say. It's true. Well, it's crikey. I hope I live up to that introduction. I listen to you daily as if you may be my dad. I'm definitely not. I've been talking to my mum about you because she's a massive fan

and I've spoke to you about her before about how kind of amazing we find your politics and something that came up, which I'd love to start off with, is how do you keep your call with some of these people that you're having to deal with? Because it's impressive. Well, I think you've got to have an end game in mind. So you've got to remember that you're going somewhere.

You're looking at the prize. Yeah, well, not even the prize, just the destination, the end, the finish line, which might be the prize. But if you think there's a finish line, then you're constantly moving towards it. So it's why sometimes you get a question that you know isn't going to be answered, but the fact that it's not going to be answered is the point. So you don't have to get angry with a person who's not answering the question.

You just have to keep asking it to the point where they will get angry or they will go a bit bonkers. I'm not as aggressive as I used to be because I think that the best way to interrogate a toxic opinion is to really, really question it rather than to attack it with your own opinions So that I think is why I don't lose the plot as often as people think perhaps I should. I feel like world politics would benefit if more people thought like that. Do you? Yes, I do because I actually feel that like, you know, just starting off,

I observe there is a rise in, you know, right-wing politics. And what I observe is that the Liberal left are not doing much in their favour to combat that because they're not asking, they're censoring people before they've had the opportunity to express their feelings. And I feel like through this kind of liberal left superiority of like, we shut this down because it's wrong, you don't really ever quite get to the root of the actual problem, which is this dissatisfaction.

It's really, really tricky. Partly because of social media, there are spheres you can't pierce. So if you look at the accounts on social media, they're absolutely dedicated to crime being committed by people of colour. They are designed to create the myth that everybody from an ethnic minority or everybody brown or everybody black. And of course, in the first iteration,

every refugee or every immigrant is a criminal or a rapist. And that rhetoric is repeated by politicians up to and including Donald Trump. I don't know how you challenge that. So there are some people that you wouldn't benefit from tall. talking to, but the people who have fallen for it. So you would say, why are you never cross about a child sexual assault when it's committed by white men, for example? And that's a good example of a question that you pursue because you know the answer, but

you need them to realize what the answer is. And they might not go away converted or happy or reviewing their opinions. But for people listening, they'll be hopefully that moment of going, yeah, why don't they ever talk about. But where do you think that rage comes from is, I guess, what I'm getting for. So I get that people dedicate their lives at, but it is, surely it's scapegoating. So what's the root cause of that rage other than dissatisfaction with their own lives? Or is that kind of snobbish superiority complex way for me to think?

It can be both, I think. I mean, it is. The problem with some of this stuff is that some positions. are superior to others, you know, that the idea that we're all fundamentally equal is a superior position to the idea that there's some sort of race-based hierarchy of humanity or, you know, eugenics or race science, which is making a bit of a comeback at the moment, partly for the reasons that we're talking about. So that the absurdity of a position can be exposed, but the toxicity, I think people cling to out of fear. I struggle to know the difference between the con man and the

conned, as it were, between the opportunist, the person who is using the other as a helpful means of self-promotion or as a helpful tool with which to kind of gather support, to hoover up clicks and power of money increasingly on X, on Twitter, and the people who are falling for it, who you think are more easily helped. And then you worry that even by using the word helped, you're sounding patronising. but people are frightened of things they don't need to be frightened on. It's not the fear itself that's the problem. If a lion, if I turned up at your door five minutes ago

and shouted there's a bloody lion coming up the high street and you ran for the hills, that wouldn't make you stupid or anti-lion or racist or bigoted. You could have been right. And then 10 minutes later it turns out, I'm lying and there's no lion at all, you can come back in again. So believing in that moment, the people who are telling you to be frightened, to be fearful,

That doesn't in and of itself make you a bad person. It's when you've been provided with the evidence that there's nothing to be frightened of. And you still perpetuate that. Yeah, then you become problematical. And they're the people that I think are hardest, perhaps, to engage with. Because you don't know how much of it is willful. Do we, is the key then to find all those people

who are, you know, you could sway and then dilute the situation and then leave those awful perpetuate. I think so. You know, I don't, you know, you mentioned in the instance. introduction that the interi I did years ago with Farage and it's not difficult to debag him. It's a mystery why more people haven't done it or more people don't do it. But you just focus in on the things that he said and you point out the absurdity of some of the

positions that he's held or the contradictions that are contained within a lot of the positions he adults. But he just moves on to the next thing. His income is his whole life depends upon this persona or this grift. But for people that have fallen for it, I think. think it's quite liberating sometimes to realize that they don't need to be as frightened and as angry as they are. Please tell me a time that you've been mad.

There's this great line in Orwell, which I always get slightly wrong from 1984, about there is truth and there is untruth. And if you can hold on to the truth, even if you are the only one, you will not go mad. And covering politics since 2016, there have been times when you've thought to yourself, well, maybe I'm wrong about everything. Certainly back in November when Trump gets re-elected, do you think how can this happen? Maybe I am missing something.

Maybe there is more to these positions than I've ever allowed. Maybe it is condescending and superior to hold that these views are just objectively... Morally right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, objectively right.

Or the opposite views are objectively wrong or at best objectively ridiculous. And when you see the world turning, when you see people like Boris Johnson become prime minister, when you see newspapers that your friends work on and that you could have easily ended up working on yourself, greeting Liz Truss as if she's the second coming and describing her fiscal catastrophe as the best thing since sliced bread.

And there's so much of it, and it never ends. And you thought it might end with Kirstama getting into Downing Street, but then Trump got into the White House. And you just sort of have to occasionally catch yourself and think, no, I am holding on to the truth. I'm not mad. Everybody else is. The only time I ever really thought I might have gone mad

was during lockdown when I was doing the show in the shed at the bottom of my garden. And this has never happened to me before because it was an empty room. You know what it's like? Studios might give the impression of being solitary spaces, but there's usually half a dozen people hiding behind a door. Yeah, precisely that.

But this was completely empty. So I would get up much later than usual because I didn't have to get into work. Family was mostly still in bed. I'd walk through the kitchen. My wife would usually sometimes get up towards 10 to 10, and the show starts at 10. Have a cup of coffee.

And I'd walk up the garden, close the door behind me, talk to Leicester Square, check that the line was up, and then just do three hours of radio. And once the thought enters your head, that there might not be anybody listening. It's quite hard to get it out again. And so there were moments when the line would go down

and I wouldn't know. So no one could tell me because the communications and the internet and the technology was, you know, it was evolving all the time because no one was prepared for this scenario. So I would wait and then my phone would have to ring. Someone would have to ring me to tell me that the line had gone down. And for the last five minutes, no one's been able to hear me. So once you've got the thought,

in your head that you're talking and nobody's listening. It's quite distracting. Up to the point where I begin to wonder whether I'm doing a radio show at all. And at 10 to 10 in the morning, Lucy opens the patio door, pats me on the backside, it says, you go off and do your radio show, darling. We'll see you in three hours. You thought you were in a beautiful mind. Yeah, and there was a bloke.

There was a story that emerged. I think during that period, if a bloke had been doing a radio show from his shed for like 30 years, just for his wife, he'd be listening on a little transistor radio in the kitchen. And that was quite, yeah, that was probably a brief flirtation with some sort of level of genuine madness. So do you think it's, like, the thing that prevents us from going mad is other people? Like having people around you, do you feel like that isolation is maddening? But being able to see people is important, isn't it?

Or at least to feel them, you know. And that lockdown mess people up in so many ways, especially children. And I think that was my little mini version of it, that absence. At my school, my school was run by monks. And I mean, we'd be here all day if we start discussing all of the weirdnesses that are a consequence of that. But there was a hermitage that was part of the monastic land. And every few years, some monk would fancy going off on their own for six months. It had a well.

It had no electricity. You'd take a Bible with you, a couple of other books. And that was it. And whereas about sort of 15 or 16, I thought, God, that sounds nice. Oh, God. That sounds nice. Now, I don't think I'd last two days.

Me neither. You'd be climbing the walls. You'd be climbing down the well. You'd be an all sort of just, so yeah, I think as I get older, I crave company more and more. I think your kind of emphasis on the truth is, really, you know, it's really admirable and dignified

and all those things, but I don't know whether now looking at modern media and politics kind of seem to be the same thing now. I don't know whether people even really care about truth

because nobody seems to, they seem to like, you know, politicians just talking and like obviously in the case of Trump, he just seems to just talk and talk and talk and he doesn't really cross-check anything that he's saying. He just sort of throws whimsical thoughts out and people are like, hmm, he seems like a great leader. But how is leadership, how is just constantly talking conducive to leadership? He subvice. Everything we thought

we knew is why I use this period of news coverage as an example of madness. Because the distillation of what you've just described was during his first administration when Kelly Ann Conway, his press secretary, coined the phrase, alternative facts. You said, that's the right reaction, Paloma. It's absolutely mad. You know, when you talked about back to what you said about the madness being this silence,

the isolation, the loneliness, like at the moment in politics, I observe that potentially the left and the right are choosing not to listen to one another. So it's sort of a wall of sound. So doesn't that then make you feel more isolated, isn't that the madness is the loneliness of it that no one's listening? I use the football analogy a lot. It's as if we always play, you have two teams on the same

pitch, but everyone agrees on where the touchline is. You might be kicking chunks out of each other for 90 minutes, but if you're offside, you're offside and you're going to give away a free kick. That's gone. That's gone. So I don't know who the other team is in the context of, in Europe and America, or in the UK in America, in the context of having constructive, substantive engagement, I don't know who the other side is. Do you not feel that people are even concerned with morality anymore? No. What do you think they're driven by?

This is where you think you're going mad because you grow up thinking this stuff really matters, right? It's drilled into you. And we raise our kids, we've both got two daughters. We're raising them to say, you don't do this. This is right. This is kind. This is empathy. All these things. The truth matters, you know, even if you can't drill kindness into them.

Don't lie. I constantly say, I don't like you fibbing. And crucially, if you do lie, bad things will happen. You know, not necessarily... You'll be celebrated and rewarded and lauded up. So that, again, it is about basic morality. The referee would blow his whistle and you'd go, all right, Gov. You broke the rules.

It's a fair cop, you got me. But now the referee blows the whistle and you start claiming that you can only hear alternative whistles. So when I was speaking to my mum, she was talking about this idea that woke culture is perceived as like a negative thing, but in her view as like a young person of the 60s, surely that's a great thing. Like, why are we now using it as an insult?

Oh, you're so woke. But it's like, from her perspective of 78 years old, she's like, it's wonderful to be woke. Surely that's the key to all the answer. It's right, isn't she? It's one of those words. When you ask people to define what it means, they can't tell you.

Especially if you move... Well, it literally means awake. Of course it does. And aware of other people's injustice or other people's suffering. Isn't that a great thing not to go through life asleep? I think it got adopted first. It got corrupted first during Black Lives Matter. I think that's when people started using it as a pejorative.

So if you remove that from the equation, and you asked, I did this with Pierce Morgan once because he was always banging on about wokeness. And I said, look, let's not talk about transgender. I want you to give me an example of something woke or of something being cancelled. Yeah. You can say all the time you want.

You've just written a book about it. Yeah. So you must have loads of examples. Something that's actually been cancelled because of wokeness. And? He was very cross about a decision taken by Google to remove the egg from the emoji of a salad because vegetarians had complained.

And to my lasting regret, because I think lines of communication between the two of us have broken down there. I wonder why. But to my lasting regret, we were doing it on Zoom. I think it was during lockdown. So it was a Zoom interview because I'd love to have, if you're in the room with someone, you can let the silence hang. Yeah, just the egg.

But if you're doing it online, you know, if it's on the radio, the emergency tape kicks in. If you leave the pause for too long, you'll start hearing, you know, my interview with Tony Robinson from 10 years ago. You couldn't say to him, apparently the chicken that laid that egg actually lived an amazing life and is still living now. Just extraordinary.

And so I think I said something like, but you don't really care about that. And yes, I do, I really like eggs. Oh, God. So that's where you go with woke. So you know, as soon as someone uses that word, that you've got them, because it is just a synonym for things that we should be proud to be.

And people who use it as a pejorative or use it as an insult are people who hate the things that we should be proud to be, or think they do. do. I agree. Tell me about a time that you've been sad. Crikey. I think the saddest I've ever been was six or seven years ago when we had really, really horrible illness in the family. It was like a combination. I can't go into specific detail because it's not my story to tell, but I can tell my side of the story.

is when one of the people you love most in the world and for whom you feel responsible is really poorly, a sort of combination of physical and mental health. And I was making it worse, not better, because I was bringing to the table all the skills that had served me very well in my life, all the skills that had got me through boarding school

and got me up the greasy pole on Fleet Street and got me a nice career as a... Your survival instinct. Survival instinct. And it's more than a survival instinct. It's a punch first, ask questions, later instinct. It's hypervigilance, fists up. Where's the next attack going to come from?

Because if you start getting beaten by adults when you're 10, and, you know, mine was a rarefied privileged childhood, but I was still beaten by adults from the age of 10 to the age of 13. And you put such enormous effort into convincing yourself that it hasn't hurt and that you're fine. It didn't do me any harm. Stiff up a lip. all the stuff that English private schools have been imbueing boys and young men with

for 200 years in order to be able to send them off to India to rule over the natives with absolutely no right whatsoever, but with no questioning of their God-given entitlement. So kill your emotions, kill your vulnerability. Weakness is awful. And you can overcome anything by stiffening your sinews, girding your loins and clenching your muscles. And the tragedy in many ways of our society is that it works. It propels you into positions of great power and success.

When Boris Johnson caught COVID, David Cameron came out and said, don't you worry about Boris. He'll be absolutely fine. I've seen him play tennis. Yeah. Sorry? You've seen him play tennis.

It's a fatal virus. There are people on ventilators in hospitals. You think his backhand? It's going to help him survive. But I understood exactly what he meant. I understood that what he meant by that was when Boris faces adversity, he bolts on his fake personality,

he bolts on his sort of bumbling persona and he'll get through it. So don't you worry about him? He's going to be absolutely fine because he's brilliant at pretending that bad things aren't happening to him. Which, of course, is no use at all. So what happened in your situation was,

Did you begin with those and then over a period of time you felt out, you know, the lack of control. Yeah, so I tried to cajole them better. I tried to not quite bully. Exert some control.

Come on, yes, come on, we can get through this. And the other thing I used to do, and I still catch myself doing this, but at least I catch myself doing it now, is that if you, if something bad happens to you, I immediately try, I think I'm trying to reassure you

that things could be worse. but what you learn is that really you're trying to reassure yourself in some way. So you tell me that you've broken your leg and I say, oh, well, at least you haven't got cancer. That's no, fuck it. That's no use to you. That doesn't help you. Your leg is broken.

You're in agony. You're hopping around the place. What I should do is sit with your broken leg. But if you've been from the age of 10, dedicating so much mental and emotional energy to convincing yourself that everything's fine, convincing yourself that nothing hurts, convincing yourself that you're not in pain, you're not vulnerable, you've got no weakness, then when someone else is in pain and vulnerable and weak, you start doing exactly the same

thing to them. You start trying to convince them that they're not in pain at all, that they're not suffering, that everything's going to be fine. Do you think that was, though, because they don't necessarily need to see someone crying when they're going through something like that? Like, is it helpful? I wish it was that, but it wasn't, no. Because sometimes people want you to cry. Some people need to see that you understand how much pain they're in. They don't want you to be constantly telling them that... It's all going to be okay because it might not be. Yeah, and that they are. They're not in pain. You're telling them that they're not in pain. You're telling them, no, it's fine. Come on. It's not that. Come on. Come on. You think you're doing it from a place...

Like minimizing. Yeah, you think it's coming. And you could probably rationalise it. But the sadness kicks in when you have to acknowledge, not only that things are shit, but that you are making them worse. And that... That is when I went to therapy for the first time, thinking it would be absolutely ridiculous, thinking it would be... I'm so glad you went, because I'm a big advocate of therapy. If everyone had therapy, none of us had a podcast. I think it should be mandatory.

I do. Yeah, I do too. I do too. And I think the people most adamant that they won't benefit from it. Need it the most. Should be at the very, very front of the queue. So I'm sitting on a sofa in this little garden office in West London. And I'm there partly just so I can go home and say,

all right. I did it. So I'm sitting on this sofa and we're talking about whether or not, you know, we're going to work together. And so immediately my kind of arrogance kicks in. I said, what do you mean? I'm going to decide whether we work together or not. You're not going to decide whether we work to, whether you, but she's like, well, you know, I can tell usually after one session whether I'm going to be any use to somebody. So I'll decide together towards the end. And she said, and if we do decide together, then at some point I'll ask you to talk directly to your younger self. And I might ask you.

for example to use a cushion as the, and I think she's nuts. I'm sitting there, I think I wish I was recording this or I'm going to get some material out of this for the radio show. Although my brain's whirring like that. But happily, she said we will do, so I do think it's worth coming back. Come back the next week, second week of therapy.

And we're talking about corporal punishment, which I have spent years insisting and arguing and even going on television programs right back in the day to defend. There's something that, yep, some chance, children only understand that sort of language. And I know because I used to be one of those children and it didn't do me any harm.

And I'm just telling her this in my usual glib, throwaway fashion. And she just goes, well, that must have really hurt. And I went, yeah, it really did, actually. Yeah. It really, really hurt. And she goes, she points at this cushion. And she goes, tell him. Tell him he's all right now.

Tell him you're going to look after him, tell him he's safe. and that was probably one of the most important moments of my life. I mean, there was still a lot of work to be done. You have to sit with it. I have to sit with the pain. You have to sit with the reality. And I got to the age of 46, not just not knowing that, but not even...

Trying to do that. Not even thinking it was a thing, you know. Well, it feels uncomfortable, doesn't it, to people to go, I'm going to sit with this really, this discomfort, and it feels very vulnerable, and we're afraid of that because then we feel an open target in a way. Yeah, yeah.

Do you mind seeming weak now? I know that before, from what you said, you didn't like it, but now do you feel like it's weak? Is a weakness or a strength? I don't know if it's the right word to use. I think what I was describing now, I thought was weakness, but it's actually strength

because, I mean, like myself much more. I'm a much nicer person to be with. The only thing I was worried about was whether or not, and I said to my therapist at one point, I said, do you think you're going to therapy me out of a career? Because I do go on the radio and beat people up and I am quite aggressive and I am quite combative, much, and I'm not now. Some people might not believe that I've said that, but I'm really not. If you compare it to what the show was like 10 years ago. So I worried a little bit about that. I worried so what, you know,

not necessarily the weakness, but some of the other side effects of that false personality, that inauthentic survival personality, I worried that when they went, then some of the stuff they'd achieved or some of the stuff they'd accessed for me

would go as well. But no, admitting, I find it so liberating Polona, to, you know, something bad happens to just say, that's so bad. It's freeing. Oh, man, you've no idea. You don't know how coiled up you were

when you used to immediately. Before you'd got to the end of the sentence describing the bad thing, you'd already started the mental process of pretending that it wasn't convincing yourself that it wasn't. And just to go, yeah, that is... And I catch it occasionally.

Someone will say something. And I'm not talking about heavy stuff necessarily. It might just be something a little bit rubbish. One of my kids doesn't do as well. as they hoped to do at school. Something as little as that. And you said, well, you've done very well in geography. Why are you so worried about French?

He don't do that anymore. You just say, I'm so sorry. That's shit, you worked so hard. You really deserved that. And that, you know, so what I think you do. I often say to my daughter about that specific thing, we're all good at different things. And that's okay, because you really tried,

and I love you for trying, but not everyone's good at everything, and you won't be good at everything. There's a little bit. Oh, come on. Criticise me. I'm not criticising you. Criticise my parenting. But even that is, there's a little bit there.

You might want to tell you some notes at this time. I will. Erranting advice. But even there, there's a little bit of trying to talk her out of being sad. Yeah, I guess. Just a tiny bit. Yeah, I'm sorry you didn't do well because you weren't really hard for it. It's enough.

Yeah. Do you think that you're your therapist's favorite client? And if... God, I feel seen. The ego. How dare you? sometimes sit there and think, I wonder if they liked me. Well, I did write a book.

I wrote a book about it, you see. My second book, How Not to Be Wrong, is essentially, and it was a lockdown book. So, you know, it came out when the book shops were shut. And it's a weird little, so my first book was politics and very successful. My latest book is politics and very successful. This weird little middle book, which was successful, but not on a scale that the other two were, largely because it came out in lockdown. But I think also partly because it was so weird and personal.

And I don't think I'd have written it if we weren't. in the middle of that space we were talking about earlier where you're on your own. Isolated, yeah. And I was doing some therapy on Zoom as well at the time, which was a little bit different from doing it. And I credit her bleakly in the back. And yeah, I did sit back and think,

I bet none of your other clients are real. When I was a teenager, I was actually sent to therapy. My mom might come and talk about this bit, actually. Come and never sit. You know what I'm about to say. Hello, Pam. Sit here. Come in.

Tell James about when I was 17 and I wanted to be my therapist favourite so I used to make stories up to him. I don't remember that. You came in the room once because I was convinced this therapist fancied my mum because I was 17. He was from Hackney Health Services.

Yeah, but he's the one who... Yeah, he was awful in the end. Because he wrote me a letter to say that... Yeah, I know. But the thing is, Mom, is don't you remember sitting in the room? Yeah. I'd said to this therapist that my mum had thrown me out that week. I can't remember.

You do, no. The only thing I remember about him is writing that letter, he wrote a letter to me to say that he was really upset that you hadn't continued. And it was a... He fancied her. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. It was really weird because he isn't his...

A therapist should never write to you in that way. No, that's not to their mother. No. And I had a letter to say, And would she reconsider? Because we hadn't got anywhere. And it was a year later, wasn't it, Paloma? Yeah, but the thing that I remember most is,

you can't remember it. But sitting in the therapy room, I wanted him to think that I was his most interesting client. So I sat there and said to him, well, it's been a bad week. And he said, why? And I said, my mum threw me out. She looked at me and went, what are you talking about?

I said she's lying also. I don't remember this poem at all. You don't know. Well, you were really angry. So it's just a note to any young people watching. They don't remember when you get to a certain age. But I basically wanted him to think that my life was interesting and brilliant because of the drama of it.

But not much had happened that week. So I made up a story. You do get that towards the end. You started quite early where you do think, I don't think I've got anything left really to say. To say. to say, and he's getting to be embarrassed about it? No, but after that, she didn't go again.

That was it, was it? Well, not that. Is it wrong that I'm feeling sorry for this therapist? Yes, because he wrote me, I think he must be dead by now. Okay. So don't worry. He's all right. The letter was very peculiar, wasn't it, Polona?

It was a year. He wrote me a personal letter to say, could she come back? He was clearly haunted by the parents. Because he didn't tell nothing, we hadn't done anything. Yeah, but he was haunted because he was obsessed with years. Was he definite? Was he? I don't think.

I don't remember that. He used to look at her like, I don't remember that at all, Palum. Not one bit. Single parent mother in Hackney. Target. She was very glamorous.

Pam against the world, look at her. I don't remember that at all for a little. That's funny that you... I have a try. 48 years in education. All right. Love it. Yeah.

Anyway. So you didn't reply then? No. No. We didn't, right. We just decided that maybe he was toxic. Well, that's, we should make that clear, actually. You have to be.

You have to. You have to. You have to. You have to. to be very careful who you actually... You have to be very lucky. Do you choose to be your therapist? I think so.

Because there are some bad ones. They certainly are. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why, you know, for some people it doesn't work and they don't have a happy experience. And a lot of people as well weaponise their therapy, don't there? They go, well, my therapist said,

and quite often if you've not done therapy, you'd buy it. But the reality is a therapist can't really pass judgment on people around you. They can't say, I think that person was awful. No. But I've been in relationships with people before who said, well, my parent therapist said, Freudian slip with the parent, but my therapist said,

you were wrong in that situation. Because, you know, and it's like, I'm very aware that they wouldn't say that. They really wouldn't. The best advice I got was that you cannot change the way people behave towards you. All you can do is change the way you behave and hope that that will prompt a change in the way that people behave towards you. So there's no earthly way, any decent therapy,

which is ever going to say, oh, yeah, she sounds like, a right, cow. Tell me about time you might have been bad. Hmm. So, well, I mean, there's the obvious stuff, like being naughty as a kid. I was a bit of a shit boyfriend as well before I met my wife. But again, I don't think that makes me special or marks me out. I'd be very obnoxious on marriage. I'd insist that people who hadn't got married were in inferior relationships to marriages.

and that if you were having, no, mate, it was bad. It's what you asked. I mean, I know, I'm glad you're saying it. In a way, it was good radio, because people would ring in who were hugely upset with me and very cross with me, and I'd argue with them, and I'd win because I'd put my armour on, and I'd be my survival personality.

You know, you can win arguments even when you're wrong, and that's what I'd do on those sort of issues. So, and tattoos, I was an idiot about, I was an absolutely dickhead about tattoos. and this woman rang up and I said, I wouldn't want my children to be taught by people with tattoos. What a knob.

I mean, honestly. Yeah. I've worked out where it came from. I'll tell you in a minute because it was fascinating. But this woman rang in and said, I'm a, I got the highest, I'm a paediatric nurse. I got the highest marks in my year. I think I'm out of the highest marks ever

for people who sat the exams that we sat to become pediatric nurses. And she said, I'm covered in tattoos. I was just wondering if your kids were brought into A&R whether you'd want me to look after them or one of my colleagues who's not as good as me. Interesting. And I just went, I'm going to have to rethink this one.

My prejudices. Yeah, and that's what I did. And I went through all of them in this book. And some are more interesting than others. So on the tattoo one, I was trying to think, why have you got this bigotry about tattoos? Most of my mates have got tattoos.

Yeah, I do know what it's like. To be honest, from my kids' generation, I think they're going to stand out more if they haven't got a tattoo than they are if they have. I might get one myself. I'd quite tend to get a little... I want to get a little bumblebee

now we live in Brentford, but anyway, that's for another day. And so I tried to work it out. I dug into it and I thought back and when did it begin and I didn't have... And when I was about 11, my mum worked on the Estée Lord account in Owen Owens, which was the big department store

in Kidaminster. And there was, looking back, a fellow who must have been a drug addict, who had a spider's web tattooed on his... his face. So he used to knock around Kidamister and obviously all the kids call him Spider-Man. And he had, and my mum is immense. She's a bit like your mum. She's, she's larger than life. She's got lots of opinions, lots of stories. People, it used to take her about an hour to get around Sainsbury's because she'd have to stop and have a chat with everybody. She had a frock shop on,

a dress shop on Cumberton Hill in Kidaminsster as she used to do fashion shows. Everybody knew mum. And back when she was on the makeup counter, I was on school holidays and I was, and I went in one day and Spider-Man had kicked off in there and he tried to nick some perfume or tried to and my mum was rattled and I'd never really seen my mum rattled and I think that's when I decided that people who've got tattoos are awful. Which is often the source of most people's prejudices is like once this happened to me and now I'm going to hate that race or that group of people or that type of person forever. Yeah.

If you can dig it out, then you can go rid of it, can go, actually, that's sort of irrational because I've met 700 others that reflect the opposite. Well, precisely, but that I think must be

where it came from. And again, once you've got it in place, coupled with the pediatric nurse, you can drop your... I think what's brilliant, though, about this section for me and what I guess I'm gunning for because I've got, as you say,

I know what I want to say, is that in a way we live in an era where people are always being pulled up in a media sense, but also in sort of the social sense by, well, you have no right to speak because you did X. 20 years ago and we're going to hold that against you. And the reality is, it's like we all spend our lives making mistakes and we need to find some kind of reconciliation with ourselves listening to you say, this was bad. Even the fact that you've acknowledged that it was a bad thing is progress.

Yeah. The marriage one was weirder. I dug into why I got these weird views about marriage. It came back to my adoption. And the fact that when I was a baby, when we were very young and mum and dad would explain adoption to us, part of the reason why we were adopted was because my biological mother was 16. And I found out years later that my biological father did offer to marry her,

but she didn't want to marry him. And so an unmarried 16-year-old girl in Ireland in 1972 could not raise a child. Yeah. And therefore being married, like mum and dad. Men safety. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's why I had such dickish attitudes about marriage as well. So it's quite nice to find this. I've got kind of the opposite because I was raised in a house where my mum was divorced and that was the safer option. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm very scared about marriage. and I've had quite a few people who asked me to marry them, and I've said no to all of them.

Because to me, that presents me with a, not a safe thing. And it opens the door to the possibility of... The wolves getting in. Yeah, yeah. Bad stuff happening, because it happened. And also, because as a kid being raised by someone who said, well, I removed you from this awful childhood by getting divorced to your father, you go,

oh, I don't want to get into that situation. It sounds awful. Which makes as much sense as my position did. Exactly. It doesn't, it doesn't at the same time. Yeah, it's still, it's really great marriage if it were. So what you won't do is slag off other people for being married and what I will no longer do is slag off other people for not being married.

But I have to hold my hands up to make you feel better. I have slagged off people who got married. And when you first said it, I thought, I thought, that little smug half. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Marriage. Yeah, exactly that. Old fashioned.

Just a piece of paper. All of that. Give up your rights as a woman. It's all about female ownership. But these are valid positions. But they're not coming from objective, logical scrutiny. No, I'm sure it works. It's amazing.

When I hear you speak about your wife, it's moving. It's like we all think, oh, I wish that I could be in a situation like that, you know, one day where somebody spoke so highly of me and was willing to work on a relationship in that way. We're going to end on hi, James, because it's been the main. speaking to you, and I don't want to sort of dwell on the negative, because God knows there's enough of it. So I'd like to know something that makes you glad, just because it rhymes.

I could talk about it. My wife, but we've just touched on, haven't we? So I won't do that. I feel like I'd really like to hear you talk about your wife. Okay. Just because I just think not enough people do that. And actually, from the perspective of someone who's, you know, looking at kids and stuff, and I just think,

oh, it's so good, like, as a male role model to hear a man say something amazing about his female partner. Because I just think in Britain sometimes, we're a bit reluctant to say nice things. Like, we always apologise first, like you did. You said, oh, I've already mentioned her, so I don't want to... Well, are you worried about it? You know, or like...

Sometimes people go, I hope you don't mind me saying, but I love your boots. And I'm like, please, why would I mind? Don't. Why would I mind? So let's just lavish your wife in how glad she makes you. Okay. I almost apologise for sounding smug there, you see, just even before I started. So I will be in May of next year, I'll have been married for 25 years.

And I still can't believe my luck. I still get such a kick from making it a laugh. I get such a kick when she makes me laugh. I still fancy the bones off her. I genuinely can't believe my luck. It is a source of never-ending wonder to me that I have had a grand romance, a great love, and that it's still going incredibly strongly.

And I think, and this isn't smug, I think she'd say the same, because if she wouldn't, then it wouldn't feel like it does from my side of the bed. You know, it must be happening on the other side of the bed as well, because otherwise it wouldn't be so intense over here. I can't believe you got me to say that stuff. No, I'm so glad because my, like, you know, like sometimes when we spoke about in this podcast, like, damage happens.

And people get defensive because they're upset. And my mum's always like, I wish I'd never read you fairy stories because you always got this idea that there might be a one person for you. And it's failing you, she says to me all the time. And I'm like, but I feel like the one person maybe isn't manifested correctly in fair. fairy tales, but when I say the one person, I don't mean perfect. I mean, your best mate. Like, this person you fancy and that is intelligent enough to have a conversation with you and be empathetic and also be really good at what they call in therapy rupture and repair.

But, like, that is what I think the fairy tale is. And I think that's what you've got. And so I feel really justified in, you know, in holding out hope when I listen to someone like you say that. and I think you're both really lucky, so thank you. Well, we've been through some shit as well. Of course. And, of course. I wouldn't doubt it.

The stronger you are, the stronger you are, the more likely you are to get through it. Yeah. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure speaking to you. Colombo, it's been a joy, especially the bit with Pam. Yes, she's the best. Thanks so much for doing this. I thank you.

It was a pleasure. Cheers. Thank you. Imagine talking could be big fun. Very nice to meet your mum. Well, she'll be happy. She'd be like, I've really, she loves you. Cool.

She's not interested in any big celebrities, just... What you're trying to say? Thank you, blover. You're huge. Yes, exactly not. In our lives, you are. Call me. Voice of our lives.

Bye. Take care. Cheers. Take care. Get home to say. Thank you, that. Well, wasn't that great? All of the links of everything we mentioned in the show

can be found in the episode description. Oh, and while you're there, why not subscribe and follow the show too. See you all next time. Later's potatoes.