Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Amiable tosh indeed - with Emma Donoghue

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Jane and Fi discuss royal hands, the renaming of stopcocks, and deliciously voluble Spanish...And, they're joined by novelist and screenwriter Emma Donoghue on the new adaptation of her book The Wonder.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Kate LeeTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello wednesday and this is off air with me jane garvey oh you're very loud me fee glover that's better turns you right down. Try and say it with a bit more... I am quite loud. Actually, I haven't been all that loud today. It's been... What kind of a day has it been today? Well, it feels a little bit like...

First of all, we dodged what we thought might have been the start of World War III yesterday. So that in itself has got to be a cause for minor celebration. We're going to put that in... We've got a bar chart going here. That's in the good part of it. Yes, very definitely. But into the bad part of it,

I think goes a really huge creeping anxiety about the autumn statement tomorrow. Yes, I think you're absolutely right there. And also, if I'm honest, completely put into perspective for me by the conversation we had this afternoon on the radio show with Christina Lamb, talking, she's obviously,

she's the Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent she's an absolute star in that world and she was just talking about daily life for Afghan women and I'm laughing but only out of total desperation because this is, we are just not paying attention, we're not paying attention

anymore, no one cares and this is a country where women now cannot go to the park so i thought she said two really interesting things the first being that actually what we forgot to do we being allied forces in afghanistan was educate men so there was a huge push to educate women about their rights about their rights and about increasing their horizons which have now been completely darkened and shattered but in not trying to educate men as well we've made it worse because women have fallen into a kind of darkness where they don't have enough allies to help them

and what was that extraordinary thing she said about how some of her Afghan male informers, if you like, people that she gets information from, have told her that their daughters, stuck at home because they can't go to school, are really getting on their nerves. And that might be the lever that's pulled to get girls back into school because women drive their men so mad by being around them all the time. Well, they nag them, you see. Yep. So that might be the impetus to allow them a bit more freedom. Oh, God. It's 2022 and this is where we are. So there's a relevant email actually from Jill in Essex.

Can I crack straight onto that one? I love your work and I'm still working through the other one back catalogue. Always a reliable mood booster. I've just listened to your chat about Qatar's hosting of the Men's World Cup and I'm now partway through Kate Mason's eye-opening podcast. It's really good. You can find it via Football Ramble. A lot of media attention has rightly been given to the lack of LGBTQ rights in the state and I'm surprised that there's comparatively little mention of women's rights.

Will women even be able to attend matches or is it an Iran style situation? And Jill says, I won't be watching the tournament but I'm pleased to see the lionesses speaking out. Well, Jill, you are a woman after my own heart because I had exactly the same thought before going on air this afternoon. So I'd looked this up because I was

ignorant about women's rights in Qatar and I think we've been very preoccupied with gay rights, rightly so. Rightly so. But women ignorant about women's rights in Qatar. And I think we've been, you know, we've been very preoccupied with gay rights, rightly so, rightly so. But women have a very odd time. In some ways, they do have freedoms. There are as many women in education in Qatar as there are men. So on the one hand, they have freedoms.

They are allowed to participate in business. But you still have to ask for a male member of your family's permission legally to get married. And you have to go to court to get a divorce. But your husband can just divorce you without having to go to court. So it's a little bit freedom on the one hand, definitely not freedom on the one hand definitely not freedom on the other so we don't know whether because i i would love to know jill's question answered actually about whether women can go to games so i think they can go yes they can go to games they have to have a man with them no so they're not in that same position where they're not allowed to drive or leave the house on their

own but they're by no means as equal as we are nowhere near as free as we are in the West. Right. OK, well, that's that's very interesting. Thank you for posing the question, Jill. And you're absolutely right about Kate. Kate Mason, our guest from a couple of a couple of weeks ago now on the podcast, her podcast about this whole business, about the World Cup, the Men's World Cup happening in Qatar is well worth listening to. This is from Josie.

Now, where is Josie listening to us from? Are we teoria? Yeah, well, she said it with confidence. So let's just stick with that, shall we? Thank you, Josie. First, feet. There is a well-known New Zealand singer called Shona Lang who wrote a really lovely song about, anthem for Jane,

I love my feet. I think Jane could totally relate to it. She also wrote a really good song called Imagine Being a Kennedy. Yes, about those Kennedys. Have a listen. Jane, yet another reason for you to hop on that jet plane for 24 hours. Come and visit. How on earth, says Josie, can Otter Lenge not have heard of Saucy P pud. What was funnier, his page 69 reference or his worry that saucy pud was like saucy get it. Anyway, saucy pud is much loved and adored here. Many of us were taught how to make one in cooking class at school and it's still oft requested in my house in winter where the temperature only drops to about 10, another reason to come. My dear old dad who hails from Hull in Yorkshire is, I'm sure, tucking into saucy pud up in heaven as I type.

Right, I didn't get a lot of that, did you? I was just thinking that if you're a first-time Off Air with Jane and Fee user, I'm so sorry. This refers to a conversation from yesterday. But it does sound like you're sending out a code that may start some kind of a very difficult situation somewhere else in the world.

It's all coming back to me. I'm Josie's operator. OK. Sometimes I get confused and I forget the secret work I'm up to. I tell you what, I mean, I was doing that programme with you yesterday and I'm still numb the wiser about some of those references. The source you put is that it is a thing that you can actually buy it, I think, in certain places. Yeah, all right. Here's Caroline.

Well, I'm just doing everyone a favour. A favourite for all of us in Upper Fort at Surbiton High School around 1977 was the iconic song Hotel California, except we thought the lyric was warm smell of policemen rising up in the air instead of warm smell of colitas it wasn't until very recently that a friend put me right caroline goes on to say i'm with jane on skiing and cruises both horrific skied once never again and will never set foot on a cruise ship

one enormous petri dish so i think this is off the back of the WAG ship that is being moored in the Gulf in Qatar so all of the footballers wives have somewhere nice to stay and actually Jane and I were both in agreement it looks horrendous but I'm not with you on skiing you like to ski?

well no I only learnt in my adult life because my kids wanted to learn and I was so I'm not particularly daring i'm not you know i'm not particularly daring do you i'm sure you're good no i'm not no i'm absolutely hopeless but i was so enthusiastic about it jane i had no idea i'd like it so much and i was just the embarrassing mom who was going come on let's go one more slope one more the kids just like oh shut up you want to go for a pizza you boring old old boot? So I surprised myself by really liking it, Jane.

Well, it felt to me like a great deal of effort, but very minimal joy. Oh, it's definitely that, but there's something, there is something in it. There is. Freedom, darling, freedom. Well, Christopher has emailed to say, the address, by the way, janeandfeeattimes.radio.

Jane, I think you'll find they don't syringe ears these days. This is something I was discussing on the radio programme today because I often fantasise about having my ears syringed. They used to do it old school with like a whirring, a fabulous watery whirring sensation. It was like being a human washing machine just for a couple of minutes. It was glorious. And then you'd suddenly get this wonderfully clear hearing restored.

Fabulous. Anyway, Christopher goes on. They just suck it out. I believe springing can damage the ear. And then he goes on to say, I was a heating engineer and I would never trust a workman with a tool belt. Oh, my goodness. Why not? Well, he says, you can't carry enough tools. I had a toolbox that I could hardly lift off the ground. Real men have a toolbox.

After I retired, I realised I didn't need to go to the chiropractor anymore. By the way, you're both right about the stopcock. It was interesting, that conversation, because Dom started talking about this thing called a stop... What did he call it? He called it a stop tap. A stop tap. And both you and I were a bit bewildered. At the risk of sounding like Richard Littlejohn

in his Florida compound, we both understood that the thing he was referring to was a stop cock. A stop cock. And it is political correctness. Go mad! Absolutely mad, of course. I don't know if you want any more.

To refer to that as a stop tap. No, it's not a stop tap. It's a cock. We've always called it that. The first couple of seconds, I thought, oh, my God, I don't know where my stop tap is. But I know where my stop cock is because it's a stop cock. I was going to go over and look for a tap. Where is yours? It's outside, isn't it?

It's one of those ones outside on the pavement. Got to lift a little bit up. Under the sink. Is it? Yes. Oh, well, thank goodness we've got to grips with that. That was an exciting part of the programme for both of us. Can I just tell you something quite funny that happened to me on the way into work today?

Oh, dear. I was on the tube. You built that up. Go on. No, not at all. No, it just made me laugh out loud. So there were two guys behind me all the way on the tube, so it was about a 35-minute journey,

who were talking in incredibly deliciously voluble Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. Do you speak Spanish? No. So they were... And it's a really beautiful language, and when it's very fast and very loud, it's impossible to ignore. So I was really enjoying just listening to them bounce around, bounce around, and I got off into a slight kind of trance. You went into a bit of a bounce around.

It sounded a bit Spanish. Yes, I think that's what you meant. And then just before I got off at my stop, one of them turned to the other and the two words of English that had been in a whole half an hour voluble Spanish chat, and do you know what they were?

Cheeky Nando's? Profiterole franchise. You're joking. That's what they'd been talking about for half an hour. And he just went profiterole franchise and i wasn't the only one in the carriage to go what there are people in new zealand listening to this and they must they everybody around the world must be thinking if only i could travel

on public transport in london i know i'm look out, because when there is a multi-million pound Profiterole franchise, I'll be able to say, I knew that. We'll be like a place that only serve Profiteroles. Yeah, I mean, it's quite fine. I'm not sure it's going to take off, really. No, not with all the sort of dairy. You'd have to have oat Profiteroles and almond, as you'd call them. I'm still not sure about that.

Potato milk Profiteroles. Almond? Is that about that. Potato, milk, profiterole. Almond. Is that how I say it? Yeah, that's wrong. It's almond. Okay, who is our guest today? Actually, a bit of a favourite of ours. Absolutely.

Our guest today is novelist and screenwriter Emma Donoghue. You might know her as the writer of Room. She's also the author of one of your favourite novels. The Pull of the Stars. Great book. And she's now adapted her novel The Wonder for the screen in a film that stars Florence Pugh playing the lead, an English nurse Lib sent to Ireland in the 1860s

to investigate this really extraordinary phenomenon. There's one girl in the film who is a fasting girl and that was something that happened at the time. These young women said, or those around them said that they had the ability to live without food and they were often regarded as miracles but of course many of them simply starved to death so more on that in a moment but to the movie making process first and we started by asking Emma how she fares as a writer when she has to relinquish control of her stories as they become movies. Well, it's not so much they're taking your baby and doing experiments on it in a sinister way.

It's more like, you know, they're standing on the balcony at Buckingham Palace and holding your baby up to the crowd. I mean, you know, they're doing something to your baby which involves a lot of excitement, glory. You know, siblings and friends get very overexcited about it in a way they never do about books. So, you know, I don't want to emphasise the anxiety of the process. and friends get very overexcited about it in a way they never do about books. So, you know, I don't want to emphasise the anxiety of the process. I think I should emphasise what fun it is to suddenly having friends in different continents say, went to the cinema and saw Florence Pugh in your film. So generally it's a great thing.

And how does it work? Do you have any say in how they adapt the film or indeed in who plays the lead characters? You have say if you negotiate the say. I would say if you simply sell rights in your book to the first comer or to whoever wants to pay most, then no, they're not going to particularly seek you out for your opinion. But I always do deals that maximize my involvement I wouldn't say control but involvement and in each case I've been um you know a screenwriter on the films from the beginning and very involved as an executive producer as well and so I would say if you do

that kind of deal you can be you can be hugely involved yeah yeah but you know you try not to throw your weight around yeah I don't I mean I've been doing interviews of this sort for quite a while now and the truth is I don't. I mean, I've been doing interviews of this sort for quite a while now. And the truth is, I don't really know what executive producer means. What does what does it mean? No, I agree that that phrase is misleading. It doesn't mean you're an actual producer, but it does mean you say, you know, you get to hear about all the main decisions when they're being made. You're not you're not suddenly shocked to hear it's going to be filmed in Bulgaria instead.

You know, I do very unusual deals in which I try not to actually sell the rights until just before the film is to be made so I do kind of um looser attachments early on where where nobody's paying anybody yet but you're all agreeing in good faith to work together. What so attracted you to an investigation of the stories of the fasting girls one of which is at the center of the wonder I think I love absolutely freakish events which may be you know once in a lifetime happenings but seem to illustrate something larger about our society so obviously in the case of room it was a weird situation of a child growing up in a locked room. But I thought it was a hugely effective way of encapsulating a fact about childhood, which is that it's this intense little space. And then you gradually move out into a bigger and bigger world. Similarly, with Anna, who's claiming to be living without food in the wonder.

Clearly, she's a weird case. But, you know, in an age when we're so anxious about our relationship with food, eating too much, eating too little, eating disorders, body image, I thought that here was a very interesting cultural history, which shone a lot of light on the whole set of tensions about food, what to eat, when, how much and what it meant. But this film is set, and indeed the book is set, very, very close, perilously close to the potato famine in Ireland, which is a part of the shared British-Irish history, which is poorly understood, not that long after it actually happened. And frankly, from a British perspective, rarely discussed. I was watching the film over the weekend with my eldest child who is after all descended from liverpool irish potato famine people she'd never heard of it wow i am shocked by that well it's not it's not taught in british school i mean it's been something i've banged on about for a while i don't understand why it's not taught taught yeah whereas for the irish it's like the holocaust it's our big terrible subject And I've never written about it directly head on, but I've sometimes written about, say, people who emigrated just after it or people who responded to it in some way.

And I love the way in The Wonder the whole film is haunted by that famine. Yeah, because, you know, there are these ad hoc graveyards thrown up for for all the people who died. And there are terrible stories of people who lost their families and so every bite of food you be you see being consumed in this film and you you see I think are eight different eating scenes and every bite of food is sort of you know haunted by the memory that within a generation before that there wasn't enough and people were eating grass and dying in the ditches so um basically I could have set a story of a fasting girl anywhere because there have been fasting girls occasionally in Western culture from, I think, the 16th century through to the 20th. They crop up over and over. So it's not a particularly Irish or Catholic phenomenon,

but I thought setting it in Catholic Ireland after the famine was the richest possible context, a sort of frame that would give added meaning to this story of one individual child saying, no, no, we don't need to eat. And this idea of the girl who says no to food and who's, you know, above all physical needs and above all bodily embarrassments. I thought it said a huge amount about the history of how our culture has treated women in particular. And, you know, this longing for girls not to be physical, not to be sexual, not to be sticky. How careful do you have to be as a writer

and then executive producer to try and make sure that there's absolutely no element of glamour or dark attraction in a storyline that you know might be emulated copied by young girls you know anorexia is such a prevalent mental health problem at the moment isn't it i'm so glad you asked strangely enough nobody's been asking this i mean to us you're kidding you're how many interviews have you done no people have said oh yeah yeah an, yeah, anorexia. But nobody says, did you think about how your film might take part in the cultural dialogue about it? Nobody said, you know, did you think about the fact that your star, Florence Pugh, has this massive following?

I mean, even during the filming, there were teenage and pre-pubertal girls lined up in the little villages to get a glimpse of her. So we were all hyper aware. girls lined up in the little villages to get a glimpse of her. So we were all hyper aware, even in writing the novel, I was hyper aware. And I read a lot about contemporary anorexia and how you might possibly take a story like this seriously and show the fascination, the dark fascination that it holds for the child, but not allow your story, your book to fall into that same danger. So I suppose in the book, I work against it very consciously by having the nurse, so I suppose in the in the book I work against it very consciously by having the nurse you know represent this kind of force of sensibleness and sanity and and um you know choosing life and choosing science and choosing sanity and choosing food and in the film there's

far less talk time so it was all the more important for us to show Florence eating that's the main technique we used she's this hugely glamorous figure and we have her tucking into bowls of stew we have her striding across the mountains looking physically strong getting dirty you know she's just the opposite of the ethereal image of the you know the girl who's on her way to heaven so I would say we were we were hyper conscious of the kind of glamour of those those pale saints those you know one beauty images, snow white in her coffin. And we really worked against that and showed women as, you know, physical and strong and flawed and surviving.

Were there really English nurses who had been in the Crimea who would go to Ireland in the 19th century to investigate? I don't know of any, no, but the case that prompted the wonder was a Welsh case where the newspapers funded a watch by nurses.

It was in the 1870s. So I decided to write a fictional one and set it in Ireland. And if I was going to have a hired nurse, I wanted that to be a really good nurse, a really professional nurse, a nurse who knew a lot. And there weren't that many around

because as a profession, it was really only getting started. And looking towards Florence Nightingale and her so-called Nightingales was an obvious place to begin because she was revolutionary in how she emphasised really active nursing. Things like, you know, fresh air and speaking calmly and reassuringly to your patients. Florence Nightingale's book on nursing was a key text for me in writing the novel and then the film. She said things like, don't discuss your patient's case in the corridor and whisper, they're going to be eaten up with worry when they overhear you. She talked about things like fresh flowers and not leaving food sitting around on their bedside table to sicken

them. She was hugely interested in the kind of psychology of wellness and she was an invalid herself at many points in her life. So yeah, I thought the Nightingale nurses were a wonderful population to write about because they really, within a single generation, they raised nursing to this extraordinarily high level that it had never been taken so seriously before. You are listening to Off Air with Jane and Fi and we'll go back now to our interview with the novelist and screenwriter emma donahue we asked her about the sense of collusion from the parents of the so-called fasting girls and how difficult it was for her to watch it in the film you're right and in one of the cases there was an inspiration for me it was actually a a mother

who was claiming to live without food and her grown up daughter was the one secretly passing food to her. So you can see this kind of little family knot can happen even even with the generations reversed. And I like I'm not remotely anti-family, but I have to say that in this particular story I'm telling, a family has got so sort of caught up in their own griefs, you know, they've already lost a son, and in their own secrets, that they're acting really as a very dysfunctional kind of, you know, well, in this case, sort of folia quatre. Yeah, I was very interested in the sort of warped psychology of a family who are, you might say they're buoyed up by their Catholic faith, but in this case, it's just, it's gone too far. I think that the extraordinary performance,

one of the extraordinary performances in the film is Elaine Cassidy's performance as the mother, because you can see she really does love her children, but it's taken on this warped form that she honestly thinks that would battle off in heaven. The character of the journalist that falls in love with, well, establishes a relationship with Lib, the nurse. He is really interesting because his own family had suffered horrifically during the famine. And indeed, he refers to them at one point as locking themselves in their cottage and dying so that people,

other people didn't see them dropping dead in the street because they couldn't bear the shame. Did that happen? Yeah, that did happen. Some families did that, yes. I read a lot about the famine and of all the details that jumped out at me, that one about people locking themselves away really struck me. It sort of rang a bell for me because of a certain Irish wish not to be embarrassed in front of the neighbours. know when I moved to Canada in my 20s I was astonished

that people would sit around on their porch kind of living openly and visibly you know in Ireland I was much more used to the idea of pull the curtains have some privacy you know um so so yes I I thought it was it was it was a fascinating story because it illustrated not just that people died but that they were ashamed about it. In fact, it's very hard to even get figures on how many Irish people died in the famine. I can't give you a number because so few relatives were willing to tell the census taker. So they would say that their family had died of fever, of TB, of illnesses, because it was just too mortified to say we didn't have enough food. So we died. And it reminds me of, you know, children in British schools, there have been

anecdotes about children coming in with empty lunchboxes and, you know, putting up the lunchbox like a kind of cover and pretending to eat behind it. It makes me shake to think of people trying to keep up their dignity in situations where they're humiliated by the fact that other people have ensured that they go hungry. Am I allowed to say that this film not only has an ending, but it's an ending that you might not expect? Because I've got to be honest, Emma, it's a tough watch at times. It's a beautiful, beautiful film, but it isn't always easy to watch for a string of quite obvious reasons but there is an ending and um it's it's a promising one very much so and i've had a few readers write to me and say like how dare you give us a fairly happy ending but you know to me there's

a kind of an implicit contract with your reader if they're going to go through horrors with you it has to be for some good purpose and there has to be light at the end of the tunnel I'm not willing to just you know squeeze all the tears out of people and leave them empty and especially with film maybe film is particularly visceral and upsetting you know a lot more things make me cry in a film than in a book so to me it was hugely important that the story had in some ways a quality of a fairy tale as well as qualities of gritty realism. And for there to be a way that the nurse, you know, use it every power she has and not just her powers of rationality and science, but her powers of sympathy and imagination for her to find some way to to save this child.

So, yeah, I think that the film does does does you know take many people aback and it's an interesting mixture of genres too many people have said that the soundtrack sounds almost like a horror film but it's really not in its storyline i think many uh potential viewers and will be very relieved well that's why i don't want to put people off to know that there isn't the the darkest of the dark things lurking at the end of a movie, particularly at the moment. Emma, would you mind if I asked you about your faith? OK. That's not a ringing yes.

It's a question that I'm sure you would have been asked before, but I was just very interested in something that you said about your own beliefs. And this is to quote from you, so I hope I get this right. You sound pompous and confused as soon as you open your mouth i don't know how to defend it in rational terms but that's how my world turns i think jane and i are both quite interested in people who have true faith and i would just put my hands up i'm i'm in that kind of place where I lean into something when I feel I need to or I should, but I don't carry it around with me all the time. So I'm just very interested by people who do. In that quote, you sound a little bit, I don't know, a bit kind of annoyed that anybody should ask you to justify it? Am I reading that right? Well, you know, I move in very sort of academic and intellectual circles, right? Like I know a lot of people with, say, PhDs,

and among those people, talk of faith does not flow freely, shall we say. It's unusual. And the default position would often be assumed to be absolute atheism and scorn for all religion. And I don't share that position. And I've always believed in God. But I do find it a uniquely difficult subject to talk about. And when it comes up in my work, I can deal with it. But giving autobiographical statements of faith, I've never found easy. But let's just say it's something that has always interested me. And even when I'm being highly critical of one particular, you know, extreme form of religion, like in the wonder, say, I'm never attacking religion as such. And I'm always trying to show the the, you know, the inexplicable beauty to these religious traditions.

I mean, you can see there's a lovely scene in the wonder where, you know, Florence Pugh's character Lib bans the family from touching Anna and they break into a hymn. And you can see that it's lifting them up. They have nothing else going for them. You know, they're living in poverty. You know, a child like Anna in Ireland, you know, she won't have a boat. She won't have any money. And yet you could see that their particular religious tradition is making them feel that they are at that moment as precious as any other human being who's ever lived. You wrote, Emma, about the Spanish flu in the book The Pull of the Stars, which was a book that I, I mean, I actually could not, I was actually quite angry with you because I couldn't shake, I couldn't shake that novel off me, not while I was reading it and not for some weeks after I'd read it

how do you I mean this was just for anybody who hasn't read that book and I do recommend it it's it is incredibly claustrophobic and involving and it's about a maternity ward in Dublin at the height of the Spanish flu how do you just sort of write a couple of thousand words and then sort of potter downstairs for your tea and just let it all rest I just don't understand it well I mean first of all sorry to put you through that but you know sorry not sorry as the kids say obviously as a writer I'm thrilled to bits to hear that it involved you and upset you and that you didn't immediately forget it this is what we're trying to do to to our readers isn't it um i've sometimes my kids when

they've been small if somebody's asked me quite be right about sad things and i say to them well you know adults we forget how to feel much and we really want art that will make us feel you know whereas i suppose children are so you know ready with tears anyway that they don't need that extra squeezing and but as to whether it depresses me it really doesn't sometimes my research um can be depressing but the actual writing is such a satisfying kind of whittling the right piece to fit into the right cog you know if i can um you know read many books about the famine and then find the perfect little anecdote which will give the journalist a backstory that makes sense for him or if i can write about um say the spanish flu and then the year the book comes out,

suddenly find them in the middle of COVID, and that by pure accident, a historical novel I've written is of some relevance and consolation to people in the middle of an appalling modern pandemic. I mean, it's just a satisfaction like no other. So it doesn't depress me. And I find the writing hugely therapeutic. I deal with every possible horror in the writing and so I sleep very well at night containment and claustrophobia seem to be at the heart of your work Emma have you ever thought about a career as a radio presenter we're locked in the studio hours at a time I think radio is such a haven though because you're not and having to be all glamorous like tv producers you you know, I think you're lucky.

What has she said? I think we'll end this interview now. Radio is not as safe as space is. Emma, you've done it. I was a fan of yours, but it's all over. I thought she sounded nice to you, Jane, but she's dead to me. Well, that was the rather cheeky Emma Donoghue making the assumption completely wrong, certainly in my case, that you don't need to dress super smart to do radio. Well, there's a difference between us today

because you've come in what can only be described as a blouse and quite a posh skirt. And an A-line skirt. Yes, and then you've got stockings and high-heeled shoes on. Polished brogues. And I've come in my combat trousers. I think you've been with your stopcock haven't you?

It is a gardening jumper, I thought I could get away with it Can I get away with it? Oh dear I've been asked to speak to you about it but not necessarily in the podcast That silence is very telling isn't it? My apologies to you Emma Donoghue is a fabulous writer, if you haven't read any of her books A Pool of the Stars is I have to say brilliant

but it's not the easiest read. Haven is her new one. Room, you may well have read already. She's just super talented. She's a great woman. And that film, I keep going on about it, it is a beautiful thing to watch and it's not as depressing as you might think.

I just want to make that clear. Yes. So we got into trouble. Well, you got into trouble, but I backed you up, sister, over possibly giving away the ending. But I'm with you on that, because I think watching incredibly distressing scenes involving young girls

is too much for some people, and they just wouldn't start the movie. Now, look, on something completely different, this made me laugh when I opened the mail today. And let's face it, that doesn't happen that often. I've been having some fun. There's a centre page spread. It's a quiz that you can all play at home. Can you put your finger on whose royal hands are whose?

And it's a selection of about 13 pictures of royal hands. And this is because the Queen doesn't like her hands, according to the photographer Rankin, a story we covered yesterday. Yes, this is the late Queen, not our current queen consort. OK, right. So we've got to pick the royal hands. Yes, and they give you a little bit of a clue underneath. So it's something like, what could be the nail-biting dramas

behind these not-so-cute cuticles? And that, I think, is meant to be... Who's that, then? Harry. As a princess, she can wear tiaras and all types of bling but her style is down to earth modest and classy like her simple wedding ring. Bingo.

It's only Catherine. Hours of fun. Has she got lovely hands? But the thing that surprises me is quite a lot of them have got really nasty little hangnails. Look at all of those. Look at those. Well, that's probably because they've been, you know how hard they work?

They've been out and about. Well, I mean, some of them do also look like they've got horny hands of toil. I'm not sure that's the case either. But anyway, well, the first part of that might be right. Anyway, the king's hands are easy to distinguish. Distinguish. Distinguish? Distinguish. They are...

I'm going to say they're not his finest feature. I've got nasty hands, I think, so I'm kind of slightly with him, really. But they are quite... I'm a bit worried about whether he's going to get his pinky ring off ever again because his fingers have swollen up. It's an astonishing piece of journalism

jane and where else would you find it but uh but where you found it right okay um so do please join us tomorrow i mean i'm not sure quite how enticing this podcast has been but uh tomorrow on the live radio show we are going to try to mop up um some of the impact of the autumn statement we'll make sense of it we'll ask all the daft questions because then you won't have to and we'll just try to sort of muddle our way through it and make it real to people and one shout out actually if you are a small or medium business owner and you're listening to morrow to the autumn statement and you'd like to talk through what it means to you and whether possibly and i don't want to be too gloomy about this, but it might be the thing that makes you review whether or not you can carry on in business.

We would really like to talk to you because we know that these turbulent times are really going to cost people dear. Jane and Fee at Timestock Radio, if you'd like to get in touch on that. Well, that does the job. Thank you very much for that. And if you can, listen to us tomorrow tomorrow either live or to this amiable tosh amiable tosh indeed have a very nice evening you have been listening to off air with jane garvey and fee glover our times radio producer is rosie cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell. Now you can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or you can download every episode

from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this, but live, then you can, Monday to Thursday, 3 till 5 on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye.