Off Air... with Jane and Fi - No craic - with Michelle Gallen

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Would you skip the football to hunt for your stopcock? Fi might be doing that very thing whilst you're listening. They are also joined by the Irish author Michelle Gallen to discus her latest novel Factory Girls. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Podcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you got a security detail? I'd rather not talk about it, but I have a pair of huge cuboid men who follow me everywhere. Yeah. This is relevant because there's a very important American person in the building this afternoon. Yeah, there is. I've just popped to the loo and they gave me the once over. I mean, not in the way that men normally do, but just to make sure that I was, you know, the right person in the right place, wearing the right lanyard.

So you weren't allowed back into your own place of work. I was, you know, the right person in the right place, wearing the right lanyard. So they're here. You weren't allowed back into your own place of work. Well, they took an interest. This is because, yes, John Bolton, who was President Trump's national security advisor, but apparently he wasn't right-wing enough for President Trump, so they fell out. Anyway, he's a guest on John Pienaar's radio programme

here at Times Radio today. We'll miss it, unfortunately, because we'll be travelling home and then I suspect we might put the telly on. But, I mean, I shall mostly be listening to Radio 3. Don't be ridiculous. So we're going to get home in time for the game and I think it's going to be leaden and wooden and the score might not even be in England's favour. But you think it's going to be... I think it's going to be leaden and wooden and the score might not even be in england's favor

but you think it's going to be i i think it's going to be terribly turgid but i think england will win probably one or two now yeah okay has anyone found something successful to rhyme with qatar you know like like a kind of thriller in manila that type of sporting rhyme um it's the it's difficult because everybody's mispronouncing it anyway our lovely colleague emma has had to tell us about 10 times how to pronounce cutter but yeah but she changes her mind every time she tells us how to say it so does she i thought she'd be very consistent you're very mean not in my experience i tell you what you're absolutely on your own at the christmas party toxic Suits me fine.

Sit there with the person I love the most, myself. Now, there's some stories in the Times today, actually. You know how Tuesday, there's always stories from the Radio Times, because the Radio Times comes out on a Tuesday. I don't follow its path through the pub. Well, I do, because I'm its TV columnist. Much loved in that, well, OK, tolerated in that role now for over a year. There's some stories in all the papers today about stuff that's in the Radio Times, including the battle. It's a battle between posh Ed Sturton and not so posh Amal Rajan about how you should speak on the BBC.

And it is it's of interest to us because we're sort of, you know, former employees of the organisation. But also, there is... I'm not the slightest bit interested. Oh, I'm fascinated. There is a long running discussion in British public life about what the right accent is. And we've never really, that's never entirely been sorted, has it? I mean, I would say that everybody's, everybody makes the point that all that really matters is that you're understood but some people's voices apparently are more acceptable than others. Okay so there are two things going on there aren't there? So I mean I think the problem is that the received pronunciation is challengeable by everybody who doesn't speak in the way that RP sounds. So that's the answer to what I thought your first question was.

But when those surveys come out about what the most likeable voice is or the voice that you would most trust or you would want to tell you bad news or all those kind of things, it's never RP. So that's weird, isn't it? It's always a Newcastle accent from anywhere on the northeast, actually, not just Newcastle. You're widening it to Durham. Hartlepool.

Actually, I'm going all the way to Avon. All the way up to Avon. Okay. What about the east coast of Scotland? Do you not like the people there? Oh, my goodness. That's where my family's from. Exactly.

But isn't that funny that received pronunciation, it's not actually been validated by anybody ever asking anyone what they really wanted. So there's something wrong with that. Yeah, they're probably, anyway. Did you have to change your accent when you went on air? I mean, if you'd been left to your own devices, if you'd just been completely and utterly feral.

Feral. I think I did laughingly posh up a bit or at least make myself not clearly anything, if you see what I mean, which is the kind of, that's the sort of base point, that's the neutral modus operandi of most broadcasters, isn't it? And do you think it would have gone against you then? You were simply scared that you wouldn't have got jobs

if you had allowed a little bit of the... It's worked against me because I didn't who applied for a job at Radio Merseyside and didn't get it because I didn't sound Scousey enough. Despite being absolutely the fifth generation Liverpudlian, it wasn't good enough. Okay. Do you regret that? Not so much these days, no. Fair enough. Although how they feel at Rhodia Merseyside is something we'll... I think they also feel profound relief.

Can you imagine? Oh dear, shall we just have a very quick email from Alison then we'll head into our lovely guest, who was lovely today, wasn't she? Alison says, hello you two, I cannot believe you weren't inundated with advice for your jacket potatoes. Let's cut to this, Alison. Microwave first first then blast for 10 minutes in a very hot oven drizzle with olive oil and twist some salt on before putting it in the oven saves on energy costs obviously and alison says uh getting used to your new location we kind of are as well actually

alison so it's lovely to know you're on board. Yeah. And Sue takes me to task for complaining about having to do Christmas. I'm really disappointed in you, Jane. Your lovely parents will have heard that. Sue, they won't have heard it. And secondly, I don't mean it in that way, but I do. I think it's something that a lot of middle-aged women, not just middle-aged women, feel about having to do the work of Christmas. It can be a little bit taxing. And I think particularly for people, this year feels like a tough one, I suspect, for lots and lots of people who are trying to make sure

that they please as many people as possible on a very tight budget. It's not going to be much fun this Christmas for lots and lots of people. I'm not putting myself in that category. I'm just saying that I'm already getting it with both barrels from every area of my own family. How fortunate I am, though, to have them, I should say. And I'm going abroad, so I don't have to hear. So she's just going abroad.

So what do you think about her? I'm angry and resentful but I'm here Yeah, that's very true we are, we're going abroad for the first time ever in my kids' lives at Christmas I've never been abroad My bloody parents have been away for Christmas

Have they? They went to see my mum's brother a couple of years ago left me and my sister, we were all alone we were only in our early thirties But you enjoyed that Christmas, didn't you? Yes. You told me that in anecdotage. We actually had a really nice time with my memory,

with my lovely Auntie Doris, who was my dad's mum's cousin. Just a lovely lady. She was uncomplaining. She enjoyed a drink and she loved her lunch. Once in the family. Now, we had Michelle Gallant on the programme today as our big guest. And she is one of your favourite writers, isn't she? Yes, I just love the way she brings to life small Irish communities

with all the hubbub and the gossip and the tension and the judgment. And also just gives us these fabulous central female characters. Her first novel, Big Girl, Small Town, was about a young woman who worked in a chip shop called Magella and her latest novel is called Factory Girls and it's about three young women on the cusp of leaving their hometown in Northern Ireland and moving on but they spend the summer working in a shirt factory. I think great, how are you? Really well, thank you. It's lovely to have you on. Can we start with the fact that you centre your novels in small towns where everybody seems to know everybody else and really knows their business? Is this based on your own experience of growing up?

I guess, yeah, I can't really get away from that, that very much. I did grow up in a small town where I knew exactly half the town because I grew up in the Catholic community, went to Catholic school, was part of the Catholic church. You know, the usual sort of thing at the time was your whole social network was very much your religion. So that did for me. for me. And I think in many ways, actually, it was because I did have a brain injury in my 20s that I'd left my town when I was 18. But I landed right back in it in a very specific, non-escape way when I was 23. So it's almost like I was double dosed on it, you know. So the town you grew up in was Castle Derg. And you are a Catholic from a Catholic family. Did that mean that you genuinely just didn't mingle with the Protestant community, that they were more or less entirely unknown to you?

We did have Protestant neighbours, and I can remember when we were fundraising, we knocked on their doors and asked them for contributions for whatever we were fundraising for. But my family were Catholic. I went to a Catholic school,. But my family were Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. All my friends were Catholic. We did go on these cross-community peace trips where they would take some Protestants from the other school and Protestants from our school, put them together,

and you had to do residential trips. But broadly speaking, yeah, I mean, I didn't have any Protestant friends at all until I went to Trinity College in Dublin. Yeah. And the misconceptions that the communities have about each other, for those of us who did, I mean, I should say I grew up in Liverpool, where you always knew who was a Catholic and who wasn't, quite honestly, usually judging by the surnames. wasn't, quite honestly, usually judging by the surnames. But this is completely different in this part of Northern Ireland. Were there misconceptions about how the others lived and what they thought? It's quite interesting because my parents were teachers and they were teaching in Catholic schools. But my mum was born in England. My mum still holds a British passport, not an Irish one. Her father was a British soldier who was captured in Dunkirk

and, you know, spent five years in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. So I grew up with parents who gave me a bigger idea of how the world worked and how things might not matter once you're outside the small town. But in my small town, we didn't have a big social network of protestants um we didn't i didn't have protestant friends i didn't go to protestant anywhere where i might meet them casually um but i do remember my mom in particular talking about before the troubles when things weren't as segregated how you know they would have formed alongside their protestant um neighbors they would have socialized with and they would have celebrated certain things. But this had all got to an exquisite point of segregation by the time I was 18, by the time I was leaving. And that's really what I

wanted to explore in Factory Girls, this idea that, you know, you have a generation that did have a different experience, but somehow over the years, things just got more and more locked down to the point that ordinary people weren't meeting at all, despite living in a really small town. There's a lovely line in the book which sums up the whole caboodle, I think, Michelle, said by one of the main protagonists, Aoife.

I suppose working in the factory has turned out to be a lot more interesting than we anticipated. Absolutely. Which is an understatement. Could you have set your story anywhere in the workplace? Did it have to be a factory? Oh, I think, you see, I worked in a shirt factory myself one summer

and it always frustrated me. I mean, I can remember the first time I tried to get a proper job and the guy who was interviewing me was embarrassed for me, scarlet for me that, you know, I put down my factory job, my CV, and he told me to take it off. But I've always felt that that factory job was such a searing experience, such a brilliant and yet also difficult experience that I just thought, oh, I'm never going to write a novel about the time I spent photocopying, you know, letters in a Dublin publishing office. That's never going to happen. But working in a shirt factory was just really intense, really hard work. It shaped me physically that summer. It shaped me mentally for years. And I just thought it was really fascinating. I love the fact that your central character in Factory Girls is Maeve. I love the fact that your central character in Factory Girls is Maeve.

And she makes the observation that men's clothing starts in size medium, but women's clothing starts in extra small. And basically, it's as though we just can't compute the idea that a man might be anything other than as big as medium and that an extra small man simply can't exist. That had never struck me before, but that's true, isn't it? It's so true. It's one of those things that you really do notice. I have an 11-year-old who's bigger than the size, you know, he's a big 11-year-old. We can now find small menswear for him. But even that is a strange thing that you've got an 11-year-old boy and you can't actually

shop in the kids' section anymore. What are we doing with sizing and clothes but yes i've never met an extra small man in real life apparently yeah but they must exist if you're one of them let us know um you can text us 87222 start your message with the word time i tell you what clothing and sizes is a whole special program about three and a half hours long isn't it uh have you in real life ever met an andy strawbridge michelle and you want to explain a little bit about uh who your male lead character is um i think andy strawbridge is a composite of many bosses um i i had several bosses in the factory and they were all irish you know so but but there were certain kind of elements of capitalism and toxic masculinity that very much played into how we worked in the factory, what the expectations were of what we would do, but also what we would put up with, what sort of behaviors that they would get away with. I did work with an English boss who I think perhaps in my first week gave me the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People for real.

He really did. He really did. He really did. I was given How to Win Friends and Influence People until to go away and read it to help me, you know, get on better with generally people, not specifically the English, but in general to get on better with people. Yes. Did you have a bit of an attitude, Michelle? Was that your problem? Well, I think I was just really naive. I mean, I can remember when I first moved to London, which was, let me think, 1998. And I used to say, I mean, I would go to the pub with all these

lovely English people and ask questions like, so tell me, how do you feel now as an English national now that you no longer rule a quarter of the world's surface, how does it feel to lose your empire in just one generation? I might say casually to somebody who would be like, what? Well, no, I mean, many people would say these are questions well worth raising. We are talking this afternoon to Michelle Gallen, the Irish novelist, and we got to the point in Michelle's life when she'd arrived in London and was tackling members of the British public about the Empire and the disintegration of it. And did anyone ever give you a very good answer, Michelle? No, I honestly believe some people weren't even conscious that they had had that experience, that, you know, that that had actually happened. People were very conscious of having had a First World War and a Second World War, but not so conscious of having

had an empire. And did it, I would imagine it would really needle somebody who'd grown up in Northern Ireland to arrive in London. And obviously, London was bombed, there were terrorist incidents on the mainland in this part of Britain. But it wasn't something we live with day to day. And there was a huge level of ignorance about what was going on in Northern Ireland. Did that really get to you? Well, that was 1998, the summer of the OMA bomb, what, 28 people were killed that summer.

And I'm from close to OMA. And when I went into the office the Monday after the OMA bomb, people were making jokes about it in my office. Yeah. after the Omic bomb, people were making jokes about it in my office. Yeah. It was a very, I think, a very hard thing to be Irish or Northern Irish, specifically in London at that point, you know,

because it was perceived that the troubles were kind of over and that bomb indeed very much was the nail in the coffin, thankfully. But it was difficult to be seen as someone with perhaps I don't know the feelings and the kind of experiences it was a very hard thing to to come into an office and then to see how people saw you that they actually thought making a joke about that sort of incident was acceptable I think we've changed a lot since then, but that 98 was not easy. No. And you then, of course, became unwell. And you went back to the place, as you said at the start of our conversation, that you more or less thought you'd left behind. What was that like? So it was a mixture of brilliant and also terrible. I mean obviously I didn't go back as myself as a 23 year

old graduate with a photographic memory and lots of excitement. I was coming back in a wheelchair, I was coming back completely reliant on my parents for care and very luckily our next door neighbour was a doctor who'd actually had encephalitis himself so I did receive a level of care I might not have received in in London I certainly wouldn't have received that level of care in London in the early days but then when I started to get well there wasn't really an infrastructure of care there I mean it was the aftermath of the Oma bomb so you had a health service that was massively overwhelmed taking care of the people who'd survived a mental health service that wasn't coping with the demands on it and that then meant that I was perhaps in a place where I felt very trapped and I had this I had a big big focus on

getting out again and standing on my own two feet. But even that was quite difficult because what I've been told by the medical system was that brain damage is irreparable and I had to accept where I was and I wouldn't get better. And I do remember a medical professional telling me that I needed to take an aromatherapy course and find a husband and have babies because my ovaries were fine. Okay. Well, I mean, you can do a lot with a votive candle, but possibly not everything. Can you just explain a little bit, Michelle, about what happened to your memory and your capacity for words?

I mean, it must have been terrifying for someone who knew that they wanted to be and were a writer to then have a brain injury that presumably immediately rendered that really difficult? Actually, it was quite slow. So it happened over a six week period, I started being really sick, having terrible headaches, really nauseous, I couldn't eat. But I really remember the time I realised something was wrong was when I opened a book beside my bed, and I was halfway through the the book and I literally couldn't remember anything.

So I'd gone from being able to memorize entire books and hold them in my head to opening a book and having no idea what had happened before. And I can remember reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which I'd read before, and it was really nonsensical to me. It didn't make sense. And then I can remember trying to write something in work just by hand, and I couldn't write the sentence I knew I needed to write. So then I tried to write my name, and I couldn't write my name. But at the time, I felt this great sort of sense of shame and fear and didn't actually reach out to other people to say, this isn't, something's not quite right

until I was really sick um and at that point really it was it was so obvious to everybody I wasn't well that yeah yeah yeah how long were you seriously ill for um so I feel in my head so what happened was I collapsed in work and I got taken to hospital in London. And it took the doctors a while to kind of figure out what was going on. So it took them a while to say, oh, we think this is meningitis. We think this is a brain tumor. And then eventually they said, we don't actually know what's wrong with you. We think you may have had encephalitis.

And the doctor asked me to stand up to see if I could, you know, if I could stand up again. So I stood up out of my hospital bed and he goes, he goes, you're fine, you can go home. And I literally went home on the tube and then had a massive relapse again. So encephalitis wasn't just like catastrophic. I had these moments of lucidity, these moments of being very capable. And then I would dive down again. my brother helped me fly home and my dad picked me up in a wheelchair and I think the next six months were very hard but the first month was really like constant seizures not being able to do anything for myself really extreme moods and my memory was absolutely in pieces I mean I just couldn't remember if he

even had my breakfast I couldn't write I couldn't there were so many I couldn't you know. I mean, I just couldn't remember if he'd even have my breakfast. I couldn't write. I couldn't. There were so many I couldn'ts, you know what I mean? And I can remember month after month learning things again, like learning how to make a cup of tea, you know, learning how to make some toast, learning how to all the very basic things you can't imagine ever having to learn again. I don't want us to lose sight, Michelle, of the brilliance of your writing. And in particular, the fact that your female characters, Magella in Big Girl, Small Town and Maeve in Factory Girls are real and ripe and their language is outrageous. They're filthy, full of lustful thoughts. And it's just, it's so life enhancing to read your stuff and to just be immersed in these worlds.

And I think, is there going to be a TV version of Big Girl Small Town? So we're working on adapting the book right now with Lookout Point Productions. I'm even writing the scripts, which is so super exciting because I don't have TV experience. You know, they've just taken a big punt, I guess, or they have trust in it. So I'm really excited about that because Majella is just one of my favourite people. She's as real to me as any of my brothers or sisters or my family, you know. Yeah, just set her up in the couple of minutes we've got left. She works in a chip shop, doesn't she?

Majella is an undiagnosed overweight autistic woman who lives with her alcoholic and opioid addicted mother. And she works in a chip shop and what she loves about i mean what she loves more than anything is fish and chips but she works in the fish shop with her colleague marty and she just wants this really ordinary life where she's serving up people their sausage suppers or their fish suppers and getting cans of coke out of the fridge but her grandmother has been murdered you know the week before and everybody in the town now wants to know who murdered her grandmother. And it's kind of reactivated the gossip around her missing father who disappeared in the Troubles. Yeah, OK. Well, if that hasn't excited enough people to read it, I don't know what will.

Because I just couldn't get Magella out of my head when I read that book. And I just think it's absolutely great. And are you working on a memoir as well, Michelle? So I am working on a memoir, but I kind of find it really hard. And mostly because it's zero crack, right? Do you know what, that's a great title for it, Michelle. Yeah, you've got the title. You know, it's just I love writing these feisty, amazing women who do really cool things.

And to be honest, writing about, hey, I was 23 and everything looked great and then it wasn't is just so. So, yeah, I am. Well, it is that, Michelle, but we've been captivated by listening to you this afternoon. So please, at some stage, do zero crack. Yeah, yeah. Zero crack. That was the author, Michelle Gallen um who joined us this afternoon to talk about her latest novel factory girls and we really do hope she does finish her memoir because that is

just an epic title and she must must use it but i know what she means her books are incredibly uh that they make serious points but they are full of life and they're very funny and i suppose she was making the point that actually there have been parts of her life, her real life, that have been quite challenging. But nevertheless, write the book, Michelle, because you're really, really good. This is a lovely email from Christopher. If you'd like to email us on the podcast

or it goes to the same inbox for the live show, it's janeandfeeattimes.radio. We'll take any old topic, won't we, Jane? And we do like, we like something that takes our minds in a slightly different direction. And criticises as well. No, I don't like that. Well, no, I don't mind it.

No, you say that, but you do. Yeah, I do. You actually know, you really like it if it's critical of me. That's true. Yes. So here comes Christopher. Hi, Jane and Fi. I thought I would ask you to sort out

my dilemma having retired I took over the running of our sea rowing group with the plan of rowing with a group of oldies before heading to the local hostelry it's me one other bloke and a large group of women my question is how should one address a group of

women and Christopher I'm just going to run this past Lady Garvey here. Girls? No. Ladies? No. Lasses? No.

I think this is a really good question. I'm glad Christopher has asked it. I would just say everyone. Hi, everyone. How is everyone? Because that's in no way I have a real problem, as you know, with guys. I can't stand large groups of people being referred to as guys. Oh, I thought you meant you had a problem with blokes. guys i cannot stand it i don't know why we've allowed it to become some kind of catch-all term for everyone when it isn't it's for i would say youngish men are guys and the rest of us are

women girls or just people if i were you christopher i'd just say everyone though i'd just say hello everyone right everyone what's wrong with that why do we or why do we need anything we need to be friendly well i love the fact that christopher has given it a lot of thought his fourth suggestion is or indeed just women and never ever refer to a group of women as just women because that won't help you rowing at all christopher uh going back all the way to stop cocks he goes on to say fee you said your stopcock was under the path as well as that one you should have another one likely under your sink inside the house yours in anticipation well do you know what if i've got time before the match starts tonight i'm going to go and hunt for that because

because because you don't want to leave that kind of thing to an emergency and i don't like it you know when a plumber comes around and says where's your stopcock and you have to do that kind of thing to an emergency. And I don't like it, you know, when a plumber comes round and says, where's your stopcock? And you have to do that kind of bemused look that girls, ladies, lasses or just women can sometimes affect. I don't like to have that look on my face ever anymore. So you hunting for your stopcock, that's a Channel 5 documentary at 8 o'clock, that is, or possibly in the slightly steamier 9 o'clock,

where they currently put a lot of documentaries about large shops preparing for Christmas. God, they do, don't they? The middle aisle one is fascinating, isn't it? Wasn't our conversation interesting today about periods and whether or not women needed to have them? This wasn't interesting in the sense that you and I were interesting talking about it,

but we had a great guest on called Julia Bailey, who I thought was, she was a reproductive specialist, reproductive health specialist at UCL in London. And it's her very firm belief that you can just be on the pill for as long as you want and you do not need to have periods. And I do find that, I know not everybody agrees, by the way, there's all sorts of stuff in the ether that says,

oh, no, can't be so. But I find the generational shift in views on all this absolutely fascinating. If you'd had that knowledge available to you at, let's say, 18, would you have chosen to not have periods by taking the pill? I think probably if the knowledge had been available and I was still growing up in the 1980s, I think I would have been really tempted to be on the pill the whole time.

But now there does seem to be this anti-contraceptive pill movement amongst some young women, this fervent desire to reject it actually and to question everything about it. And I think it's partly because it just seems to a lot of young women that they're having to do everything and that young men get away with not having loads of invasive chemicals put into their system. Yeah. Now, I mean, there are all sorts of good reasons why, frankly, well, because it's women who get pregnant, you must be the ones who make sure that you don't get pregnant unless you really want to be, because that is a whole other set of problems. Yeah. So I can completely understand that argument. I think it is really interesting that now there is a choice about periods. It's not a choice about contraception. I only ever entertained the pill or other forms of contraception to do with having babies and

fertility. You know, it really wasn't, I'm not sure that I even really thought very much about STIs, which I think the younger generation have to think about a lot more now. But it was never about periods. I just read the leaflet that told me what to take and when to take it, and I didn't question it at all. I didn't question it either. I didn't really know that that bleed I had was not a period. No, I don't think I did until I stopped taking it. So what an interesting leap has been made in knowledge.

I thought she was fascinating as well. If you want to go back and have a listen to that, if this has pricked up your ears, it was about, what was it, half past four? Half past, about 25 to five this evening on the live radio show. And you can do that on catch-up, can't you? Can you do that on catch-up? Yes, you can do that on catch-up.

Wow. Wow, technology, Jane, is amazing. I'm going to go home and catch up on all our shows. Well, let's go home and watch the football first, shall we? Not that we're watching it together, but, you know, you can send me a little text if you want to. You never do. But obviously, good luck, both teams.

I've managed to pull that off. Your Welsh side came out, I thought there. Wonderful. 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.