Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Where the magic happens - with Bryony Gordon

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Jane and Fi talk to journalist, columnist and author, Bryony Gordon, about social media, Prince Harry, being a parent, and her experiences with alcoholism.Her latest book, a young adult novel, 'Let Your Hair Down', is out now.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Emma SherryTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Off Air with me, Jane Garvey. And me, Fee Glover. And we are fresh from our brand new Times Radio show, but we just cannot be contained by two hours of live broadcasting. So we've kept the microphones on, grabbed a cuppa, and are ready to say what we really think. Unencumbered and Off Air. Welcome to Off Air with me, Jane Garvey. And me, Fee Glover. Now, it's worth saying that today was

very much Matt Hancock Tuesday. And the reaction to Matt Hancock and the fact that we were talking about Matt Hancock was quite interesting, wasn't it? Well, it's one of those things, Jane. I mean, I would like to imagine that I'm not the type of person who wants to spend a lot of time talking about the contestants on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. But it turns out that I'm completely the type of person who wants to become obsessed with the fact that Matt Hancock is going on The Jungle Show. Yeah, it's interesting. John Pienaar, our colleague here at Times Radio, was asking whether or not I'd go on I'm a Celebrity. This was in, we were making small talk.

I mean, we are in an office, you understand, which is very exciting for Fiona and I because we haven't allowed, we've really been allowed in an office, living memory. So now we're in one. It's quite exciting because you can talk to your colleagues before you do your radio show and everything it's all very exciting anyway john was asking whether i do i'm a celebrity and i said yes i think it's the show that i would do not for the money but it's the one i think i could do all right at because i'm fairly convinced i'd fall under the radar i wouldn't be picked for any of the trials

and i'm okay at the sort of camp activities with the girl guide experience i've got in my locker i don't care about bugs or insects doesn't bother me and there aren't any real snakes there are there and i don't i just think i'd be all right i think i could do it john said he wouldn't do it for a million pounds no would you do it no i just think it's really really hard work and uh i don't know why I'd be doing it. I mean, you've got to want to be really, really, really famous to go on something like that. Your life is never the same again after something that huge.

You can't walk down the street, you know, all that type of stuff, which I suppose I allow myself to laugh at people who go on that and pick them to pieces because i think they've done the deal with the devil anyway so that's kind of that you know it's fair game so i wouldn't go near it with a barge okay when i want to make very clear at this point i don't want to do it i'm just saying you've given an alarming amount of thought to something you don't want to do. Of the TV reality shows currently available, I would rate my chances on this show. But do you know what I mean about there's something about that show, I think more than Strictly,

because I think sometimes Strictly does still invite people who are maybe not quite so ruthlessly fame-seeking and ambitious. Well, it makes stars of people who in some cases deserve to be more widely known. But I'm a celebrity. For me, it goes into exactly the same category as all of the Real Housewives of and Geordie Shore and stuff. You really know what you're signing up to

and you're really going to get it. And it's putting yourself in the stocks, isn't it? And the only difference is instead of the rotten apples, there's a ka-ching at the end of a mobile phone call to ITV. A ka-ching for some of them, but not necessarily. They won't all be getting the same amounts. It's all very, very different, isn't it?

So I reckon Jill Scott, who I think might be the one who wins it in the end because I think she's a hugely, hugely likeable character. I bet she's being paid less than half of what Matt Hancock's getting, which appears to be an astonishing £350,000. Well, we got that figure from our colleague Asma Mia. Let's repeat it then. Asma's never wrong. £350,000.

Yeah. Which, if you're an MP, and MPs, unless they're ministers, they get about £85,000 a year, which is a lot of money, but perhaps, as one of our listeners pointed out might not be enough to finance a divorce which certainly Mr Hancock has got to think about. Yes and I really hope that his ex-wife is okay because I think it must be very difficult, Jane to see in the public consciousness

so much of a person who you probably don't really want to see a the public consciousness so much of a person who you probably don't really want to see a lot of. And also he will have, he does have children, doesn't he? You do, yes, you wonder. Perhaps if we don't know, he may well have discussed it with them. Yep. We're going to see quite a lot of his body, aren't we? Can I just say that I'm really not looking forward to that.

He strikes me as the kind of guy who's going to have a shower whilst holding his stomach in and i just leave it at that he will though won't he he'll be doing push-ups and lunges and squats and all kinds of things but if you are in his constituency or as we discovered on our show today elsewhere you can fill the gap in your life that matt Hancock's time in Australia will leave by downloading the Matt Hancock app and enjoying all his constituency activities in the privacy of your own home. Dear Gee and Fane, keeping things fair,

says our email correspondent, I've never in my life written into any form of media, despite consuming a lot of it, but I have me driven to write to you. I've listened to you both since the very beginning. I didn't have been driven to write to you i've listened to you both since the very beginning i didn't have the means to play the bbc in my car so i'll download the episodes to my phone and listen with it on the dashboard i remember driving and crying with laughter well don't do that it's terribly dangerous just pull over and have a good old belly ache and

then a weep uh thank you for all of that i I truly love you. Fine with your move to Times Radio, but massive, massive but, and this is from Chloe, the music that keeps blaring out midway through and creeping in over the top of people talking is completely ruining it for me. Please, please ask your very competent and probably lovely production

team to return this horrendous bed to Jamie Oliver to soundtrack his chop and chat and either find a way to reinsert Sean Keaveney that's a podcast in itself or just leave the voices lots of love and hope for the future says Chloe Seven aged 33 ex-cornet player from Cornwall many thanks I'm pre-menstrual yeah you do sound a bit pre-menstrual Chloe it's when um it's when I read things like that I realize I don't miss my menstrual cycle one iota no well talking of apps I can't I can't remember whether we've mentioned this or not but there have been some period apps going down in our house and I had one on my phone

for another member of our household for a while and it sent me an alert one day saying that I hadn't had a period for 635 days you're gonna have such a big baby when it comes um yes a period tracker apps now there's a reason why you shouldn't have them i mean certainly they've been used in my house as well it's because if you don't tick the right box on the cookies and they're sharing your data yeah you might start to find yourself inundated with advertisements for babies when you haven't had one couldn't have one chosen not to one, and all kinds of other things. There's some quite odd stuff going down with that. Yes, and I think I was talking about this

with some friends the other day. What was it, Yuffie? I can't remember. Where back in the day, you would keep a note of your periods in your diary or something just by writing a letter P and then drawing a circle. Did you draw a circle around the letter P? No, I'd just circle the date. You'd circle the date, OK.

I mean, I try not circle the date. You'd circle the date, okay. Yeah. I mean, I'll say, you know, I try not to big myself up much, but I did have a very regular cycle. Did you? Yeah. Mine was all over the shop, Jane. I was strictly every 28 days. This is a very important point, actually, about bin ladies,

which, and I shouldn't have done this, I doubted the existence of bin ladies yesterday. I can confirm that there are real live bin ladies here in North Yorkshire. I've seen at least one with my own eyes in Bidale. Up here they'd surely be known as a bin lass. Loving the Daily Podcast as I don't have Times Radio up here. In Bidale, why can't you get the Times Radio app in Bidale? I don't know, but we could send an operative to try and help you.

And there's another email here from Alexa of Barber Lodge, Yorkshire division. She says, listening to your podcast from today, had to email. My friend's daughter is a refuse collector. She drives the lorry. We're in Yorkshire where men are men and so are the women. Well, you've said it, but I was about to say you can't say that. By the way way i like the podcast thought scott galloway was fascinating also i watched the live stream on sunday night

and i really enjoyed that too gosh i'd forgotten we did the live stream on sunday night it's been a long week already hasn't it that was live from shrewsbury thank you for that you really are going above and way beyond the call of duty but thank you yeah so back in our tiny orbit here we invited brianie gordon in to talk to us today brianie is a journalist columnist and author and also has a book out at the moment a young adult novel called let your hair down which kind of leans into the fairy tale of rapunzel but it updates it with some quite horrific but very realistic storylines around toxic friendships and social media influencers creator houses jane god forbid that you ever end up in a creator house but we started catching up with her by asking where she was chatting to us from

i'm in my bedroom in london in London. You've given it away now. Which is the only place in the house that has good enough Wi-Fi, embarrassingly. Well, look, sometimes I can ask very long questions, Brian. If you feel the need to go and fold some clothes during one of them, come back. I'll still be rabbiting on. We'll be fine. This is where the magic, not just that magic, but the magic. This is where I wrote that book, basically. I think we'll keep the magic of your bedroom until a little later in the interview, if you don't mind. We could start there if you like. I don't mind. Bryony, I'd forgotten just how dark Rapunzel was as a fairy tale. Had you?

I hated Rapunzel as a teenager growing up because it was so it's so focused on her appearance. And I personally I lost all my hair when I was 17. So I yeah, I got I developed alopecia, which it was the late 90s. And it was a very confusing time. And I had been very unwell with obsessive compulsive disorder as a child. And this was like the physical manifestation, I think, of that. So Rapunzel to me, yes, it's very dark, but it had that extra resonance. But even then, we still look obsessed now. Right.

But we have a lot more awareness and body positivity going on but back in the 90s it um it felt particularly dark particularly dark to me as a 17 year old girl who had gone bald yes it must have done it must have done I mean the bits that you write in the book about Barb and I'll ask you to tell us a bit more about your heroine in just a couple of moments but when she when she first notices that she's got a patch of her scalp that she can feel where the hair has fallen out I mean had you had you known for a while that you would be able to write about alopecia or was it a very conscious decision now to write about it was it something that you felt you wanted to make kind of public again well I yeah I had written about it a little bit in my I wrote a book about my own experiences of mental illness called mad girl and I had written a bit about it then but

it was mostly about my experiences of um OCD and addiction and um but I then after I'd sort of laid a lot of that to rest or certainly I was you know in recovery from it and and uh and sort of thrown into this world of social media as so many of us are and I was I was thinking a lot about I was seeing for the first time women with alopecia who were kind of proudly reclaiming what was happening to them on social media and I was thinking about how interesting it would be to sort of revamp that I have had alopecia on and off ever since I was 17 and I don't have it anymore now but it's very much me. And there are all sorts of reasons that people get alopecia. It's an autoimmune condition.

It's it's very it's quite common and it manifests in all sorts of different ways. There's alopecia areata, which is what I had, which is patches that that appear. And then you have things like alopecia universalis and alopecia totalis, which involve losing all of your hair. So including your eyebrows, your eyelashes. And I just kind of wanted, I just thought, oh, hang on. How can I retell that story now with that kind of background of social media, if that makes any sense? But it doesn't, you know, alopecia doesn't bother me anymore it bothers people more when they see it because they're they're they sort of i look i can look a bit like friar tuck occasionally you know with the sort of

balding and it's the kind of strange thing to see on a woman but i'm quite open about it and i don't worry too much about hiding it um but uh i and I wanted to write about it because so many people have got in touch with me through my work as a mental health campaigner and told me that either they've experienced it or their kids are experiencing it you know it seems to be quite common in young teenage girls so tell us a little bit about Barb your heroine who I think is so clever because you don't make her a total sweetheart she's a very real character isn't she influenced by the modern age and she finds herself in this dreadful situation which will immediately explain when you tell us about her that kind of comparison to Rapunzel. So Barb has amazing long sort of strawberry blonde golden hair it was also she's also based a bit on my daughter who

from the moment she was born people would stop us in the street while I was pushing the buggy and say look at her hair where did she get it from as if I'd sort of chosen it from a shop and I remember when my daughter was about three or four I remember her turning around to me and saying mum why is everyone so obsessed with my hair? You know, it didn't make any sense to her as a sort of pure child, I suppose. And so that I sort of thought, oh, God, we are so obsessed, aren't we, with appearance? So Barb has that hair that is very much based on my daughter. and she lives with her aunt in a tower in South London,

not too far away from where I am now. And she has turned her hair into a sort of industry, I suppose, on social media. She's an influencer. She has hundreds of thousands of followers and her aunt wants her to sort of dump school and turn that into her business. But there's something that doesn't feel quite right about it. You know, she hasn't, it's been at the expense of everything else in her life,

friendships, a normal teenage social life. So while she has on the face of it, everything that a 16-year-old girl might want, like thousands of followers, you know, she's gifted things by companies and and uh you know she's she's insta famous um she's actually really unhappy and um and and for me alopecia was often like a physical reaction to my unhappiness my stress and that's very much what happens to a barb when she discovers

her patch we were talking a little bit yesterday i think it was yesterday about how we wouldn't want to be a teenager now no well i wouldn't want to be a teenager ever again would you jay uh well i wouldn't mind a second crack at being a teenager in the 80s that was all right or it could have been all right if i'd had a bit more confidence. But this isn't about me. This is about you, Bryony. It just strikes me at the moment that it's so tough, the constant judgment that you're expected to make of yourself and the way you look and the way you are. And then you know, particularly as a girl, though certainly it isn't confined to girls,

that everyone else is judging you too based on how you look, who you are, what you've got. But do you remember, I remember when I was a teenager, we had this obsession with magazines you know and and and we were aware that it was sort of airbrushed you know even back then photoshopped whatever um but now it's on a whole different level where we whereby we airbrush ourselves yeah you know so we don't and I and I I have such a complicated relationship with social media and I'm 42 right and I and I consider myself quite well versed in sort of therapy speak

well-being speak and all of that and I find myself getting sucked into it so what would it be like what must it be like if you are a teenager a girl a, a boy, whatever, anything in between. And also, I think, I don't know about you, but school, I'd come home and I could sort of cut off from it. So anything that was going on there, you had at least those few hours, didn't you, at home? And that's the huge tragedy, isn't it? Just that it's there 24 hours a day and you feel like you have no say in whether or not you participate in it,

because if you do put your phone down, then a whole conversation and a whole friendship group can change overnight and you haven't been involved in it. But I wonder, Bryony, what you think about that. There are kind of two horses in this race, aren't there? Because there's all of that pressure going on. We know the damage that does. But there are also really brilliant voices like yours

and really open conversations about poor mental health and anxiety that were never around in previous generations. So will the latter eventually help to balance out the former? How are those two things coexisting? two things coexisting I really I really hope Sophie but I have this theory that we are going to look back on our current use of social media in the same way that we look back on say the Marlboro Man ads that smoking was good for us you know like because I it's the whole thing and I think about this a lot as someone in recovery from alcoholism. I, you know, I use social media and I think most of us do. In fact, it is designed entirely to play on addictive processes, to make us want more, you know. And I think it's really dangerous. And I think it's I think we I hope that in years going forward, we we will look more at how we can use it responsibly um I wonder what it you know how how you know will we look back and go I can't believe we were just mindlessly

scrolling through our phones all day um and I I hope that as you say it can be used brilliantly for example I set up this thing called mental health mates which is a peer support group a walking group which is all around the country now. But I could only have done that through the power of social media, right? And I, as a woman, I now make sure that my feed only contains people that are sort of, quote unquote, real, or they present themselves in a real way. I don't follow people that, you know, I can see obviously use Photoshop and filters. But it's difficult. It's tricky. And I, you know, I fall for it myself. Well, we all do. We all do. There'll be more from Bryony Gordon in a moment.

Our big name guest today was Bryony Gordon, who was talking to us about her new young adult novel, which is called Let Your Hair Down. But we talked about lots and lots of other things, including a very famous interview that she did with a much younger Prince Harry on her podcast, where he talked about his mental health. Bryony, is it fair to say that you were the first person,

in a way to give us all a glimpse of the real Prince Harry? Well, he gave the glimpse of the real Prince Harry, but yes. Yes, I think it would be fair to say. I interviewed him five years ago on my podcast, Mad World, and that was when he first spoke about the sort of, the terrible suffering and crisis he'd experienced after the death of his mother.

And if you had him on your podcast, an episode with him now, what would your first question to him be? Oh, I mean, it would be the first question I ask everyone on my podcast, which is, how are you really? And he was my first ever guest on that podcast. And that be the first question I ask everyone on my podcast, which is how are you really? And he was my first ever guest on that podcast. And that was the first question. Why did he agree to do it? OK, well, I had been writing about mental health for a while and I was invited along to the launch of Heads Together,

which I don't know if you remember was there, was the Prince and Princess of Wales and Prince Harry, as it was at the time, their mental health campaign. And it was the official charity of the London Marathon. And they asked if I would get involved. And I signed up to do the marathon. And I ended up getting involved in all of this campaigning. And I spent quite a lot of time with them, the three of them. And I really sensed the real engagement from them on the subject. But I especially sensed, I don't know, a sort of kinship with Harry, I suppose. Got on really well with him. I mean, all three of them.

And so I asked if he'd be the first guest. And I was like, he'll never say yes he's Prince Harry and uh and to my utter surprise he did and then it surprised me again because I thought he would just talk very generically about mental health yeah um and that was not the case and how do you think he is really at the moment? It's always so difficult to say. I, you know, I am very fond of him and Megan. And I think, you know, if you read,

if what you read makes it look as if they're sort of having a bad time or I think he is in a really good place. And often when someone breaks free of something, I suppose it can look like the opposite is the case. But Bryony, would you advise him, as someone who likes the guy, would you have advised him to write this book? Or would you perhaps have advised him to live his free life out there in the sunshine of California and leave us all behind him? Listen, I'm someone who's written six memoirs. Yes, you're a fine one to talk.

I'm in no position to advise him not to write his truth. No, but with greatest respect, you're journalistic royalty, Bryony, but you're not actual royalty. Does the beekeeper like honey, I think was the question. I know that you've talked to the past, Bryony, about being quite an anxious child yourself.

I mean, you even, you had to have a bell by your bed just in case there was a house fire. Is that correct? Yeah, that's true. So I wonder how you have found parenting yourself because quite often you've you you do subconsciously live your own childhood again when you have kids don't you and but we're in a very different time now as well so have you found that you've been able to navigate it possibly much better than you might have thought um I don't know about that. You'd have to ask my nine-year-old.

Has she written a memoir yet? She's so dumb. That'll be, that'll teach me. I'll buy that one. She, no, listen, I try my best. I'm not perfect. You know, I was, she was four when I got sober. So, but I try, it's, you know, parenting is, it certainly made me have more empathy for my own mother, put it that way.

Can we ask a little bit about your alcoholism? Because it's really tough in Britain not to drink. I mean, obviously, there are some religious people who don't drink for a string of good reasons. But those of us who navigate the world in which almost everybody drinks, what is it, what do you do? How do you get through a really tedious evening where a lot of other people have got drunk or are drinking heavily and have apparently begun to find each other amusing when you're bored to tears and just can't wait to get home? Well, it reminds me of why I shouldn't drink.

Also, I was very much I I spent most of my life trying to prove to myself that I wasn't an alcoholic because I had a successful job and you know I wasn't on a park bench and I didn't drink every day just every other day and when I drank it was pretty excessively but um I the consequences of my drinking got so out of hand so when I find myself in those tedious situations Jane of which you speak I it's very it's certainly hard to be sober in Britain in after 6 p.m yes um but for me I remind myself that is not as hard as the alternative which got pretty dark so um and I kind of play the tape forward so to speak and think about how

smug I will feel the next morning without but also I don't know how I managed to drink the amounts I did because now if I eat like a Chinese takeaway or have an ibuprofen I feel terrible the next day it's like I don't know how I went from being a sort of pharmaceutical dustbin to this to this person who who can't even have MSG. So I thought you wrote a really, really important column the other week, Bryony, about addiction. And I wonder whether we could almost try and end on a positive note. Something has changed in our understanding of addiction, hasn't it? Where although to some people there might still be a moral underbelly to it, you know, you've got to be strong, you'll be able to conquer it, you're weak if you are addicted. There's also just more and more evidence, it's an illness, isn't it? And once

we can really nail that and put that into our understanding, it changes something, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, it's not so, I think there's all sorts of arguments there's not even so much uh uh an illness or a disease as a response to childhood trauma and i and you see i can say that and i know that there will be people sitting at home going oh stop banging on about trauma you know we think of trauma as someone who survived a war or you know um and actually trauma in psychological terms is all sorts of things it's neglect that often parents don't even realize they're doing um and and to a child to a to a to a baby to someone under the age of five there's no difference between the two anyway i could whine

on about that as much as i could but addiction is um it's i prefer to see see it as a maladaptation, you know, and it's your brain's way of trying to cope with life. And it's not particularly, you know, it works for a bit. And certainly it worked for me. You know, I had decades where drinking, I'm grateful for alcohol, guys, because if I hadn't drunk, I wouldn't have been able to leave the house. No, but it stopped working for me. Nobody. What I would say is nobody wakes up or nobody. I certainly when I was young, didn't think when I grow up, I want to be an addict. I want to have to go and sit in church halls drinking terrible coffee and saying my name is Bryony and I'm an alcoholic.

Nobody makes that choice, you know. And I think that's really important to remember. That was Bryony Gordon, the journalist and author. And she was talking to us about all sorts of stuff, as you've just heard. But primarily, she was on to discuss her new novel for young adults, Let Your Hair Down. But plenty for everyone to enjoy. They're certainly not restricted to young adults. Never quite know what that means. I don't think you do either, do you, Phoebe? No, so I'm thinking probably there's a cut-off point somewhere below 53. So it's not for me, but I did enjoy the book anyway.

Phee and Jane, following on from your conversation about dumping pumpkins, Riverford Organic Farmers led a very good campaign this year leading up to Halloween about how to avoid contributing to the 14 million plus pumpkins that are chucked away at this time every year they had some great ideas around decorating squash instead so you can eat them afterwards well if you want to just google um riverford squash pumpkins you'll get all the information you need but it's possibly too late to warn against pumpkin dumping because I suspect that

much of it will already have gone on, won't it? Yeah, 14 million pumpkins. That is absurd, isn't it? I know. I remember once doing a relatively serious item on a previous employer about what was regarded as a spate, it's always a good word in news talk, a spate of owl dumping, because people had started buying owls as pets after enjoying Harry Potter, and then they couldn't look after them, so owls were being dumped. And I actually think it's far worse to dump an owl than a pumpkin. Controversial, but there you are. That's a terrible image I've got in my head now.

Talk to you tomorrow, Twit2. Yes, big guest tomorrow is Ian Hislop so looking forward to that 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 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