Woman's Hour - Fatherhood, Laura Mulvey, Women's football stadiums

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

As part of the Radio 4 Fatherhood season, Clare McDonnell and her guests discuss the role of fatherhood in men’s lives. Darren Harriott is a 37-year-old comedian and presenter of Father Figuring. Darren has now lived longer than his dad, who took his own life while in prison, and he is questioning would he be a good dad? What even makes a good dad? They are joined by Dr Robin Hadley who has written a book looking at why men, like himself, do not become fathers.In 2016 Natalie Queiroz was stabbed 24 times by her partner while she was eight months pregnant. He is currently nine years into an 18 year sentence for attempted murder and attempted child destruction. Natalie and her unborn daughter nearly died. Earlier this year she learned that changes by the Ministry of Justice meant that her attacker could be transferred to an open prison many years earlier than she had expected.  She's been campaigning against this but has recently learned his application for a transfer has been approved. Clare hears from Natalie and Ellie Butt from Refuge.Laura Mulvey, filmmaker and pioneering feminist theorist, first coined the term ‘the male gaze’. The British Film Institute’s Fellowship is a pretty starry list – Bette Davis, Martin Scorsese, Judi Dench, Tilda Swinton, Christopher Nolan, Tom Cruise....to name a few and now Laura has been added to that prestigious list. Tomorrow Women’s Super League Football will officially unveil Design Guidelines for the Delivery of Elite Women’s Stadiums in England – a world first framework supporting clubs, local authorities, and architects in building or upgrading venues specifically for their women’s teams. They say the rapid growth of the women’s game has demonstrated that football venues, historically built and designed for male players and fans, need to be better equipped to cater towards the specific needs of female athletes and supporters. Hannah Buckley, Head of Infrastructure, Safety and Sustainability for WSL football and Suzy Wrack, women’s football correspondent for the Guardian discuss. Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Kirsty Starkey

Hello, this is Claire Macdonnell and you're listening to The Woman's Hour podcast. Thank you very much. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour. Here's a question. Has the relationship you had with your father affected how you parent yourself? What if you never knew your dad and you have absolutely no parenting roadmap on that count? Well, it's a question posed by comic Darren Harriet in his brilliant new podcast series on BBC Sounds. It's called Father Figuring. Darren's dad died in jail when he was just 11 years old and now he's asking what lessons he can learn from the past

so he doesn't repeat them in the future when he becomes a dad. Let me know today if that's been a gap in your life and how you overcame it. You can text the program. The number is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media we are at BBC Woman's Hour. You can email us through our website

or you can send a WhatsApp message or voice note using the number 0,700, 100444. As women's football continues to grow a pace, this week, Women's Super League, will officially unveil design guidelines for the delivery of women's football stadiums in England. Now, if you were building from scratch, how would you make football stadiums

a better space geared to women players and fans? And what about reconfiguring stadiums that are all ready, built. We're going to talk to the woman behind the guidelines. And Bet Davis, Judy Dent, Tilda Swinton, they are all fellows of the British Film Institute. And now you can add filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey to that list. A doyen of feminist cinema for 50 years, she coined the phrase male gaze in relation to not only how films are made, but also how women are represented in them. Laura will join me in the

Women's Hour studio. But let's start this morning with taking you back to 2016 when Natalie Quares was stabbed 24 times by her partner while she was eight months pregnant. He is currently nine years into an 18-year sentence for attempted murder and attempted child destruction. Natalie and her unborn daughter nearly died in that attack in Sutton-Coldfield. Earlier this year, she learned that Changes by the Ministry of Justice mean that her attacker could be transferred to an open prison many years earlier than

she had expected. She's been campaigning against this, but has recently learnt his application for a transfer has been approved. Delighted to say, Natalie joins us now. Welcome to Woman's hour. Thank you very much for having me. Good morning. Thanks so much for coming on.

You were told the application Natalie had been approved just last month. Tell us how you feel. Yeah. Yeah, basically a few weeks ago now, it's taken time for me to process before I went public because obviously took time for my family to bed in the news and it was absolutely devastating. And just to sort of put people in the picture or listening to this, it was a particularly vicious attack. Are you happy to talk us through what happened that day? Yeah, it started as a really ordinary day in early March 2016.

As you say, I was eight months pregnant. I was just starting maternity leave. In the pharmaceutical industry, I lived in a safe area, a nice house. So when you tick all the boxes of what you think you're in a safe and secure environment, I lived with my then partner who carried this out, and there were no warning signs that had never been violence. And that afternoon, that Friday afternoon, about 3 o'clock, I set off to go and meet him in the town centre. I was walking down to meet him at the bank, an appointment that he'd arranged. And I was even on the phone to him, chatting, and he told me he was stuck in traffic. He finished the call with I Love You.

And then 20 minutes later, as I approached the town centre, I was followed down a passageway behind a graveyard that was a cut through to the town centre. And I sort of felt that something was off. I tried to get out and I did. I got myself out into the open. And this man following me jumped on me. And for the next nine minutes, he pulled out a 12-inch carving knife. He began to stab me multiple times.

I was very blessed that two passes by. jumped on top of him. At one point, I broke free, but he came at me a second time. Another passerby, a young man 18 years of age. He ripped him off me. But he came at me a third time. And luckily at this point, so we're near the town centre, the police happened to be in the town centre. They heard the shouts for help from the other passers by. And they arrested him as he came at me for a third time. But at that point, I've been stabbed in all my major organs. I'm eight months pregnant. And obviously, nobody's thinking that. I was going to come out of that situation.

How on earth, did you? To this day, nobody can, I don't know. It's the honest answer. I think being blessed the fact that West Midlands Police were on scene so quickly, they were able to stem a lot of the injuries and the fact that they mobilised the air ambulance straight away and the air ambulance managed to land in the town centre so the helicopter came in.

They reckon when we landed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, a major trauma centre, they said you literally had less than five minutes. We didn't think you were going to make. helicopter because your blood pressure was so low, we were expecting you to go into cardiac arrest at any moment. And the medics have said, we honestly medically can't explain how you're here. You survived. Your unborn child survived. But once you're over the physical injuries, the mental injuries last a lifetime. Before we move on to ask you about these recent developments, have you ever had any answers from your former partner as to why this happened?

Obviously, that was my first question, I'm afraidly to say. When I came out, I was putting in an induced coma, and when I came out, the police told me it was him. And my first question is, why? Why is he done this? I want to speak to him. Which is no sounds of an odd reaction to say, I want to speak to him. But this is somebody I'd known as a friend for 25 years before we came a relationship. And he blamed family pressure.

His family culturally didn't approve of our relationship. And I was like, he was 41 years of age. He was a business man. He knew his own mind. it didn't ring true and as I unpicked it all afterwards it came out that he told multiple lives um lies he basically created multiple realities um almost in a true psychopath style everyone thought he was charming he was well spoken he was educated but very therefore manipulative and i think in short as the house of cards fell down it came at his family didn't know his

you know mother and siblings didn't i was pregnant for example and i think as he got close to me having the baby and the lies were starting to unravel, I think in his mind, his answer was to terminate the ultimate lie, which sounds an awful way to put your bits the best way. I can, and with no warning, literally no violence. He went to work that morning. He bought his lunch half an hour before. It was still in the car when the police found his car. He was very calm, cool and collected drawing. He wore multiple layers of clothing during the attack. He even had a rucksack under his top with spare clothes, spare shoes. He had a bin bag in his back pocket.

So it's not somebody who lost his mind. He was trying to sort of do this temporary adjustment disorder excuse. I think it was somebody who lost control, lost the ultimate control. And in that sense, chose to do the ultimate act. I did face him in 2017 in prison. I was always determined to look him in the eye and didn't really get any answers. But he was very disconnected, talked about how he was proud of me and have my scars and my stripes.

I mean, that's just jaw-dropping. Thank you so much for explaining all of that and going through all of that for us. So we now know you learnt this application for a transfer has been approved. We've got this from, excuse me, the Ministry of Justice who say this, this was an horrific crime and that the small number of offenders eligible

for moves to open prison like your ex-partner face a strict, thorough risk assessment and anyone that found breaching the rules can be immediately returned to a closed prison. Does that give you any comfort? No, not at all. So in my work, I've worked across 10 prisons in my work that I've done preceding this.

I do a very different work now to what I used to do. And I had it reported by many different senior prison officers that were concerned about the number of people getting transferred to open prison because of prison pressures. And just last week, the prison. Prison Governors Association have come out publicly and stated that they have a real concern, that they're seeing people in open prison that they probably wouldn't have seen a couple of years ago and they are concerned for public safety.

Well, if the prison themselves are saying that, I think that kind of speaks volumes. Let's bring in Ellie Butt now, Head of Policy and Public Affairs for the Domestic Abuse Charity Refuge. Welcome to Woman's Hour. In one, first of all, the decision in this particular case, are you hearing more and more decisions being made like this? We're definitely hearing from survivors of domestic abuse that are concerned with the way that the criminal justice system is managing their perpetrators in terms of whether that's a move to open prisons or a release. I think we see time and time again that the criminal justice system and the professionals in it are not trained to understand the dynamics of domestic abuse, the ongoing risk that many perpetrators, present to their victims and survivors. And that's a huge concern.

When we add that on to the enormous undeniable pressures that are on the justice system, but we see things being rushed, decisions being made quickly, sometimes based on the papers, rather than actual, you know, thorough risk assessments by people that have been working with perpetrators, that's a real concern

in terms of survivors. safety. I guess what they would say, and we have a statement, I'll read it shortly from the Ministry of Justice, is that this decision to move somebody to an open prison would not have been made without a full assessment. At what point do we shift into a rehabilitation mode? Because that is clearly what prisons are for as well. I think what we need is transparency about that risk assessment and also some reassurance that domestic abuse and the dynamics of domestic abuse, including post-separation abuse, are really understood. It's one thing to risk assess somebody, you know,

based on how they've complied in prison, what they've done during their time. That's clearly an important part. But what we're saying, it's absolutely crucial to understand their attitudes towards their victims and survivors. And crucially, communicate with, in this case, Natalie, she found out almost accidentally. and had to do lots of work herself to understand the full fact.

It's frankly appalling that we're still at the point where we're not communicating with survivors about when their perpetrator is coming out so that they can be in full knowledge of the fact. Natalie, just to go back to you, how did you find out? So in terms of finding out about the actual change to the conditions, it was completely by chance. It was actually last year I was working with a,

group of young offenders and one of those young offenders spent two years with them and he very gleefully told me as he would understandably he was going to cat d and i knew how long he sentenced was and i thought that doesn't calculate up based on the fact they should be within five years of their release date and i asked an officer and they said oh yeah it's changed they no longer need to be within five years of their release date they just have to be three years before their parole eligibility um i had that confirmed just through my own research and through questions that the BBC posted the MOJ, and we discovered therefore that meant his eligibility jumped forward by four years. But that was done under the Conservative

government before they went out of power, but he's been kept very quiet. But the Labor government have also made a further change where now prisoners are eligible up to five years before parole eligibility. So he's actually his eligibility would have come forward to further two years. And I think that's where the real concern is. I'm full for CATD. I've worked in enough prisons now. I've worked with enough offenders. There is absolutely a place. Rehabilitation is really important. I want to really highlight that. But it has to be the right rehabilitation length of time for the right offender. And we have to balance risk to victim as well as benefit to offender. And I feel that's where I'm coming from is trying to reduce that amount of time before

parole legibility for a domestic abuse offender to balance that risk, benefit risk ratio. Eli, but I'm sure you would agree with that. I've just got a quote here from the Prison Reform Trust Chief Executive Piers Sinha, who says open prisons play a crucial role in rehabilitation and resettlement, allowing individuals to demonstrate progress and reduce risk before release. These changes ensure transfer decisions are based on individual risk assessment, not just sentence length. So very definitely making that, you know, you look at the individual, the sentence is what they get at the start, but people change.

What do you say to that? Yeah, we're completely supportive of rehabilitation and open prisons are an important part of the system, as Natalie has said. I think from our perspective, the thing that we're most concerned about is the lack of communication and the lack of transparency for victims and survivors about where their perpetrators. are and at what point they might be released. We hear time and time again from survivors that get notified that their perpetrator was released last week or it's going to be released tomorrow and they have to try and bridge the gaps in this dysfunctional system, trying to get support to apply for a non-molestation order because they're not confident about the restrictions that are in place.

That is the system within which we're working. This isn't a message about locking people up and throwing away the key. It's a message about the importance of understanding domestic abuse, the ongoing risk that perpetrators often present to their victims and survivors, and the vital need to communicate with survivors so that after all the work that they've done to kind of get safe, try and process what's happened, you know, rebuild their lives free from fear and violence, that they're not thrown into a panic.

and a loss of control because they do not know under what restrictions their perpetrator is under any more. Natalie, final word to you. You want victims to be more included in the decision-making and also, as you've just illustrated, you kind of haphazardly found out about this change in the rules and then went on a journey of discovery in relation to your own case. How do you think that could be factored in, the victim's voice?

I think victims, slowly we are getting a positive change. I think my main drive is actually to say that domestic abuse offenders and stalkers shouldn't be transferred more than 12 months before parole eligibility because I think we need to minimise that window that victims do feel at risk as Ellie quite rightly said, you know,

victims do feel that. And if we can minimise that and then obviously with the victim being able to put in a full report of what their fears are, That is, to be fair, on the government, that is starting to be seen. But it's really this restriction of making sure they can domestic abuse and stalkers who are very different offenders. They're very different offenders to other offenders that we maximise,

sorry, that we limit them to a maximum of 12 months before parole eligibility. It still gives them that time in the outside world. It still gives them that time to blend and rehabilitate. And we've got to remember parole eligibility is only the minimum amount of time that someone has to spend in prison. So if after 12 months, the parole board would say, do you know what we're still not sure they can do another 12 months you know it's not that we have to release at parole legibility thank you so much for joining us we really appreciate

you going through your very traumatic story we really really do appreciate that natalie keros there joining me and also you heard from ellie butt the head of policy and public affairs for the domestic abuse charity refuge here's a statement from the ministry of justice spokesperson this was an horrific crime and our thoughts remain with the victim this government inherited a justice system crisis with prisons days away from collapse and we were forced to take firm action to get the situation back under control. The small number of offenders eligible for moves to open prison face a strict, thorough risk assessment and anyone found breaching the rules can be immediately returned to a closed prison. We are keeping the most dangerous offenders off the

streets by expanding prison capacity with 14,000 new places by 2031 and introducing sentencing reforms to force prisoners to earn their way to release or face longer in jail for bad behaviour that statement from the Ministry of Justice. Now, the British Film Institute's fellowship is a pretty starry and prestigious list. Bet Davis, Martin Scorsese, Judy Dench, Tilda Swinton, Christopher Nolan, Tom Cruise, to name but a few. And now, filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey, is the latest to become a BFI fellow. a doyen, a feminist cinema for 50 years. Her ideas have shaped how we think about film and women in film.

And the current chair of the BFI, J. Hunt, says that every single woman working in film and TV owes her a debt of gratitude. I'm delighted to say, Laura Mulvey joins me now in the Women's Our Studio. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming in. I want to go back to 1975 and your essay, visual pleasure and narrative cinema. You introduced the idea of the male gaze and it's an idea that's transcended cinema.

Did you ever think it would be that influential? No, not really. But at the same time, I did write the essay to be polemical and I wanted it to shock. I wanted the readers to sit up and think and one way in which I did that was throughout to refer to the spectator as male, as he and him. Lots of my feminist friends disapproved of that, but I was drawing attention to the way in which in those days the universal one was masculine.

And the way in which the cinema, a wonderful instrument of visualization, the mechanism of seeing, had adopted itself a kind of language of gender in its big industrial forms at any rate. And that was what interested me. I was interested in the way cinematic language was gendered. You grew up in a feminist household, and your mother was an academic, so I guess you felt comfortable in that world.

But you came to cinema a little bit later, didn't you? You weren't an avid film watcher as a child? So tell us when you first experienced that and when you went, this is kind of all from a male perspective, all of this. I think everybody's viewing experiences in the cinema is complicated. But one of the ways in which I found this language of cinema so fascinating was that its masculinity masculinized any spectator.

So in a way, my great days of film, film fanhood of going to see Hollywood movies in 1960s, you know, as an intellectual, I was influenced by the French theorists. I was quite happy watching my favorite movies as a male spectator because that was how you were dressed. That was the way the language worked. And so in a sense, it was the impact of the women's movement, of feminism in the early 1970s. that changed my way of seeing. So almost one day, almost from one day to the next, I moved from being this absorbed, moved spectator

into sitting back and thinking, what is this? What's going on on the screen? There's a gendered language which is not equal. It's imbalanced. And that's what I called the heterosexual division of labour in which the woman was spectacularized and not only to enhance female stardom,

but also to protect the male star, the male protagonist, from being exposed to this kind of passive, feminizing look. Yes, and you make the point, and it's still true today, the function of men and women in cinema, in a story and a narrative, the men are dynamic and the women are pretty passive.

The women tend as they generally have throughout patriarchal society to stay reasonably still except when they perform as it were and this allows the male protagonist to drive the story forward and emphasise in a sense his active role

which then kind of protect him from the feminizing gays. Yeah. How does it affect all of us? I mean, you draw some really interesting parallels about representation of women and obviously women's involvement in the film and TV industry. But how does, growing up with that, and we're still very much kind of in that, you could argue, male dominance in the storytelling and the representation, it has a structural effect

on all of us, doesn't it? How we live our lives, how we interpret ourselves? Yes, but I also think it's important to remember that consciousness has changed over the years. So when I was writing in 1975, it was pre a shift in which put it like this, even though we can't say that representation has been revolutionized, that the language of cinema is exactly as we might have liked. at the same time, consciousness has changed over the years. Women have much more say in how society and culture is understood.

And I think that's a really important change. It's still something that has to be struggled for, emphasized, but there's an awareness. And I think it's really interesting that young people have picked up this male gaze idea. I might object that it's become a cliché, that it's become a kind of easy concept, but at the same time, it affects the way that people think about image and representation, and it helps them to realise that images and representations are as political, are political issues as well as the more obvious political issues.

And it's not just political for women, it's political for men as well. You make the point that everybody gets. put in a straitjacket of sort of gender recognition, whether they like it or not? Yes. How do you think that would help men then if we carry down that path of understanding that construct and dismantling it?

Yeah. To dismantle it, to my mind at any rate, to my mind, the crucial development would be more women making films, more women behind the camera. women directing and women directing their own stories, their own experiences,

their own perspectives on life. And this not only allows women to speak for themselves, but it also, I think one has to remember, makes up for the deprivation that society and culture suffer from, if women's stories, women's experiences and so on, are not there on the screen. So to a certain extent,

this question of spectacle, this question of imbalance of gaze, if you like, has to be countered by other stories, other experiences. And that, I think, is not only speaking for women, but is speaking for the whole people, our whole society, which, as I said a moment ago, loses if 50% of its population is not heard.

And when you look at the statistics of the top 100 films last year, only 11% directed by women the year before. No female filmmakers were nominated for the best director Oscar. So it just goes to show there's still a very long way to go. If we have a male gaze, do we therefore need a female gaze? if we have the female gaze, how is it different from the male gaze? Well, I think obviously one wants to avoid real reversal.

If we are objecting to the male gaze, we're not going to replace it with a power dynamic which is just run by the female rather than the male. Thinking about this, obviously, going right back to the 1970s, I came up with perhaps a rather neat opposite, which is curiosity, and the way that curiosity has always been associated with women,

women excessive curiosity, a desire to know rather than a desire to see. Or you could put it like this, a desire to see with the mind's eye rather than the physical eye and the desire to decipher interesting riddles, enigmas and it fits to a certain extent

with the way in which our culture has thrown up women detectives women detective writers and women detectives have actually flourished in a way more than in other kinds of literary genres. So that world of curiosity, I think, is something, and again, it's liberating for everybody, not just for women, but women have been associated perhaps derogatory in a way

by this association with curiosity. It's absolutely, I could talk to you till 11 o'clock, but we've got a guess here. I just have to read this text out. This is for you from Sally, who's texted in to say I discovered Laura at university during a module on film her book was invaluable and helped me get a first for my dissertation.

So thank you, Laura, from Sally. Thank you very much and thank you Sally. There we go. It's been a delight having you in the Woman's Hour studio. Many congratulations on the BFI Fellowship and I know if you want to learn more about your work, Laura,

and how you're being celebrated. Excuse me from the BFI, you can go to their website. Many congratulations, Laura Mulvey, filmmaker and theorists. Thanks for dropping by the Woman's Our Studio. Thank you so much. Lots of you texting in as well this morning on fatherhood. We're going to be having a discussion on that. How an absence of a father in your life maybe has changed the way you parent.

How did you plug that gap? My father remained in England whilst I went abroad with my mother. I've always retained that sense of abandonment and duality as a result. He sadly took his own life at the age of 87. It has affected me both consciously and more seriously at the unconscious level. I froze. Finally, age 67, the wounds are now healing. Thank you so much for that.

And Julia says, my husband sadly died when our son was 11. Soon I started noticing for the first time the pervasive narrative about absent fathers and problem boys. people attributing all the worst evils of society to boys growing up without fathers. My son and I were bereaved and it seemed all people could do was to twist the knife. My son now has a wonderful partner and two kids of his own, but my feelings are still raw.

Julia, thank you so much for that. 84844. Keep your text coming in on fatherhood. We're going to have that discussion in just a few moments time. Time to play you a little bit of a lame page now. the Grand Dam of musical theatre. She made her West End debut in the 1960s and then shot to fame in 1978 playing Eva Peron in Evita. She went on to star in Cats, Chess, Sunset Boulevard and many other shows. And last week, Elaine joined Anita to talk about becoming an actual dame.

And now she's fostering the next generation of talent. Here she is talking about how she manages stage fright. There's a lot of anxiety involved. Certainly for me there was. I mean, there are some people that just love to be out there and perform and they could do it all at a drop of a hat. For me, that was not the case. And so I've had to manage this anxiety for, well, all these years, 60 years,

how I managed to do it and face that fear every night of a performance. I just don't know. And it gets worse as you get older. I can remember asking Vera Lynn in her, later 80s, whether she's still got nervous. And she said, oh, Elaine, it just gets worse and worse. The older you get. So I'm not unique in this.

I think all actors feel it, but it's managing it. That's the whole part. Fascinating to hear that, isn't it? You would never have thought that. You can hear the rest of that interview on BBC Sounds. You can search for Woman's Hour, and that interview played out on Friday the 7th of November. Now, tomorrow's women's Super League football will officially

unveil design guidelines for the delivery of elite women's stadiums in England. It's a world-first framework supporting clubs, local authorities and architects in building or upgrading venues specifically for their women's teams. They say the rapid growth of the women's game has demonstrated that football venues, which have historically been built and designed for the male player and fan need to be better equipped to cater for the specific needs of female athletes and supporters to create a welcoming and inclusive environment and consequently become spaces that serve everyone regardless of gender. Hannah Buckley is Head of Infrastructure Safety and Sustainability at the WSL

and Susie Rack is Women's Football Correspondent for The Guardian. Welcome both of you. Hi, how are you doing? Very, very well. Hannah, let's start with you. This is a really interesting paper because we're going into territory we haven't been in before. So what have you highlighted in the guidelines that maybe need to be looked at here? Yes, certainly.

So I think there's three really important segments of the group. One is our players. And I think I'm going to go straight in at the very start, if I may. Our players, some of them are mums. And obviously, it's really important that those that are returning to play after giving birth, are given the opportunity to continue to do so. So breastfeeding is a great example. But then the second one is obviously, and most importantly, our fans.

It's really important that we listen to our fans and understand. and their needs and requirements. And also with having Susie on the call as well, all those different stakeholders out there and making sure that we're equipping them to do their jobs as well as possible. And I don't want to forget our coaches. In the men's game, we don't have first team female managers,

but we have three in the top flight and a number in the WSL2. And I think, again, if you just think about that practically, it's like, where do they get changed before the game? So that's, I mean, it's all very interesting. I'm a lover of women's football. I go and watch it quite a bit. There's the practical considerations, aren't there?

because, like most women listening to this, will know when they go anywhere. There's a very long coup for the ladies, but it's a very long queue at football stadiums, isn't it? You're looking at that as well? There certainly is. And unfortunately, I think it's a real, one of the things that we've noticed is our female fan base

is significantly higher than it is in the men's game through the research that we've been doing over the last few years. And one of the things that we're keen to do is educate our stadiums. We're actually doing some research as well in that very thematic area at the moment. to try and understand how long our fans are losing from actually watching the game

because if we don't know these things then how on earth can we design stadiums to facilitate and need them? And so at each juncture of our development, one of the key things we've got to do is go out there, have a look what's going on on the shop floor and really understand what the consumers are facing. And I think you've just said it on the nail on the head there in terms of, you know,

you don't want to pay your money to go and watch football and then most of the time in the toilet queue. So we're trying to basically redress the balance, I think would be the phrase and educate around the volume and number and also flexible design, thinking about dads and daughters as well because that's an important segment of our audience.

It really is. I almost didn't have time to buy a pie at Crawley Town recently, but rest of short, I managed to. Let's ring in Susie Rack. I mean, Susie, you've been covering football for a long old time now. I guess you're quite used to going to stadiums that are built, structured for men.

Oh yeah, and what you guys and Hannah may not know is that I'm actually an architecture graduate, so I have a keen interest in this aspect of work and stadium design. It's something I always pay particular attention to. But it's a huge problem. I mean, as you say, toilet cues at stadiums. I was chatting to some fans at a Champions League game last season, who basically missed a majority of the second half

because they were in queues for the toilets at half time, which is really unacceptable when you're spending that kind of money to travel out to games. This was a game abroad. And situations like that make it really, really problematic in terms of the matchgoing experience and the matchgoing fan really matters, right? There's the famous quote, football without fans is nothing. It may not be the biggest individual audience watching a game in terms of, you know,

they're also being huge broadcast audience too. But that broadcast experience is critical too. And fans in the stadium make that better. So like providing a space and spaces that are able to. to lift mood, as we know architecture can do and make people feel welcoming and a sense of belonging really, really matters. Let's talk about welcoming, because any stadium you go to,

the turnstiles are incredibly intimidating, built for an entirely different audience, Susie, because of tailgating, essentially. I guess women football fans and people who go, not necessarily just women football fans, but don't tend to do that as much. So that's quite intimidating, isn't it, sometimes when you turn up at the ground?

It is. And as I approached the Alianz Arena by Munich Stadium last night for the press conference and was confronted by rows of empty ones in the dark, I was like, God, this is pretty grim. But yeah, you don't have those problems. And I mean, I think there's a very different atmosphere in women's football generally, partly because of the fact that ticket prices are so much more affordable. So people can afford to take their families. You're not having to sort of fight to get in because you can afford to just go if you're on a low income. So there's all those benefits to the fact that this is an affordable place. to be and take a family that alleviates some of those issues. You know, you're not going to get tailgating in the same way.

You're not going to get kind of, yeah, any kind of like sort of cheating to get in. You're not, they just don't really exist. So you kind of need those kind of facilities a little bit less. Obviously, as the game grows and ticket prices raise, that may shift a little bit. But for now, the environment is a really nice, inclusive place in a really organic way, which is a huge, huge positive for it. Hannah, it's a two-pronged paper this, isn't it really? Because there are clubs who are hoping to build stadiums for women, the women's team.

Brighton and have Albion, also Durham. Everton women, for example, they've just moved into the old Goodison Park Stadium because Everton's men's team have got a brand new stadium. Arsenal, Susie's out to watch them play by Munich tonight. Arsenal have this season started to share the Emirates with the men's elite team. So is it both? Is it's how do we configure what we've already got and what we should be building for the future?

Absolutely. I think one of the things that we recognise is the men's game are really coming to the table in terms of supporting us in terms of opening their stadiums and giving us access. So we've got some fantastic fixtures this weekend, with it being international break. They've got the Manchester Derby at the Etiatt as an example.

So what we've tried to do is make sure the document really talks to those who own and currently are upgrading assets on a regular basis because anybody who knows that they don't keep on top of them, their developments and understanding their customer base will obviously face challenges. But it's also there for those clubs who are making the strides to obviously build new. We really would like primacy so we can schedule when we want, how we want, and not behind the men's game. And I think that's an important piece to land here in this juncture,

because without those things, obviously we're always going to play second fiddle to the men's domestic game in England. Are you getting listened to? Because this is the thing when you look at a team like Arsenal, and they've been strategising this for a very long time, which is why the women's team are playing at the Emirates and you kind of scratch your head and go, well, they've done it. Why can't other teams do it?

It is possible. Yeah, there are so many complexities to actually scheduling a game. And that might sound really silly, but stadiums have become venue businesses. They're not just football churches, really, as how I described them from sort of 20, 30 years ago. And so what we've got to be mindful of it is, is there many events taking place

And that's across the capital. If you take London as well, we've got eight WSL teams playing. That's before you overlay the men's game in the Premier League and the AFL. And so then you overlay additional services. So transport, for example, policing. These all have a variable that we have to consider. And I think what we've got to be mindful of is that any decision that we make in the women's game has got to be a positive decision, both for our fans, also for our stakeholders,

to help drive the revenue to continue the growth trajectory that we're on. Susie, just coming on that one, if you will, because, you know, majority WLSL teams in London and the surrounding areas and you're not talking about building new stadiums there, are you? So it's very much about converting what you already have. What do you think about the trajectory for building a purpose-built stadium for a women's team? It doesn't seem to be having that quickly, does it? No, and it's very difficult.

I mean, obviously for the London Club's real estate is a premium. It's not necessarily a priority financially when there are pre-existing stadiums that you can either go into partnership with, whether it be Spurs playing at Brisbane Road or playing the men's stadium like Arsenal. So there's options available. What I'd like to see is more kind of adaptation of some of those bigger grounds

because ultimately, like even mid-sized grounds, you know, teams will grow out very quickly at the rate the game is growing, particularly for the very, you know, the teams at the top, the arsenals, the Chelsea's, the cities, the United's. So for me, that's the key. And I don't think that just goes for football, right?

These stadiums are all used for major concerts and things too. I was at Wembley for Oasis last month. And I go out to go for a wee and the queue for the women is literally kind of snaking miles around the concourse. I didn't join it. I held it in and I went afterwards and then joined the queue then, like absolutely busting to Lou, right? It doesn't make sense. And you're looking at the men's ones completely empty and multiple, you know, kind of sections of men's toilets open and empty. And you're just like, why can't we just change the signage?

You know, it could be that simple. It could be literally just changing the signage and putting a little, you know, kind of temporary barrier in front of the urinals, right? It doesn't have to be a really kind of expensive or complex change to make those kind of environments, football stadiums, which are, as Hannah said, multi-use facilities now, multi-use entertainment facilities, more welcoming to women in general. So I think that's, they're the kind of steps I'd like to see take and buggy parks,

that kind of thing. I had a friend who had a newborn baby three months old, wanted to go to a match at one of the London clubs and just wanted to take their baby in the sling into the ground and they weren't allowed to without buying a ticket for that baby, which kind of felt absurd. It wasn't going to have a seat. It was going to literally just be on her body three weeks, four weeks old, something like that. And basically she had to give up her ticket because she couldn't go into that ground because it was one of the major stadiums. So like those kind of things where, you know, it'd be fine, for example, at Bore and Wood. where Arsenal playing previously to, you know, kind of take a baby into the stadium, but not at the Emirates because of those kind of like restrictions and the security measures that are in place at those bigger grounds. So kind of just an adaptation isn't kind of a huge financial burden. I think are things that could be made immediately and not kind of mid or long term plans. Yeah.

Well, listen, fantastic. Just while we've got you, Susie, I just want to ask you a very quick question on VAR. last weekend's game between Arsenal and Chelsea and the calls form from both sides to introduce VAR video assistant referee into the women's game. Is it time? Given all the controversy it's had in the men's game

and some people saying now maybe we should roll back on that. Yeah, I mean VAL is not perfect, right? There's flaws in it as we see week and week out in men's football. But for me, we need investment in women's refereeing so that they can all be full-time. They're not entirely fully professional in the WSL yet. A lot are, but they're not quite, there yet. We need more investment in them and in making sure they're able to do the best job

they can. But then also, I think for these big decisions, VAR or a VAR lights, which can pick up on things like off sides and like really catch the really, really bad decisions would be beneficial. And I think protects the referees a little bit. They got a lot of stick after that Arsenal Chelsea game, which isn't totally fair. Refereeing is a step behind the development of the playing game because the investment has been a little bit slower to come in. So there's the gap there and it's not really fair to the referees for us to be so hard on them. But at the same time, in a big game like that, you need to be getting the majority of the decisions right, right? Like one or two mistakes here or there, you know, we can let go.

That's kind of the beauty of the game like drama. But you can't have multiple, multiple mistakes again and again and again in a game of such significance. So, yeah, I think there has to be kind of some version of VAR to support those referees on their journey as they're playing in the PGMO or playing catch up to bring it into line with. of the sort of level and the standard that the game is reaching in terms of the players and their development. But sort the toilets out first of all. The toilets, toilet roll.

And we'll talk about VAR some point down the line. Great to have you both on the programme. Susie Ratt, Women's Football Correspondent for The Guardian and Hannah Buckley, Head of Infrastructure, Safety and Sustainability for the WSL now. Let's move on finally this morning to talk about father. And lots of you getting in touch on this one.

How has your relationship with your father affected how you parent yourself? It's pretty straightforward, I guess, if you had a solid role model to go to, but maybe you didn't, and maybe you didn't even know your father. Well, as part of the Radio 4 and BBC 5 Live fatherhood season, Darren Harriet, a 37-year-old comedian is presenting a fantastic new podcast series called Father Ffiguring. Now, Darren has now lived longer than his dad. His dad tragically took his own life whilst in prison. And Darren is now questioning whether he would be a good dad.

He's not a dad yet. And what even makes a good dad? And we're also joined by Dr. Robin Hadley, an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He wanted to have a child but struggled to do so. His experience inspired him to write a book looking at why men like him who want to become fathers do not and also feels there's something missing in their life going forward.

Welcome both of you. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to have you both on the programme. Darren, let's start with you. Why tackle this subject? Well, like you mentioned, my dad passed away when I was 11. I think in my head I'd always sort of put his life and what he was going through.

In the back of my mind, you know, I started high school. I then went to college. I started comedy. I just kept myself busy and as soon as I turned the age and became one day older than he was it all just sort of hit me that there's this massive part of my life

that it is missing whether it's my dad's life that I didn't really know that well and my own life and whether I wanted to have kids because I felt like I was just I was just kind of upset and just depressed constantly

and you know all these really fun things were happening in my life with my career and all this and I felt like something was really missing And I think it was a sense of not really knowing about this person who was probably one of the most, well, who I saw as my hero and then wondering how that was impacting me going forward. And it all kind of just came together. And that's why we started the show and talking to a lot of my friends and my family's family on the show and hearing their stories about fatherhood. It really just made me think that actually it's a bit more common than I realized, unfortunately, to have.

sort of whether it's an absentee dad or a busy dad or just a dad who's not present in every sense of the word. But yeah, it really made me realize that there is, it happens a lot more than I realize. I want to play people a clip, people listening a clip from the podcast because it's, you know, there's a lot of serious issues, but it's a lot of fun as well as this, I think this clip illustrates. I should describe both my parents' personalities while I'm here. My dad was a Rastafarian, drug dealer, drug addict who was in and out of prison. for multiple crimes and had some severe mental health issues. And my mum enjoys a glass of wine after work, TV soaps, and complicated men.

And this is the thing, you go, you talk to your mum. And she always put a lid on all of that, didn't she? And do you think that's kind of left you with so many questions that hasn't helped you so far on your adult life? Well, it goes back to what I was saying, just. I mean, my mom had issues with her dad, her dad, a ban. and the family when they were really young and just avoided them. So for my mum, it's been a lot easier to just sort of push everything down.

You don't bring up the pass. You keep moving forward. So talking to my mum, as you hear on the show, it's an absolute nightmare because she is very old school in her mentality. We don't talk about these things. We just keep it quiet. When it blows up every now and again, and every 10 years, we talk about it. But we do not mention it.

So she was very annoyed that I wanted to find out more about my dad. and dig into his past. And as she says, you know, let the dead stay dead. We don't dig things up. And it's been, honestly, it was a nightmare trying to find things out from my mom. I still don't know everything. That's why we had to get researchers in because she is, she'd make a great spy, my mum, because she wouldn't say a thing.

Let's bring in Robin now. You say Dr. Robin Hadley that you're sad about the fact that you're sad about the fact that you know, you haven't become a father yet at this stage in your life. And that often isn't talked about. Did you start to feel broody at a certain point in your life? And why didn't it happen? Hi, well, thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm so chuffed.

My mum would be so proud that I'm a woman's out. She really would. So why did it happen? I really felt broody in my mid-30s. I felt a weight and a heaviness around me. And part of that, I think, was a biological urinary. to become a father, which we don't often appreciate within men. But then there's the social aspect as well about being out of sync with my peer group.

And there's a great sociologist called Leslie Conald in Australia who brought this up that actually as important as the biological clock for women was a social clock, that peer pressure. And the same goes for men. I come from a working class background. I'm of a generation different from Dan, and I'm a board game generation. He's a keyboard generation, touchscreen generation. But from a working class background, in that arc of life, my expectation was I was going to leave school, get a job, get married. For the middle class men I interviewed, it was leave school, go to university, get married, and become a father.

And that was the peak of the arc of life. and now I'm 65, so on the other side of the arc of life, I'm not going to become a dad. And I didn't become a dad because part of it was me and the way I relate to people. I'm the seventh of eight children. I've got anxious attachment. I overattach.

So it's amazing how I've had any relationships at all. And my first marriage, we were in sync at the beginning, Then we went out of sync with our ideas about becoming parents. So we got divorced. Then in my early 30s, I had a relationship with a woman that was going great. And at one point she said, you know, I want to have your babies. But then we split up. And I think that was the change from me was in my 20s,

I was really worried about how I would be a dad, how I would be a provider. What was that going to mean? I didn't know what it was to be a dad. My dad workshifts all his life before he died. So I hardly ever saw him. My thing about my dad, he's very authoritarian, but also we had to be on eggshells around him, not to disturb him during the day.

And there's eight of us. So it's not going to be a quiet house. So you two, I'm just going to come in there and just push this back to Darren, because you two sounds like you've got an awful lot in common. Robin was concerned, had anxiety about what kind of a father he would be. And Darren, you're the same because you don't have children yet, but your friends around you are having children. And this is the kind of, you go and talk to them

in the podcast as well. They've had very similar experiences to you, but they've moved forward in a different way to their own fathers. Did that inspire you or did it reassure you? Oh, yes. Yeah. It definitely inspired me. Can I just say, well, Dr. Hadley's saying, I can relate to so much, the peer group, the friendship, having babies, being in the mid-30s, that is like I said it just hit me at 35 um those feelings but yeah in terms of my friends i mean my friend dan his dad you know was set on fire horrifically and he had to nurse his dad my friend leon he found out his dad wasn't his real dad biologically in an argument with his mom when he was a teenager and all of these both of these people have become and i've watched them become

fantastic dads and for them it they had they had lots of thought in really in terms of their own fathers, you know, how do I tell my kid about my granddad? I'm still dealing with the trauma from what happened with my dad. Will that trauma go into my kid? They have all those sort of questions. And for me, I'm the exact same. You know, my dad took his own life.

I, throughout my years, have considered taking my own life. Is that something that I'm going to pass on to my kid potentially? My dad had four kids and he still took his life. Would I still be, even if I have kids and I'm happy, Would that still affect me? Would I still have those thoughts? You know, all these different things that I've gone through myself over the years.

However, seeing how my friends are as parents and with their kids and the fact that we actually, as men, are able to talk about these things because we agreed that, you know, 20 years ago, we would never have spoken about this to each other, you know. But now that we're older and we've got, you know, we've got families and we're maturing, I guess, and we realize how much communication is important, especially with men when we're talking about these issues,

I definitely feel much more confident now than I've ever felt. I mean, within the last, like, honestly, six months. This whole show has really changed things formally. And it's just made us have that sort of dialogue, which I think is just so important for, I would say, just for all men in general, just for everybody. Just this kind of dialogue is so important because it made me feel like I'm not alone

and there's people there who can help me. Yeah, Robin, let's go back to you. I mean, you wrote a book about this. How is a man supposed to be a man, male? childlessness, a life course disrupted. Are you hopeful that, you know, you're both really honest and brave, and I think that's fantastic to be so open about, you know, how your lack of a relationship with a father or kind of disjointed relationship with a father affected you. Are you hopeful, Robin, that by saying this now on the record, doing it in the way that you

have done in your book, you get people to recognise those patterns in their own life, so they don't take that forward? Absolutely. And just to put another narrative out there for men, because when I was in my 30s, although I had that relationship. I thought, well, it's going to be different now. I can be a stay-at-home dad. I can do things. I'm confident about it. But actually, the broodiness, I couldn't speak to anyone.

I don't think I even recognized it. It was held in me. I didn't have a narrative. I couldn't speak to my friends. One of my colleagues at work became a dad, and it was so jealous, I couldn't face him. We used to have bruised together, and I used to avoid him because I was just so jealous. We had a chat, and I said, you've got the life I should have. And speaking to the men in my book, they all said this thing.

And it's something Darren said, something's missing. And there is, there's something missing inside, but there's also something missing outside. And the thing that Darren's doing is putting something out there. And that's something that I want to do is actually there are narratives. And there are ways of being, and you can be vulnerable and not be humiliated, which is a very big thing for men. Well, it's been brilliantly helpful and cathartic, I'm sure, for so many people listening to this. Thank you so much for coming on and being so honest. Dr. Robin Hadley there, Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Darren, Harriet, as well. It's a brilliant podcast series, Father Figuring, available as a box set on BBC sounds now. And if you have been upset by anything you've heard in this discussion, you can go to the BBC Actionline website, which is a fantastic resource, and you can find links there. Thank you for listening. Tomorrow, Kylie will be here. Talking to one of the recently announced winners of Prince Williams' Earthshot Prize, Runa Khan, who runs programmes in Bangladesh to combat climate change and improve women's lives.

And actor-writer Nicole Lecky on our new coming-of-age drama, Wild Cherry. That's tomorrow. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. I'm Ragnar O'Connor from BBC Radio 4 and the History Podcast. This is The Magnificent O'Connor's. In war-torn London, a man is murdered. The police arrest 23-year-old Jimmy O'Connor. He's sentenced to death, but Jimmy is my dad. For 80 years, my family has fought to prove his innocence.

And now we're making one final attempt to uncover the truth. But are we ready for what we'll find? The Magnificent O'Connor's. Listen first on BBC Sound. Thank you.