Woman's Hour - Mikey Madison, Jojo Moyes, Inside the RAF

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Oscar-nominated actress Mikey Madison joins Clare McDonnell in the Woman’s Hour studio. She speaks about playing the title role in Anora, a film about a sex worker in New York. Mikey spent months embedded in a strip club to fully immerse herself in the world. The film is nominated for six Academy Awards as well as BAFTAs and Golden Globes – we speak to Mikey about how she’s finding receiving such attention so early in her career. The government have announced £13 million of funding for a national centre to tackle violence against women and girls. How will it work, and what difference might it make? Clare speaks to BBC Senior UK Correspondent Sima Kotecha and National Police Chief's Council lead for violence against women and girls Maggie Blyth.Top Guns: Inside the RAF is a Channel 4 documentary that gives viewers a rare view of RAF operations both in the air and on the ground. One of the women featured in the new series is Chief of Staff Jenni, who was recently stationed at an airbase in Romania. She joins Clare to tell us more about being a woman in the RAF and her experiences.Jojo Moyes is the bestselling author of 17 novels, including the smash hit Me Before You which was adapted into a Hollywood film. Her new novel We All Live Here tells the story of Lila, a woman dealing with divorce, teenage children and duelling fathers. Jojo joins Clare in the studio to tell us about this ultimate sandwich situation.Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Lottie Garton

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Claire Macdonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour. On the programme today, a brilliant young actor enjoying huge Oscar buzz right now. Mikey Madison is nominated for Best Actress in her lead role in the film Onora. It's a tour de force performance, and Mikey will join me shortly. What is it like to be a woman with a five-year-old daughter sent on deployment for five months at a time with the RAF

at a time of increasing global insecurity? Well, Jenny joins me from the new Channel 4 series Top Guns inside the RAF to tell us more. And also, the best-selling author Jojo Moyes will be in the Woman's Hour studio to talk to us about her brilliant new novel, We All Live Here. Its central character, Lila, is living in a multi-generational household. Kids, grandparents, you get the picture. So tell me, what is your experience of being in that sandwiched generation,

caught between children and parents, looking after both but rarely yourself. Tell me the highs and lows and maybe even where you hide when it all gets too much. You can text the programme. The number is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media, we are at BBC Women's Hour. Or you can send a WhatsApp message or voice note using the number 03700 100 444. My first guest today is none other than Oscar-nominated Mikey Madison. You may know her for appearing in Quentin Tarantino's

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Now, today she joins me to discuss playing the title role in the film Onora. It follows Onora, or Annie, a sex worker in New York, as she meets and marries the son of a Russian oligarch. And what follows is a chaotic and often comedic portrayal of a world many of us rarely see. Anora has been nominated for six Academy Awards,

including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress for Mikey's performance, which is thrilling, as well as BAFTA's Golden Globes. The lot started off last year at Cannes, winning Best Picture, and it's gone from strength to strength. I'm delighted to say Mikey Madison joins me now in the Women's Hour studio. Welcome. Hi there. I'm so, so lovely to be speaking with you. You have a beautiful voice, by the way. Kind of, you might. Well, not as good as yours.

No, no, no. You have a true, yeah, a wonderful voice. Oh, I'm going to put that on my show reel. Thank you very much. Now, congratulations on the Oscar nomination. Where were you when you heard the news? Well, thank you. I was in a hotel in New York, but I was FaceTiming with my mom and my dad and my brother and my dog. And yes, it was very, very surreal. But it was nice to be on FaceTime with my family. I think it felt a little bit more real to experience it with them. So to share the moment must have been quite something. And did the dogs go wild? Because presumably the humans went wild.

Well, the camera was just pointed at my mom's face and I have some cute screenshots of her crying. But no, I don't know. I don't think my dog cared at all. I'm just, I'm his servant, basically. That's how dogs roll. You are only 25. What a trajectory. Does this feel real? No. No, it doesn't. It's very surreal. I feel like I often have to sort of be mentally pinching myself

and trying to hold certain memories in my head and really think of things or write certain things down just because I want I want to remember certain periods of time I think the last year or last since last March has been such a whirlwind and it feels like it's simultaneously gone super super fast and also slow and so yeah it's been a very interesting experience. And it must have started off, kind of another pinch me moment, because the director said, I haven't quite finished writing this, but I want to write it for you. So this is Sean Baker who came to you and said this. How was that?

Oh, the wonderful Sean Baker. He is so amazing. He actually hadn't even started writing anything at all. He just had a loose, very loose idea for the script and what the story might be. And he reached out a couple of days after a horror film I had come out in theaters and was like, I want to write. I want to write something for you. I want to work with you. These are a couple actors I have in mind as well for the film. Yura Borisov, who he had seen at a film at Cannes when he was premiering his

film Red Rocket, and Karin Karagulian, who's been in all of his films. And I love Sean's work, and so I accept it very happily. And yeah, it's been such an interesting journey from the culmination of the idea all the way to now. Let's take our listeners then into Annie's world, into the world of Anora. Tell us about her. Tell us about who she is, what she does, where she lives, the choices that she's made in her life thus far? Yeah, so I play Annie in the film Nora, and she's a young woman who lives in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. She works in the city at a club called Headquarters.

She's a dancer and a sex worker. And she ends up meeting the son of a Russian oligarch at work. And it's not a spoiler, but she ends up marrying him. They have a shotgun wedding. And sort of things happen where his family is sort of trying to tear them apart and she's kind of working to fight to save her marriage and preserve some of her dignity, I think, throughout the film. And she does fight, doesn't she? In so many ways. Oh yeah, she's a true fighter. That's one of the things I recognized from the beginning is her amazing fighting spirit. She's scrappy. But she's she's a fighter, not just physically, but emotionally as well. She is really willing to put herself out there

to fight for what she believes is rightfully hers. So you to do your research, I mean, you went full in, didn't you? And on the research you did on those kind of clubs and the women that work in those kind of clubs, tell us what you did, who you spoke to? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the research is one of the most important things I did for the film. You know, she's a sex worker, she's a sex professional. And so I really needed to immerse myself as much as possible, do as much research and be a student in terms of talking to women. We had incredible consultants who were brought onto the film who have similar lived experience to Annie, and they were able to offer so much beautiful insight into that kind of work and what their life is like and the nuances to their job day to day. I went to clubs and I shadowed women, which was such an interesting experience. Shadowed women at some clubs in New York and specifically at Headquarters or Rosewood,

the club in New York that my character works at. And that was really interesting to kind of just be a fly on the wall in a way and just try to observe and soak in the environment as much as possible understand what that's like what the conversations are like and there's a great camaraderie amongst the women there's competition as well though isn't there because you're earning a living and you only earn as much as you dance for people yeah I I there, I think there's certainly camaraderie and I think it differs person to person. But also like you, you really have to hustle doing that kind of work, especially working as a dancer at clubs in the US. You know, you most of the time have to pay a fee, like a fee to work there. So I think a lot of women pay like maybe $200 to just enter the club.

And then you have to work to make up that amount. And then you're also tipping the DJ, the bouncers, the security guards. It's hard, you know. And so to even just break even, you really have to kind of work your butt out butt off excuse me you have to charm everybody because everybody in the chain helps you earn your living well it's I mean you know it's it's a psychological job as well you have to be quite intuitive I think um to do that kind of work and it's it's physically demanding and emotionally demanding as well because you're walking up to someone, trying to connect with them, trying to read them and see, oh, what can I offer them? What can they offer me? Like, how can we have a connection and both enjoy each other's company as much as possible? Did you have any hesitations about portraying a sex worker? Because it's a controversial choice, he's not interested in

sensationalizing the work or dramatizing it in any negative way. He really just wants to tell the stories of what these people are like and what they do. And so I was, I was also interested in that, you know, she's Annie is a sex worker, but that's just what she does for a living. You know, she's just Annie. Yeah, I mean, it's very transactional, isn't it? There's a lot of sex in the film, as people might expect. How comfortable were you with all of that? I was very comfortable.

I think because I had done so much. I mean, first of all, I'd never done anything like that before. But I had done so much research and had talked to so many consultants and had been training for so long to be a dancer. I felt like I was in tune with my sexuality in a way that I hadn't been before. I just, I know that it was kind of a performance for the character too. You know, she's putting on a specific version of herself and as an actress, I think I was as well. And so those scenes were fun to shoot. And I also think that the way that Sean Baker, our director, was portraying a lot of those scenes, it was quite light-hearted and funny and um yeah so it was it was a really positive experience but I think also it's important for you to see my character at work because she's she's good at what she does um and I think she also enjoys her work too and it was uh it was it was important

for me to portray that in the film as accurately as I could. It's so real, isn't it? The thing I took away as a viewer was often when you, these kind of movies are made about these kind of women, it feels like they're being objectified. It feels like there's a lot of titillation involved and there's a lot of perfection involved. And that is not how these women or your character are presented in this movie. You get a sense of wholeness um of your particular character

and the relationship she has with other girls other people in her life was that important for you oh of course yeah i i mean like i said i i there's so i mean there's so many different sides to annie as a person and you get to see different versions of her as well. You get to see her at work and what she's like and the kind of sort of persona that she puts on to make a living. And then there's those more private moments. I think that when her guard is down a bit, you get to see sort of who she is at the core. And so, yeah, I felt really privileged that I was able to play a character like that and that we were able to portray sex work in as honest of a way

as possible. That was very, very important to me because I got to know, you know, a lot of really incredible people in the sex work community and have made so many wonderful friends involved in that kind of work. And so I really felt, I don't know, I just really wanted to do them justice as much as possible. It's, you know, it's not, it's not an overall, there's no way that we could possibly portray the universal sex worker experience it's just from the point of view of one woman but I'm really proud of the way that we um we did it I understand you opted not to have an intimacy coordinator on uh the film and for people listening who don't know what they are they are professionals who work with actors on intimate scenes to ensure they are performed respectfully and consensually. You didn't want one. Why? Well, I was asked

before we started shooting if that was something that I would be interested in. And, you know, at the time I had just created such a really close relationship with Sean and his wife and producing partner, Samantha. And I just personally felt comfortable, you know, just foregoing one personally. And, you know, this was a decision made not just me. It's a decision made with my team, with the production, with the other actors. And I had a really positive experience on set. You know, Sean, Sean's priority as a director is comfortability, safety, he wants everyone to have fun making his films and that those sentiments were really echoed.

I mean, some people are saying that this should be mandatory now to have these intimacy coordinators when you're shooting scenes of that nature. What do you think to that? I think it's really important to have protection in place for people who would like that and feel that it's necessary. And, you know, if I do a film in the future where there are intimate scenes and I feel like that's the best decision for for me and the production as a whole and I look forward to working with an intimacy coordinator yeah I mean it's it's the the final scene is incredibly intimate again and it's it's left up in the air but it's incredibly moving um and I read that you listened to a voicemail from your father that you'd saved

before you did that scene can you tell us why uh yes I did um you know I think uh I had been really focused on my character's point of view throughout filming I was really had integrated sort of my mind into hers. And, um, you know, I was filming that scene. There was just so, so many emotions that had built up inside of me and I was kind of holding them in and my character was holding them in too. And I was like, you know, I think I just need to pull out something from my internal arsenal and just kind of, I don't know, something to just twist the knife a little bit deeper in me. And I think it needed to be something personal for my own life. And so, you know, there's lots of things actors do to prepare for scenes like that. And I was like, I think I'll just

listen to this voicemail. And it's a voicemail that I don't listen to often, but I have saved because it's very special to me. And so I played it before we shot the scene and listened to it with John and Jura. And it was a little embarrassing very vulnerable but I think it kind of just grounded us all to an interesting place and was sort of the the tipping point to just I don't know really some of the emotions that had been building up within the character it really does pack a very uh powerful emotional punch. And you mentioned Yuri Borisov, who's with you in that final scene. He's nominated, too, for an Oscar. And it's an incredible ensemble piece. And you say they're very fun. It's a comedy in parts where, you know, this unlikely band of you and these henchmen that have been sent by the Russian oligarch's father to find him. You kind of go on this road trip through this part of New York that has a very big Russian community. And that was something you also did. You learned Russian.

Yes, I did. How hard was that? Oh, man. Russian is such a complicated language. There are so many sounds that native Russian speakers make that Americans do not. I don't even think British people do either. And it was really difficult. And I dedicated two months to really trying to cultivate my Russian language skills as much as possible. And so I would fall asleep listening to 10 hours of Russian speaking

and wake up and do my Duolingo and, you know, have my two-hour Russian sessions. But it was really important because it's, I think, immediately when Annie starts speaking Russian, she speaks it in a very specific way. That's very, um, you know, it, it, it really tells you a lot about the character. I think she speaks it kind of like an American does. And so she's, you know, trying to connect with her new husband and by speaking Russian and, uh, you know, she's, she's always an outsider in lots of ways. And I think that that's echoed even with her Russian dialect.

But, yeah, you mentioned you are a Brasov who's so, so amazing. And I think he's, if I'm not mistaken, he's the first Russian actor since 1977 to be nominated for an Oscar. He is, yeah. It's so wonderful. And he's just the kindest person, the most loving, the most talented. He's so deserving. I'm so happy for him.

And he's such a star, isn't he, back in Russia? Oh, yes, yeah. When you were filming in New York in this big Russian community, he was the one getting mobbed, wasn't he? Oh, yeah. I mean, he is like the, what I've been told, like the actor in Russia. And so it's so interesting, I think.

I mean, it must be. I haven't really talked to him about this, but for him to be such a star and be so celebrated with so many accolades in Russia and for his first English-language film for him to be recognized like this as well. It must be so interesting for him. Well, it's an incredible piece of work. And just finally, what do you hope the people who see this film take away from it? What were you hoping to achieve?

I think that we were just interested in telling a human story about unlikely connection. And I mean, I hope that people laugh watching it. I hope that it makes them feel something. I don't know. I mean, I think that for me, I'm really interested in making films that garner conversation. And I think that our film has done that. So I don't know. I think it's really up to an audience to decide what they feel watching the movie. But the film has always been very special to me. And I think it's special to other people now too.

It's just an incredible piece of work. It really is. And your part in it is phenomenal. Thank you so much for dropping by the Woman's Hour studio, Mikey. Oh gosh, thank you for having me. It's great to have you here, Mikey Madison, who is the star of Nora. And if you haven't caught up with it,

she's nominated for Best Actress. You can catch it before the ceremony in about a month's time now. And it's streaming on many platforms. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. We're going to be talking about intergenerational living shortly on Woman's Hour with the novelist Jojo Moyes. So lots of you have been texting in with your examples of what it's like.

Lorna from West Yorkshire says, I have my 15-year-old son and 90-year-old mother who has dementia living with me in a small terraced house. We have a lot of laughs and my son is a star with mum who is often bewildered by him. I have a visual impairment and so find the chores

extremely difficult. It's a full-time job. Life can feel lonely and exhausting. Thank you so much for getting in touch, Lorna. 84844. If you want to join in with your experiences of intergenerational living before we talk to Jojo Moyes a little bit later in the programme. Now, you may have heard this over the weekend,

£13 million of funding for a new national centre to tackle violence against women and Girls was announced by the government. The new centre will be run by the National Police Chiefs Council and the College of Policing and will bring together around 100 officers and staff across England and Wales. Now this funding announcement comes after a report by the National Audit Office on Friday said that years of government efforts to deal with violence against women and girls have not improved outcomes for victims. So how will this new National Centre work? And most important question, will it provide better results than previous plans? To talk me through the announcement is the BBC senior UK correspondent Seema Kotecha, also joined by Chief Constable Maggie Bly,

the National Police Chiefs Council's lead for violence against women and girls. Good morning, both of you. Good morning. Seema, let's start with you. Let's find out a little bit more about what the government announced around this new centre. Yeah, so as you said in your intro this is a new national centre

that's supposed to provide support to victims of domestic abuse that's victims of rape and sexual offences for example and it's meant to provide a centralised police response and give officers the training needed to tackle this crime so it's being described by some people as a dedicated policing hub. And it will bring together hundreds of officers, or should I say 100 officers and staff who will prioritise tackling violence against women and children. And this is about having a specialist response. We know that with counter-terrorism or serious organised crime, there's often a specialist-tailored response. And this is something that victims have been calling for, a response that is tailored to the crime that's been offended, that's happened towards them, so that they can get the support they need, regardless of where they are in the country.

This is for people in England and Wales. So that's the objective of the centre. But we also know that some victims don't really trust the police and police are very much aware of this. And it's something that they're working on to try and increase the trust in them and other agencies. But I think that is a big obstacle when it comes to people confiding in police, when they're feeling especially vulnerable. Seema, it comes a couple of days this announcement doesn't it after the UK's spending watchdog the National Audit Office released a report that said the Home Office's response to the serious and growing problem of violence against women and girls has been ineffective. So let's talk a little bit about this NAO report and reaction to it. Crucially,

will this centre make any difference? Well, quite, yes. The NAO report made some stark reading last week. I mean, it is very damning and it's just basically, in a nutshell, says enough hasn't been done by the previous government to make substantial change in this area. But it also said the new government and its ambitious target of halving violence against women and girls over the next decade is an ambitious one, as I say, but to meet it, it would need to lead a coordinated whole system response

that addresses the causes. I think the government hopes that this centre will fill that gap, that there will be a whole system response because we're talking about experts working whole system response because we're talking about experts working at this centre we're talking about police officers working in this centre and we're also talking about them receiving the training they need to deal with this crime so I think the government would would say look we're listening to what that report said and this is

what we've come up with we're investing 13 million pounds to deal with this in england and wales um and we hope that it will give women the confidence and girls to come forward and to to be a part of this centre to go there for support and advice when they need it sema thank you bbc senior uk correspondent sema katecha let's bring in chief constable maggie blythe the national police chiefs council's lead for violence against women and girls. Maggie, first of all, let's start before we move on to talk about this centre and the new money. What do you make of the National Audit Office report? It must be hugely disappointing for somebody in your position to read that.

The National Audit Office report was very much around government's whole system response to violence against women and girls and I think from my perspective speaking for policing we know there's still so much further that we need to go in our society to really be able to tackle the crimes that disproportionately impact women and girls, the crimes that are domestic abuse, rape, stalking, harassment, child abuse in particular. So from a policing perspective, I guess we're not surprised that we know that there's still so much further to go. We published a very important report last summer which outlined just the scale of the threat around these crimes that indicated that about one in 12 women are victims in this country, two million victims a year. We estimate one in 20 are perpetrators. oedd yn dweud bod tua 12 o'r dynion yn ddynion yn y wlad hon, 2 miliwn o dynion y flwyddyn, ac rydym yn estimadu bod 20 o'r dynion yn gwrthdaroedd. Felly, rydyn ni'n credu nad dim ond ymateb polisi yn ei angen yma, ond ymateb system llawer llawer llawer o'r

cyllideb gan Lywodraeth llawer fwyaf sy'n edrych ar atal, sy'n edrych ar cynydd y gwahaniaeth rhwng rhai o'r blant sy'n tyfu i fyny. Rydym yn gwybod bod y looks at the onset of violence amongst some boys growing up. We know these crimes disproportionately impact girls and boys and women. So we welcome anything that takes us further. And I think when we published that threat assessment, as we call it in policing, we were very cognisant that our advice to government is to take a similar approach to national threats to violence against women and girls in the same way that policing advises around counter-terror, serious and organised crime,

that without some form of national coordination, it is very difficult for 43 different police forces working with local authorities, working with other local providers to make the impact that's needed. So we welcome, we think it's a positive first step that government is bringing together, and I would stress that it's bringing together existing resource or capability at the moment across policing to ensure that we have the specialist

advice at the centre that can ensure training, guidance, policy, etc. It goes out to our 43 forces in a very consistent way. And it's looking at violence against women and girls, but also what we call in policing public protection. So it's all of those crimes that vary from stalking, harassment, domestic abuse through to child abuse, bringing that together to ensure, because we've learned a lot from how we tackle counterterrorism and serious and organised crime, that having that national coordination will help us in the ongoing long-term work that we need

to keep moving forward in this way. So it sounds as if you're saying the significant change here is these are existing services that are going to be coordinated. I mean, we're hearing from government there's 13 million pounds worth of additional funding is this to build the center that they're talking about they're not putting more more resources into personnel by the sounds of things it's very much the start it's it's bringing it's really important to look at coordination otherwise you have a range of disparate services in in different areas bringing bringing that coordination together to look at

training, to look at the right specialist assets that local police officers on the ground need is important. But this is the start. And this is very clear in our advice outlined in our threat assessment last summer, build the centre, start with coordination, and then build that up over the next decade so that we can really start to have the impact at something that is an epidemic in the same way that we now, looking back 20 years at how we deal with counter-terrorism in this country, we've built up a similar centralised coordinating function. And this fits with where government tells us in policing, police reform will also go. Because at the end of the day, you know, there

are acute financial pressures on all police forces, on all parts of the public sector at the moment. These sorts of crimes are increasing. They've increased by 37% since 2019. Child abuse, in fact, has increased by 400% in terms of what's reported into policing since 2013 so we we know that we we have to to look at um centralizing some of our approach to national threats so that we can support excuse me interrupting if it is such a national emergency um it definitely needs more money doesn't it and i just want to get your reaction There was that rapid report that came out last week into the aftermath of the Southport killings where this kind of issue of, you know, men getting radicalized, misogyny. The government seems to be saying, well, we're not going to include that in our look at everything you're talking about, whether it's Islamophobia at one end or far right at the other. We're going to stay with where we are on that.

Would you think that's the wrong move? Because it sounds as if what you're saying is this needs a lot more resources. This is a serious emergency we have in this country right now. It is a serious emergency and we will need to keep investing in this area moving forward. We'll wait to see what any public inquiry coming out of Southport advises government to do.

But from our perspective, we want to bring together all that we know about counterterrorism, radicalisation around the crimes that particularly impact vulnerable individuals and the crimes that impact children. So bringing together all of that knowledge and expertise, because there is lots of emerging good practice across the country that's come together over recent years. We need to bring that together at speed to be sure that moving forward, we've got the right resources to give women and girls and also boys the confidence to come forward and report to us. You said at the beginning that some of our communities don't trust the police. We feel that that's improving and increasing, and we want that to continue to be the case. And just finally, while we have you, that new laws come in today on coercive control.

This is very much an area that maybe a lot of women and some men think can't be in that sort of bundle of all the kind of offences you're talking about? What kind of important difference do you think that will make to women? Absolutely fundamentally important. Our evidence base in all of this area through this coordinated centre is around the modus operandi of the sorts of perpetrators,

the men that perpetrate these crimes. Coercive and controlling behaviour, repeat offending is very much what sits behind some of this crime type. So anything that can help us do more around tackling coercive and controlling behaviour is only a good thing. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been good to have you on.

Chief Constable Maggie Blythe, National Police Chief Counsel Lead for Violence Against Women and Girls. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. Now, although many of us may not realise it, there are constantly men and women in the Royal Air Force deployed overseas to protect us all. Top Guns Inside the RAF is a Channel 4 series

that gives the audience a different perspective of what it's like to be involved in keeping us all safe, both in the air and on the land. So what is it really like in 2025 being a woman in the RAF? I'm joined now in the Woman's Hour studio by Jenny. She's a wing commander in the RAF police and has recently returned from overseas deployment in Romania. And she features as part of the new series Inside the RAF. Welcome to Woman's Hour. Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. We'll get into why you wanted to join the RAF. Welcome to Women's Hour. Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's great

to have you here. We'll get into why you wanted to join the RAF shortly. But why did you want to take part in the series? This is series two, isn't it? It is. Yeah, that's correct. I felt it was really important that we actually represented some of the other roles within the RAF. And also the fact that there are females in fairly senior positions in a lot of these detachments deployments I think what's so great about this series is you get to see a really great variation of you know at home deployed all the variety of the roles and stuff that people are involved in and I just felt it was really important to be represented. Just move a little bit closer to the microphone if you will that's absolutely brilliant. What was your choice then to join the RAF? When did you make that?

So I've been in 18 years this year and fundamentally it was a decision to get away, do something completely different. What I love about the Air Force and I'm quite passionate about is every couple of years I get to do a completely different job. You get moved around, you get a new role, you get to meet new people, you get to work in an entirely new area. And I just find it varied and fascinating. And it's just it's kept my interest now for well, 18 years and still going. And what do you do now? Explain to people who haven't seen it yet, which they won't have done. What's your role now? So my role that I covered in the documentary when I was deployed was as a chief of staff for the

expeditionary air wing, which was the sort of 225 approximately people that we took overseas to support the mission my role back in the UK currently is I work at the headquarters air command I'm in a staff role at the moment and this is what I love so much this is what I mean about the variety you know you can be overseas one minute on a deployment and then back into a command role in charge of people or you're in a staff role developing policy and new direction and stuff for the Air Force. And in the documentary, we see you in your deployment to the MK Air Base in Romania, where you are chief of staff. And that is at a moment, obviously, with incredible instability in the Middle East, with everything that's going on between Russia and Ukraine. Why were you sent there?

So we were doing the NATO air policing mission across the Black Sea. So a really important allied operation, where essentially countries take it in turn, and there's a rotation for working with the Romanian Air Force to stabilise and protect their airspace, essentially. So it's all part of an ongoing NATO mission. And it was the UK's deployment was like a four month chunk, if you like, where the UK typhoons were out there patrolling the Black Sea and that area. How do your family feel about because you know, you're normally either here or you're somewhere else training, but that's near the front line isn't it yeah I think the proximity you know the border with Ukraine it was all pretty yeah pretty punchy stuff it was pretty close um I think they're very proud I think

they're a little bit nervous at times I'd say it's safe to say um I'm not sure my parents were overly thrilled with the idea but I think they're also I think the overriding feeling is that proud that you're doing something and you're part of that effort and also you know the job I had out there was pretty safe compared to the guys that were actually out there doing the flying and flying the missions you know what we were doing based in Romania was you know it was pretty safe and but pretty important at the same time. As you say, ground support, they couldn't get up there, they couldn't do what they do without all of that behind them.

Absolutely. And I think that's what's so great when, hopefully you see this on the series is, you know, this awareness that in order to get those jets in the air, just how many people are involved in that entire operation, you know, the ground support, the background, everything that contributes towards actually achieving that mission. You talk I mean obviously we see you as a mum in in the documentary um you've a young daughter five yeah she's six now six five at the time I was away yeah and you know you we see you doing face time with her how hard is that because these some of these

deployments can be long can't they they can yeah. I found it harder than I expected, if I'm honest. Yeah, it was difficult. My daughter absolutely nailed it. She was fine. She handled it probably a lot better than I did, if I'm honest. But yeah, I mean, everybody out there, you know, whether it was a lot of people had kids that had left behind, parents, partners, you know,

everyone's got something going on at home, right? It is difficult to be separated from. And sometimes it's quite hard when you have the availability to touch back like that so much. You know, it never used to be the case. You get your one phone call every week or couple of weeks for 10 minutes. And it was easier to feel a little bit more disconnected from it whereas now I think with wi-fi and being able to call and contact you all the time you're still so connected to home while also being so far away it's a very strange very strange dynamic there's a moment you get upset because there's these little landmarks aren't there that you miss

tell us about the one you got upset about. And it sounds it sounds really absolutely ridiculous to say out loud now. But yeah, she was awarded star of the week at school and it's her first year in primary school. And it was a big deal for her. You know, that was something that she wanted me to be there to see. And yes, it's not, you know, it's not groundbreaking stuff. But in a five year old's world, that was important. And I wasn't there. And, you know, for everybody out there, people missed, you know, weddings, birthdays, funerals even. You know, there's a lot goes on at home that you're just, you're not there for. You're not there to see. But how unusual is it for a woman like you with children to be in the position you are? Are you in a minority?

No, not at all. It's very common. You know, there's a lot of very senior females now within the UK military, which is fantastic. And there is, you know, a lot of the dads on debt, a lot of the guys out on debt also have children. And, you know, they also need to juggle the leaving family at home and coming away. It's not a uniquely female experience, I don't think. Is there a judgment on you that you notice in that, in the services, because you're a woman and you've left because normally it's the man that leaves? Yeah, that's the norm, right? No, I think people judge me more for being an RAF police officer than they

do for being a female and having kids and leaving them behind. It's accepted, you know. We all made a choice to pursue this career and that's on you. And the expectation is that you have made that decision. You have made that juggle work. I mean, I'm hugely fortunate that I have a massively supportive family and an amazing network of friends who just help smooth all of that. But, yeah, it's a choice that everyone makes it's watching it it's brilliant watching you out there and just being in so control of all of it um but you kind of sit there as a woman and you go where's the female

fighter pilots what's going on there because women can do frontline stuff absolutely so why is that i mean is it just because historically there's just always been men in these jobs? I think that's the perception, certainly. I mean, the problem was with the series, it's a snapshot, right? It was one particular deployment, one particular deployment of typhoons of which there happened to not be a female pilot. You know, had they taken a snapshot of another operation at another time, you may well have had one in the mix as well. So I think it's more of a perception. But I guess it's still the ratio's pretty weighted one way, would you say? It's getting better. I would definitely say it's improving. It doesn't feel particularly weighted in the same way, I don't think for most of us. There's certainly a very, very high proportion

of females now in all the armed services. Yeah, well, that's good to know. I mean, you'll know, obviously, that the armed forces have had or really haven't had the best couple of years in terms of news headlines, specifically surrounding treatment of women, accusations of sexual assault and harassment in the Army and Navy. An investigation was carried out into the toxic culture of the RAF Red Arrows that found predatory behaviour towards women was normalised. Were you surprised by that? I think everybody was quite surprised and shocked at the outcome of that. And what I would say is, you know, the Air Force has gone to great lengths to uncover and discuss and, you know, deal with those allegations that came forward at the time. All I can say really is in my personal experience of 18 years, I have never been aware of or subjected to anything that I would consider to be toxic or inappropriate behaviour.

That is really interesting. I reading this statement, an anonymous RAF serviceman at the time said he wasn't surprised by the allegations because in his experience, women were very much seen as second class citizens. I mean, what he's't felt that kind of environment at all in the time I've been serving. I think that's, I mean, everyone's entitled to their own opinion and have their own experiences, I guess, but I can only reflect on mine. And do you think women who do, and clearly there have been women who've had that experience, and I'm so glad you haven't, but are they supported? Is there a definite culture change now where women can come forward and confidently speak to people and will be listened to? Absolutely. There's a very supportive culture. Again, only from my own personal experience can I suggest that there are people there to talk to. There are systems in place. These things are not taken lightly it is taken seriously and hopefully the outcome of that particular investigation that you refer to showed that demonstrated that you

know it was open and and steps were taken yes and um air chief marshal sir richard knighton chief of air staff and professional leader of the ref said at the time he was appalled by the findings and apologized unreservedly and two pilots serving with the Red Arrows were dismissed over that. Final word then Jenny what would you say to young women listening to Woman's Hour Now who might be thinking about a career in the RAF? I would say absolutely go for it explore all the options there are some fantastic opportunities out there and I would implore you to absolutely pursue them. It's been wonderful to meet you. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for your time.

The programme is a brilliant watch. It really, really is. And it makes you understand the risks that people in the armed services are putting themselves on the line every single day in ways we'd never get to find out about to keep the world order, really. So we're very, very grateful for that. Thank you so much for your service. Thank you for your time. And thanks for dropping by. And you can watch Top Guns inside the RAF. It starts tomorrow, nine o'clock on Channel 4. We're going to talk about the sandwich generation,

excuse me, in just a moment, but lots of you getting in touch with what it's like to be in that sandwich generation. Elaine, thanks for texting. Elaine says,'m a 75 year old widow living in a small terraced house in brighton that i bought last april planning to have a spare room for my first grandchild to stay my 40 year old son moved in with me last july because he could not afford to rent in London. It has its pluses, but, says Elaine, dot, dot, dot. You can keep your text coming in on that one, 84844. And the reason I bring it up is because my next guest has joined me in the Woman's Hour studio now, Jojo Moyes, bestselling

author of 17 novels, including the smash hit Me Before You, which was adapted into a Hollywood film, of course. Her new novel is fantastic. It's called We All Live Here. And it tells the story of Leela, a woman dealing with divorce, teenage children and dueling fathers. Jojo joins me in the studio. Hello. Good morning. It's great to have you here.

Let's then take the Woman's Hour listeners into the bosom of this multi-generational family and your central protagonist. So this is your elevator pitch. Yes. Okay. So my elevator pitch. Right. So Lila is the 42-year-old mother of two girls, one 16 and one 8, both of whom are at a challenging point in their lives. She has been deserted by her husband, who has run off with a neighbour just after she published a nonfiction book about how to repair a marriage gone stale. And she's just discovered at the opening of the book that the husband's new girlfriend is pregnant and they have to see each other every single day in the school playground at pickup time and into this mess lives her stepfather who's quietly moved in with her after the death of her mother but who leads a very rigidly healthy

and formalized existence which is slightly at odds with the two teenage, with the two girls. And then on top of this, just as she's thinking she can't quite cope, her biological father, who is a failed Hollywood actor who once achieved moderate success in a Star Trek ripoff called Star Squadron Zero, arrives back into her life after a huge absence of decades, having exhausted every line of credit, every tolerant ex-girlfriend back in LA. And it's what happens to that family once he arrives back again. It's a comedy. It's so funny. And that is the cast. And just to go back a little bit, the kicker for Lila is that she is an author whose last book, How To, How To Be a Kind of Success, it all falls down around her ears. So were you kind of sending up a flare to people who do this, who kind of put their lives out there and monetise their lives

to say, you know, kind of that's a risky thing to do? It fascinates me because I find it absolutely terrifying. I cannot imagine anything worse than exposing your life to the judgment of millions and millions of strangers, especially on something as intimate as a relationship or, you know, later in this book, Lila's romantic life. So yeah, maybe I'm sending up a flare, but maybe it's, I'm just fascinated by things that I personally couldn't do so it's probably a bit of that as well. Yeah I mean she is a writer of course of non-fiction yeah who faces a dilemma about how much of a personal life to include is that a dilemma you've faced as well? Oh it's it's a constant because you know I was discussing with one of your researchers that I wrote a substack essay about the fact that when women promote books, we are far more frequently expected to talk about our personal lives than male writers, even though we might be writing about very similar topics. And it's really hard because I think as a writer, you're interested in the idea of honesty.

As an ex-journalist, I certainly don't want to give scripted answers. I want to be interesting and, you know, entertaining. But if you, for me anyway, giving up too much of my own life just is profoundly destabilizing. I don't like it. And also, I'm not that interesting. I'd much rather people just were interested in the books. Which is why you write fiction. Yeah, exactly. No, you're very interesting.

But do you acknowledge that in this novel, certain topics, divorce, grief, a lot of the issues that come up do mirror what has gone on in your personal life recently. Do you know what? And actually readers are invested in you, aren't they? They would want to know more. A little bit. Yeah, I realised I made a category error when I did the acknowledgements in this book, which is I wrote at the beginning of the acknowledgements, this is my least heavily researched book ever. And by that, I meant that I hadn't travelled to Kentucky or done, you know, reams of research on aircraft carriers in the Second World War or whatever normal things I do in the course of

research for my previous books. This was just a small cast of characters who happened to live in London and happened to be a family. So it required very little research. But what I've realised after a week of touring Germany is that people have read that to mean it's all based on my life. And I'm just going to tell you that it's not. You know, I made her a writer because that was the dictates of the plot. I made her divorced for the same reason. And of course, I'm sure bits of your life show up in any book. And sometimes you may not even see them until years afterwards.

But all I can say is there is not a scintilla of character in this book that is like my family or you know the world that we live in you don't have a relative who's been in a star trek spin no i would love to have a gene in my life frankly that would be something to talk about on the school run what is brilliant i think um is is you talk about this sandwich scenario um of this in the middle who's, you know, she's got all of this going on. She's doing it on her own and she's got teenagers and she's got the older generation. You give voice to that. And I guess that's quite a kind of silent struggle that a lot of women have. Oh, well, you know, I'm 55. I look around me at the women I know and most of my friends are, you know, I call it holding up the sky, they are looking after elderly relatives, they're looking after teenagers, they're looking

after young children, they are taking care of their friends, they are trying to hold down jobs. I just think there is a kind of emotional and physical burden that doesn't get acknowledged very much, at least not with humour, because I think often when women of this age are written about, it's always rather kind of victim-y or just miserable. And actually, there's a lot of fun involved in it as well. And what I wanted to show with Lila and her best friend is that women of this age are also capable of being rude and silly and irresponsible and supportive and loving and kind of quite hard on each other and all the complexities are still happening even at this age um yeah and you write it from

different perspectives as well um and the really moving part i think is when you write in the voice of the teenage daughter and you get an insight into her world that again you haven't written her in a cliched way she's projecting the classic kind of teenage daughter leave me alone and then you go inside all the struggles she's having and you understand why she might be doing this why was it important to do that I think for me one of the things that fascinates me is how we always assume we know what's going on in someone else's head and actually we're incredibly bad at. And in the case of Lila's daughter, Celie, when we first meet her, she looks like the archetypal teenage brat. She's rude to her mother. She's acting out. She's bunking off school. She just seems like a troubled teen.

When you are forced to see the world through her perspective much later on, you realise that this is a girl who is struggling with her parents' divorce, her sense of responsibility for her mother's happiness, being iced out at school for a reason that she hasn't quite yet worked out. And she's going through so much that she has nobody to talk to about. And so you then see her in quite a different light and her struggles become, you're much more sympathetic to them. And I guess in many of the characters and many of the plot twists in this book, I wanted to show that we very rarely really know what's going on in anyone's life. And so perhaps we need to be a little kinder

and a little more open to the possibility that the story is not what we necessarily believe. And you're not judgmental as a writer at all about the characters. I mean, you mentioned Lila's ex-husband. It would have been very easy to write him as the one who left, started a second family with a younger, hotter mum. The Fendi young mistress, I think. The Fendi young mistress on the school run.

But you also write about what he's going through with compassion. Why? Why did you decide to do that? Because I don't think there really are any villains in life. I think most people are any villains in life. I think most people are muddling through and doing what they think is best. And sometimes they're going to get it wrong. And sometimes, you know, they're going to be less empathetic towards the people around them than they should be. But the older I've got, the more I realize that, you know, aside from a kind of tiny percentage of people, there are no villains. And I guess once we understand someone else's motivations, even if it's Dan and the bendy young mistress, you kind of, you have to have some

sympathy for them. You have to kind of view the world in a slightly softer light. Yeah, there aren't any goodies and birdies really, are there? I don't think there are. Even Jean at the beginning, her dad, he's just an awful, awful human being. But actually, he does some of the kindest things and most explicable things as you get to understand him better. And just a final word then on the older generation. These two men who've kind of been thrown back together and you find out, you know, how they crossed over earlier in life. But that whole idea of loss and love and romantic love when you're a septuagenarian. I mean, that's something you don't really read about often, is it? No, you don't.

But I, you know, again, the thing about getting older is you realise we never get any better at this stuff. It's, you know, I remember being kind of 20 and seeing a friend's mum at 40 having kind of a romantic disaster and thinking very judgmentally, well, gosh, she's a mess. I'll have it all worked out by the time I'm 40. Well, 15 years on from that, I have no clue what I'm doing. I have no clue what anybody's doing.

I think, you know, we just have to get on with it, do the best we can and hope to have a laugh along the way. Well, if you read this book, you will definitely have a laugh. I found so much of it so relatable. I don't know what that says about my parenting, but it's so lovely to meet you. Thank you so much for coming by, Jojo. Jojo Moyes, her new book is called We All Live Here

and it is out this week. Thank you so much for dropping by. I think we've got time for just a couple of texts from lots of you listening who've got an experience of the sandwich generation. My husband and I bought a house with my mother in 1997 and lived happily there with our two children, seeing them through school and university until my mother, now 96, moved into a nursing home at the end of 2022. A completely mutually beneficial arrangement, perhaps a few niggles along the way.

But we got to know each other and that is family life. Thanks to everybody who has texted in. On tomorrow's programme, my guest will be actor and writer Daisy May Cooper about the second series of her hit comedy, Am I Being Unreasonable? Talk to you then. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. I'm Alex Kretosky. And I'm Kevin Fong.

How do you feel about AI? Does it scare you? Very quickly that question comes up. You know, is it going you feel about AI? Does it scare you? Very quickly that question comes up, you know, is it going to think for us? Does it excite you? I say, how is the AI going to help us to think better? Do you worry about how it'll change your life, your job, your kids? AI is built into many of the software applications that we now use in schools every day. In every episode of The Artificial Human from BBC Radio 4, Kevin and I are here to help.

We will chart a course through the world of AI and we will answer your questions. It doesn't just lie, but it lies in an incredibly enthusiastic, convincing way. That ability to be able to kind of think critically is just going to be so important as we move forward. The Artificial Human with me, Alex Kretosky. And me, Kevin Fong. Listen on BBC Sounds. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.