Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman’s Hour - Cush Jumbo, Spice Girls Stamp, Assisted Dying

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

Cush Jumbo is the award-winning actor known for her roles on the stage and screen, from The Good Fight to Macbeth. She joins Clare McDonnell to discuss starring in - and executive producing – the new crime thriller series Criminal Record. Cush stars as DS June Lenker, a police detective locked in a confrontation with an older detective, played by Peter Capaldi, over a historic murder conviction.For the first time, Royal Mail has dedicated set of stamps to a female pop group, to commemorate 30 years since the Spice Girls formed in 1994. Lauren Bravo, a culture journalist and author and DJ Yinka Bokinni joined Emma to talk about it.Last week on Woman’s Hour we heard the candid admission by the former Labour MP and Government Minister, Dame Joan Ruddock that she was ready to end her terminally ill husband's life using a pillow in a bid to end his pain. Her husband the former MP Frank Doran had been suffering from end stage bowel cancer in 2017, and she struggled to get him pain relief medication in the hours before he died. She is now calling for a free vote in the Commons to legalise assisted dying. The public debate around the subject has been revived in recent months by leading figures such as Esther Rantzen - who revealed that she is considering travelling to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland if her cancer worsens. But others such as Baroness Ilora Finlay, a cross bench peer in the House of Lords and a palliative end of life care expert, are cautioning against a law change. She believes improved access to care and pain relief is the answer when people are dying rather than the taking of lethal drugs. She joins Clare McDonnell to reflect on the new push for a law change.Shere Hite - a name many people will remember, but some may not know. She was a pioneering feminist sex researcher who published her ground-breaking book, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality in 1976. The book was seen by many as radical, changing prevailing notions about female sexuality. Shere went on to write and publish several more books, but endured intense and lasting criticism in the US, and eventually moved to Europe and renounced her American citizenship in 1995. She died in 2020. Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated Director, Nicole Newnham felt that despite how influential Shere had been in life, that she has since been forgotten. So Nicole produced the documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which is released in UK cinemas on January 12th. She joins Krupa to discuss it. As the number of pupils missing a significant amount of their education is about double the level it was before the pandemic, Clare is joined by Ellie Costello, the executive director of Square Peg, a not-for-profit which helps families that struggle with school attendance.

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 Krupa Partey and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. Put the kettle on, grab a cuppa and settle in for this week's highlights. Coming up. I think that the phrase Lady Macbeth is probably known by more people than people that have actually seen Macbeth. And I think that's because it's become a bit of an archetype in our culture of Lady Macbeth equals evil controlling woman probably controlling a man to do something.

Actor Kush Jumbo speaks to us about playing Lady Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse and her new Apple TV series Criminal Record. We discuss assisted dying with palliative care expert Baroness Elora Finlay and a Spice Girls stamp will explain more. But first, Cher Haidt was a pioneering feminist sex researcher who published her groundbreaking book The Haidt Report, a national study of female sexuality in 1976. Many of you will know her work. It laid out the views of over 3,000 women who anonymously answered questions on sexuality and the female orgasm. Her book was seen by many as radical, challenging, prevailing notions about female sexuality. Jenny Murray spoke to Cher back in

2006. Let's take a listen. As a human rights advocate, I would suggest that if men have orgasm every time, more or less, and women have orgasm only one third of the time, that somehow there is an issue of equality there. And I think that we should just not be afraid to say, I'm not afraid to say that. Cher Haidt speaking to Jenny Murray. Cher died in 2020. Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director Nicole Newnham felt that despite how influential Cher had been in life, that she has since been forgotten. So Nicole set out to make the documentary The Disappearance of Cher Haidt. She spoke to me from the West Coast of the US and began by telling me about Cher's early days as a student. Well, she had moved to New York City in the late 60s, and she found work as a model. But she was also enrolled in a graduate school program at Columbia University. And she experienced an enormous amount of sexism and classism, actually, at Columbia University. People were hostile to her questions about sexuality and also just didn't really even believe that she was doing her own work. It was pretty extreme. At the same time, she was trying

to pay the bills by doing modeling. And she was coming into contact with the kind of up and coming feminist movement, the second wave feminist movement that was kind of blowing up in New York City. And so all of those things sort of came together in a conversation that she had with fellow feminists about Masters and Johnson's latest book, which in their previous book, they had said that women could not have orgasms through intercourse. But in the second time, they said, well, actually, they can. It's just indirect. Rather than the first book, they said that orgas, actually they can, it's just indirect. Rather than the first

book, they said that orgasms required clitoral stimulation. And in the second book, they said that women should be able to orgasm through indirect stimulation through intercourse. And Sharon and her friends talked about that and realized that it was pretty wild that people didn't really know what women's true experiences was. And that was sort of the genesis of this massive research project that began very grassroots and creatively and with a lot of optimism that if women's truths were discovered, then good things could be done to help women reach equality and for men and women to have better relationships with each other.

And that grew into the HITE Report, you know, which was... Well, it's groundbreaking. It changed the conversation, didn't it? And considering that, I wonder why you feel like she's disappeared. Well, you know, I was really struck when I read her obituary in 2020 and the headline said, Cher Haight, she explained how women orgasm and she was hated for it. And that was the beginning of my journey on this film, because I thought, how can it be that somebody who made

such a positive contribution to society was hated for doing so? And then I thought, you know, wait a minute, nobody ever talks about Cher Height anymore. And the more that I and the young women who I worked with on the film explored this, the more we realized she really has fallen out of conversation. She's not taught in curriculum. She's not remembered for the work she did. And furthermore, you know, that her work was still shocking, relevant, and important to the people who encountered it. So, of course, it's not a surprise that the thing that caused her to disappear was patriarchy and people's response to what she was suggesting, which was that we could change things and make things better. And I think people who don't have an interest in seeing

change really ended up kind of gathering together and attacking her, you know, personally as a means of suppressing her message. That patriarchy that you mentioned came across very clearly in the documentary, the battles, the mountains she had to climb to be heard. Going through that archive, what was that like? Oh, it was incredible. Cher had taken care to see that her archive went to the Radcliffe Schlesinger Library. And when we contacted them about this documentary, further to your previous question, they were really happy to hear from us because nobody had been requesting the material for a long time since it had been acquired. And so we were some of the first people to go

through it in real detail. And it was incredible because she had written her thoughts about her life from very early on, sort of all the way through on the backs of cocktail napkins and opera programs. And she would just put a page in her typewriter at the end of a long day of modeling and type up what she thought of the modeling industry and the beauty standards that women were being held to and all of these things. And so we were able to create sort of a contemporaneous of Cher herself as she was, you know, kind of making her discoveries and creating her work and help to humanize her and bring back a three-dimensional portrait of a woman who had really been kind of reduced to a two-dimensional caricature. For those who don't know about the height report, and I called it groundbreaking earlier, Just explain to us what she learned

about women's sexuality and what she shared. Well, the biggest bombshell, of course, was this idea of women needing clitoral stimulation to have an orgasm. And one of the things that I found amazing in watching the archive was that she was engaging male interviewers on nightly television shows about clitoral stimulation in the 1970s. And I just don't see that kind of thing being discussed on television now, you know? So that was really incredible. But she was, I think one of the most radical things she did is she asked women in this incredibly comprehensive survey over 100 questions to respond to her anonymously, whichever questions they felt comfortable asking questions about their lives that also included their emotions. you want out of sex? How do you feel when you have an orgasm? What does it take for you to feel fulfilled? What are your wishes, your dreams, your fantasies? Things that people just really hadn't ever asked women before. And 3,000 women replied for the original height report. And

reading it, when I stuck it from my mother's bedside table when I was 12 years old and read it, I felt like I was going through a portal into a world of female sexuality that I otherwise didn't have access to. And for many women at the time and women since, it's been that way. It's like a massive circle of 3000 aunties sort of like, you know, telling you if you're a younger woman, what they are really experiencing. And she didn't judge people. She just kind of mirrored it back and then wrote her own observations about it. There was criticism of her methodology, wasn't there? There was criticism of her methodology. You know, she was doing something new. She was,

you know, sending out this long questionnaire that was requiring narrative responses for people to just say whatever they wanted and whatever length they wanted. And then she was trying to take that down and, you know, put it into data. And it was an incredibly thorough, meticulous job that she set out to do. But she did do things that, you know, differed from the sort of what's considered to be the correct way of getting a random sample. And so she was very criticized by that and for that. And her response was usually to say, you know, I'm developing a new way to get at the truth. And when Freud did that, and he had a sample size of, you know, three Viennese women, he was taken seriously, you know, I think a lot of people have adopted some of the techniques and methodologies that she's used in social

science sense and qualitative methodology is taken much more seriously now than it was then, you know? Yeah, yeah. Her relevance to the younger generation of women feminists now, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think the relevance is really enormous. I think one of the things that I really wanted to show in the documentary was not only the way in which, you know, she was eventually sort of silenced and censored and pushed to the point where she decided to self-exile

to Europe from America, but was also to show the way that she and the feminist movement that she was involved with at the time in which, you know, she really had so much fun and joy and creative work pushed back, you know, because at least in the United States here, we're in pretty dire times in terms of women's rights, especially in regards to bodily autonomy and the things that Cher was addressing. And I thought the project of the height report itself and people just saying it's OK to challenge the status quo, it's OK to talk about it, was very inspirational. So that's been the response that I've gotten from, you know, young women around the country as I've, you know, around the

US as I've shown the film is that they see her as sort of an icon for the time. And a lot of the things that she was very criticized for beyond the methodology were the way she dressed, the way she carried herself, the way she, you way she talked very openly about sexuality, those are all things that young women today can embrace and they see her as a badass and as a trailblazer. And so I think it's really important that we don't lose the stories of the trailblazers who came before us and the wisdom and the knowledge and the actual impact of,

you know, her work. I know that your previous documentary, Crip Camper, starts in 1971. That period is a particular time of history that interests you. I wonder what else you're working on at the moment? Well, I'm working on two projects and they're actually both about women, about trailblazing women. And one is set in the 1600s, and one is actually also set in the 1970s and 80s, which I admit is a time that really interests me. I think it's a time when there was an open dialogue in society about what kind of change was possible. You know, it's a time that the disability rights movement and, you know, the second wave feminist movement and the height report came out of. And I think it's a time we really need to kind of look back to, you know, for inspiration now. Nicole Newnham there and the disappearance of Cher Height is in the UK cinemas

now. And we always love to hear your thoughts on our stories. Helen said, Shehite is a legend in my lifetime. We went along two unworldly students to her book signing in Kensington High Street in the late 1980s. We brought no money as naively thought the books were being handed out for free. We told her as much and she mischievously said, steal them, which we did. Now to a star of the stage and screen, Kush Jumbo. Many of you may know her from her role as Luca in the US legal drama, The Good Fight, or from her time playing Hamlet and now Lady Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse. Kush is also executive producing and starring in a new Apple TV series, Criminal Record. She plays D.S. June Lenker, a police detective locked in a tug of war with an

older detective played by Peter Capaldi over an historic murder conviction. Kush began by telling Claire about her character June. She's not a copper at the beginning of her career. She's kind of at the beginning of the middle, if you know what I mean. She's around my age, her late 30s, and she has been in the domestic violence unit for a few years. She's now moved over to CID, so she's at the beginning of a new part of her career. Absolutely loves her job, but is also a mother of a 12-year-old in their long-term relationship. And not sure why, but she is feeling extremely dissatisfied with her life. So we meet her at a bit of a crossroads.

But ultimately, she's a type of officer that does the job for the right reasons. And until she runs into Hegarty, she's feeling a little bit of a crossroads. And she buffers up against DCI Daniel Hegarty, played by Peter Capaldi. And what's brilliant about this drama is that you'd think that would be a very simplistic narrative about this progressive woman who's'd think that would be a very simplistic narrative about this progressive woman who's come from the domestic violence unit and this old detective

who's there's allegations of, you know, a false confession and all of that. It's not that simple, is it? No, it's not. It's one of the reasons why I love the show, actually. And I loved working with Peter.

This show is all about two generations crashing into each other and the idea that each person feels that they are following what they think is the truth and the right process. But Hegarty's process is one from 30 years before and June's is one from now. And they actually have more in common than they don't have in common because of the way they attack what they do. But other than going to meet him, she never would have gone down this rabbit hole of this case. But after a chance piece of information from an anonymous call and a woman that has gone missing, she goes to meet him as the leading investigator of this old, old case. And there's just something really odd about the way he behaves, brilliantly done by Peter,

that just makes her want to open up a little chink of this box that then completely explodes in all these different directions and makes her realise that there's something to be truly discovered and brought to justice here. Yes, and it's sort of the layers come up as you watch more and more episodes. She's a female mixed race detective. She has to work with some pretty racist, misogynistic colleagues. And I was struck by that as a motif that runs through it because of the hierarchical nature of the police

that she, you know, there are looks exchanged with female colleagues, but she has to kind of swallow it because she understands the terrain she's working in. What kind of research did you do on this? I mean, did you talk to officers? Is this kind of the area that women still have to sit in? Well, I think at a base level, a woman has been a woman from the very beginning. So we've all been practising being women for quite a long time. So we've become kind of experts at repression and

kind of knowing how to deal with these paper cuts and microaggressions. And if you're of global majority or black or mixed race, you're Asian. You also have been that for a very long time. So you're an expert at dealing with with those things and knowing which battle is the battle to fight. And then I suppose you take that and you put that within any kind of structure. Ours is a police, and it's an additional layer for a person to have to deal with. And I wanted to look at all the different ways that that can happen in a space. But I certainly hope and feel that what June is experiencing will be felt by audiences that don't happen to be police officers. I think these are

scenarios that happen in all professional structures. They are very universal themes, aren't they? How did it feel? I know you worked with Peter Capaldi before. I think you worked, which drama did you work with him on? I say, so we worked together twice. So many, so many years ago, we did Torchwood. Torchwood, yeah.

And he was playing the prime minister and we became great, great friends. And then he directed me in Getting On, which I did with Joe Brand and Joe Scanlon. And that was hysterical. Peter is a very, very, very hilarious person. I love him. I get on really well with him. And we wanted to work together for years. We've been trying to find something to do together. We both have an interest in thrillers and police and darkness. But we also wanted to do something which kind of used the idea of somebody about to end their career and somebody kind of at the beginning digging up what the person at the end is trying to leave buried.

How was it working together then? How was it working with him? Because not only are you acting together, both names come up as executive producers. How was that to have a bit more of a reach into a drama? It was amazing working with him because, as I said, Peter's actually very fun and cheeky. And because of that, we made a decision not to rehearse together hardly at all, our scenes.

Some of our scenes are eight or nine pages of dialogue and they're all about the cat and mouse of who is giving what piece of information, how, when, are they lying? Are they telling the truth? Does somebody leave having one? Do they not win? They're these little skirmishes that we have. But because of trying to not read each other too much,

we couldn't be chummy on set together. So we kind of stayed apart. But in terms of development of the show, I've absolutely loved exec producing it because the privilege of being able to go do you want to do something together great what's the idea and then working with STV and Apple to create something from the very beginning is that as an actor of course usually you are majority in front of the camera or on stage by the time you get to a character people have been working on that character for months ahead of you and then you've got to spend all this time getting to know

them and then putting them in front of an audience being able to get in at this level meant that by the time me and peter got to set we knew these characters inside out we knew exactly who they were so from an acting perspective that was amazing but also i've always written things and i've always been a maker of things. And I have a real interest in the development of projects and collaborating with people. And there's something really satisfying about being able to shape not only the work you're making, but the people you're working with. And you can have a direct effect on the kind of people that are working in your crew, how you shoot things, when you shoot things. And I think that's an important part of being creative.

Talking of which, male violence against women's strong theme opening scene is all about that. And your character is beaten up several times by male offenders she's investigating. And it is brutal. It's incredibly well done, but it's visceral. How hard was that? And again, as an exec exec producer how did you shoot that

how did you make it so that you weren't the only woman involved in all of that I mean I'm like I said I'm a fan of a thriller I like drama and I like the work that I do but I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence for the sake of entertainment and And as an actor, you're sometimes put in these scenarios where without really considering it, whether you're watching it as an audience, that stunt sequence or that scene where a woman in particular is being attacked by men will be shot over and over and over and over and over again.

I can sometimes shoot a stunt sequence like eight or nine times. And the body doesn't always know that you're not doing it for real because you're being held down by your neck for so many hours of the day. And the only people standing around you are men. Then the mind starts to get a little bit confused. So you have to be really sensitive and smart about how you choreograph, who's around, what you do. But at the same time, I wanted people to understand that June is not some kind of Marvel superhero who just does all these things.

She goes after danger, looking for truth to defend other people, but she's a vulnerable human being. She has a kid at home. She could die in the process of this job. So it was important to show. But yeah, it was great being able to talk about how we do these sequences, when we do them, who's choreographing them. What does this piece of violence mean versus this piece of violence? How triggering is this? How is it not?

And also to make sure that our crew had the right mental health support, because it's very tough for crews to watch these scenes over and over again. Yeah, it's tough as a viewer, but it's absolutely brilliantly done. Before we let you go, you're playing another extremely strong female character. You're rolling Macbeth at the Donmar opposite David Tennant. I only work with doctors now. Just former Doctor Whos. How did you want to update the role of Lady Macbeth for a contemporary audience? Well, people keep telling me when they've now been to see it that they feel this about it that i've updated her somehow but when i'm i've wanted to play this role for a long time but i haven't

played it because i haven't felt like it was the right combination of things i think that the phrase lady macbeth is probably known by more people than people that have actually seen macbeth and i think that's because it's become a bit of an archetype in our culture of Lady Macbeth equals evil controlling woman, probably controlling a man to do something. Whereas I don't come at characters that way. I came at it from having spoken to David and Max Webster about what they wanted to do and being so excited about the idea of a couple that essentially lost a child and have been trying to have more and can't, or maybe have had trouble, or we don't know, and are in a community of people that all have children,

and where their culture is all about the heir, the legacy, what you leave behind. So, okay, we came at it from the perspective of a couple who are essentially suffering with a psychosis and are in grief. And I know people, and I'm sure we all know people, that have had fertility issues, miscarriages, have dealt with grief. Those are just human things. They aren't made-up crazy things. Those are just human things. So when you start to look at it from that perspective,

and then you continue with the choices that are made in the play, which I think is really about, they just kind of wanted to have a nice project together. It just turned out that it was murder, but, you know, it could have been painting the bedroom. It was just that I just wanted a little bit of lightness, you know, and they get, everything kind of unravels from there.

So I try to approach everybody that I play with compassion because they're human beings, they're not archetypes. Kush Jumbo there. And Criminal Record is available to watch on Apple TV now. Still to come on the programme, we discuss the term school refuses with Ellie Costello, a parent and the executive director of Square Peg, a not-for-profit which helps families that struggle with school attendance.

And we're talking about a new stamp to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the girl band The Spice Girls. Remember that you can enjoy Women's Hour any hour of the day if you can't join us live at 10am during the week. Just subscribe to the daily podcast for free via BBC Sounds. Now, last week on Women's Hour, we heard the candid admission by the former Labour MP and Government Minister Dame Joan Ruddock that she was ready to end her terminally ill husband's life using a pillow in a bid to end his pain. Her husband, the former MP Frank Doran, had been suffering from end-stage bowel cancer in 2017 and she struggled to get him pain relief medication in the hours before he died.

Here's a clip of that interview. I knew my husband wanted help to die. We'd always talked about it, but he hadn't given me precise consent because he couldn't any longer speak to me. And I think he was obviously terribly worried about the consequences for me. The pain was going to be under control. They gave him an injection in addition to the constant morphine and I asked how long will this last because by this time he was groaning in agony and they said it would last for five hours and indeed he went well for the first few hours. I said what time will you come back because this is going to be one in the morning. They said, oh, no, we go off duty at 10. I then called the out-of-hours doctor service.

It wasn't the sort of thing they normally did. I was able to give them the name of the drug that was used for the injections. Ultimately, after I said to them, either you come or I will end his life. I didn't know what the consequences are, but I will do it. And eventually they came. I want to see it possible to have a system which is now operating in quite a number of countries across the world, starting with Oregon in the US, but now in European countries as well, whereby a doctor or maybe two doctors have to make a decision that somebody is, you know, fully in their right mind, and they know what they want to do, and that their life

is going to end anyway. At that point, then there could be a choice and a means of medically supervised means of ending the life. The all-party parliamentary group for dying well stands against the legalisation of assisted dying, instead says we should promote access to excellent care at the end of life. Huge strides have been made in palliative care and also the chair of that committee, Danny Kruger MP, said on X recently that all experience shows legalising assisted dying is dangerous for the most vulnerable.

There has to be great supervision in this. There have to be very tight laws. People have to be in the right, you know, have the right mental ability to make a decision. And indeed, you know, the decision is tested by experts. So I think the safeguards are there. And if we're absolutely honest, there is nothing in this world which is 100% safe. There are risks in everything. And it would be wrong to say there is no risk. But I think the risk is very, very small indeed. She's now calling for a free vote in the Commons to legalise assisted dying.

The public debate around the subject has been revived in recent months by leading figures such as Esther Ransom, who revealed that she is considering travelling to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland if her cancer worsens, and the late Dame Diana Rigg, who made a recording before her death making the case for assisted dying. But others such as Baroness Elora Finlay, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and a palliative end-of-life care expert, are cautioning against a law change. Elora is also co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dying well. She believes improved access to care and pain relief is the answer to end-of-life care rather than the taking

of lethal drugs. She joined Claire live in the studio and began by responding to what we'd heard from Dame Joan Ruddock. What we heard from Dame Joan is completely unacceptable. Nobody should be left in pain. Nobody should have the nurses walk out and not say, what are we going to do to provide pain relief overnight? In Wales, we've been trying to tackle this on a national basis. And we've been teaching relatives when we see somebody who's very near the end of life in terms of the medication that they can give as breakthrough medication and how to give it with a community drug chart there. This has been going since pre-COVID and then during COVID it became a protocol because it was so urgent and it's been quite safe. And we've also trained up paramedics from the ambulance service who can come out and who can administer medication and who can alter doses as well as needed, because nobody but nobody should be left in that situation. his life and Dignity in Dying say this of course who support assisted death euthanasia say some

people are beyond the reach of even the best palliative care when it gets to that stage what do you say to those people? When you're a clinician looking after somebody and you're not getting on top of their distress then you need to ask for help from somebody else. Nobody should be so arrogant to think that they can just do it on their own. They need to seek help, possibly from an anaesthetic colleague, possibly from someone in psychiatry, from other colleagues to come in. I'd have to say from the Cardiff end, we've been completely integrated in the cancer centre. We're seeing patients during their oncology treatments. And now what my colleagues are doing is establishing a dashboard across the whole of Wales to identify deficits where patients themselves can enter how they feel.

And if there is an area where care looks as if it's really not as good as it should be, then we can go in and do something about it. This is about continuous improvement. These are things that are happening now. And the Cicely Saunders Institute have set up an impact centre. They're just developing it now to make sure that people can access the best advice as to what to do when to do it so a specific question on what's going on in wales then you're talking about the patient themselves and and friends or relatives actually administer administering pain relief yes when they are at end of life have there been any situations on that pilot where it's gone wrong?

No, there haven't been. No, there haven't been. But there have been many situations where people have been relieved. Now, if you think about it, we teach parents to give children insulin, which is potentially very dangerous. Giving people pain relief when you know the dose that they need is not dangerous. The aim is to get on top of the pain and to empower families to know what to do if the unexpected happens is really important because it puts them in control and it gives them a choice in the care that they're getting. So of the people on that particular pilot, did all of them die at home? Are many of them still alive? What are the statistics? What's the breakdown? There have not been problems. It's been safe because the clinical specialist team are assessing the patient, working out what they would need just in case and making sure that it's there. And they're working with the family. The not just about the medication, but how to help them get up from a chair, how to help them move, how to help them get to the toilet. So these scary

things that we hear about just are avoided. And that's all brilliant because that's palliative care for people who are going to die and it's easing their pain and their discomfort but that is distinctly different from the choice the patient might want to make about themselves we we had that interview with dame uh diana rigg who said um this any palliative nurse will tell you in the end patients often starve themselves as a means to an end the body becomes weaker the organs shut down it's not that they want to die that way it's how they take control um and that was her experience she said she lost control of her bowels her daughter had a in the shower every day um and in many ways brought them closer but it she said it was an undignified way to die and she didn't want to die in that way why

put people through that why take that choice away from them i would say that nobody should be left in that situation if you've got a situation where you've got such terrible diarrhea that that that's going on then what are the clinicians doing about it what if they can't do anything about it well i can't comment on the on her but the general deterioration on the body, not individual cases. This is what we're talking about. People having the right to say, I've had enough. Right. It's really interesting to see. Firstly, in Denmark, their ethics council looked at Oregon and the Netherlands

and looked at the experience with a view to possibly changing the law. The 17 members of the council, which was a balanced committee, came out with the conclusion that it is too dangerous to change the law. As a legislator, we have to make sure that the law is safe for everybody. Sadly, in this country, we have the Liverpool Care Pathway. It was very well thought out. It was very carefully intentioned. The problem was when it was rolled out that it didn't work because listening to the pilot you've done in Wales. Yes. Is that not open to abuse? I mean, you say nothing happened there, but with less scrupulous people looking after those people with access to those drugs, are you not open to the same kind of risks?

No, because the situation is monitored. The drugs are monitored. Medication given is at the dose that that patient needs. And what we do know is pain and distress are really powerful stimulants. And when somebody is comfortable and has pain relief, they can let go of life. And they do. They just let go of life and they die because they don't have this drive from pain or breathlessness or other distressing symptoms. I'm going to read you a couple of texts, lots of people getting in touch and we thank them for that. I'm 100 years old and in favour of a free decision and I would definitely wish to end my life in the case of a terminal illness or when my life becomes in my own assessment unbearable.

I do not want the pain and the indignity of being sent to die away from my loved ones and i would want to spare them the pain inconvenience and expense and the uncertainty waiting for me to die i'm not religious i refuse that religious people decide what happens to my soul what do you say to that person this has got nothing to do with religion but what about their autonomy their decision okay certainly that if the country, if the nation wants to have a suicide service, then that is up to the nation and the politicians to set it up. But the evidence from Oregon and from the Netherlands and certainly from Canada is that by having this as part of clinical care, making ending patients' lives a specific treatment is the most dangerous thing you can do.

Canada was told when they started to change the law that it would be really safe, that it wouldn't expand as it had in other countries. And lo and behold, it's expanded more rapidly than anywhere else. And now patients being killed really with lethal drugs is the fifth cause of death. Okay, but again, dignity in dying, say we're now closer than ever to a change in the law

and mounting evidence from countries like Australia, New Zealand, several US states has exposed opponents, fear-mongering as unfounded. I have to put that back to you very briefly in 10 seconds. What would you say? We're not fear-mongering at all. And Australia and New Zealand are already beginning to find problems, I have to put that back to you very briefly in 10 seconds. What would you say? We're not fearmongering at all. And Australia and New Zealand are already beginning to find problems,

even though they thought their legislation was tighter. It is not safe. It is just too dangerous. Baroness Elora Finlay there. And so many of you wanted to share your thoughts on this. One message here says, my mother was a strong believer in being able to die when she wanted to. She was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer and died on the 28th of December 2019. The district nurses were amazing, but because it was Christmas, everyone who had been involved in

her palliative care was on holiday. It was the bleakest week of my life. She had asked her nurses to let her die two weeks earlier. I wish they had. I'm so angry she wasn't able to die when she wanted And another one from Mariam says, Try to get to them ASAP and it works well for families. Families can call us 24-7 and we give morphine and other drugs to ease suffering whilst dying. Support and access to palliative care is the answer. The topic of school absences has been making the headlines this week. On Monday, Claire spoke to Nadine Good, Director for Children's Services in North England for the children's charity Barnardo's. She discussed a pilot they've been running involving attendance mentors in Middlesbrough. Nadine also discussed the many reasons for children not being at school, including being a carer for a parent, poverty and health issues.

So we wanted to hear from a parent of a child who doesn't go to school, not because they don't want to, but because they can't. Ellie Costello is the executive director of Square Peg, a not-for-profit which helps families that struggle with school attendance. She has two older children who are what is known as school refusers. Ellie began by telling Claire how she feels about the term. It really does pathologise the behaviour in the child as well and often the drivers are external to the child and indeed the family home. So I think there's some improvements there. There is a new term that is gaining popularity called emotionally based school avoidance but even that really does place the issue as being in the child. My local area

neighbouring to me in Coventry, they just call it EMAS, extended non-attendance from school. And I think that is a much more helpful term because actually then what we're thinking about is any and all children who are struggling to attend, access and remain in education. That could be truancy, exclusions or those who are in crisis or persistently absent. You heard Nadine Good from Barnardo's there. She outlined which factors act as barriers to attendance. We heard them, financial, mental health, all kinds of things, children becoming carers for their parents. The list is long.

With your children, did any of that factor in? Yeah, so we presented with chronic and long-term genetic health conditions. So we were sitting within the health umbrella and had no idea really that it would impact education. But of course, if a child is unwell and unable to access appropriate care, it absolutely impacts, but also developmentally impacted.

So those things such as being able to keep up with the curriculum and socialise and be well enough really did factor in. And my youngest daughter was identified as a young carer, which is something that I had never heard of prior to entering this landscape. I think Nadine talked really eloquently about that support around the family and having an advocate and trusted helper to help you advocate and get through the systems because they are numerous and complex and often aren't joined up and that's part of the problem and if

you have any additional disadvantage such as English isn't your second language isn't your first language or perhaps you don't have access to technology it's an absolute minefield and you have health or mental health needs yourself so I think is right, but I do think it needs to be done with families and at the child's pace and not two families. And the agenda can't be getting a child back into school as quickly as possible if school is part of the problem and that relationship is broken down. Exactly.

So you think a wholesale change needs to happen about how this whole issue is addressed because it's multifaceted, as we've established, and the language is often very punitive and the action is often punitive as well, isn't it? You're not there, therefore you are marked down or you are fined. Now, I know you've made suggestions to the Education Select Committee. What changes did you suggest so we're asking for three asks at the moment and the government are looking quite carefully at things like the registration system there's 23 registration codes and depending on the culture and practice and ethos within your school your child can be authorized or unauthorized in different ways one of the things that we're calling for is a mental health and well-being um absence code because we've got too many schools who don't feel they can authorise absence due to mental ill health in children or don't believe that children can struggle with their mental health. In fact, I was that parent. I didn't know an eight year old could develop a clinically disabling and diagnosable anxiety condition.

But believe me, it happens and it's a terrifying thing when it does so I think we need to draw parity of esteem and separate our physical and mental health absences and actually bring mental health challenges out of the shadows and when parents are reporting a mental health concern it's recorded as such that'll really help with data the other thing we're asking for is for an attendance code of practice and that would be in line with the admissions code or the send code of practice which is attached to the children and families act that's a far more robust rigorous piece of legislation that would be co-created and have parliamentary oversight at the moment we've got bits and scraps of guidance that are

being chucked out left right and center and actually they aren't fit for purpose we saw non-statutory guidance being released last year and that saw an increase in our membership of 15,000 families and an up surge in fines and prosecutions so actually guidance is is can be a massive lever in the wrong direction. So we're asking for a much more rigorous approach to attendance, including legislative oversight. And when we talk about truancy, there is this think tank, the Centre of Social Justice, calling for a review of fines and prosecution. And they're saying there should be a support first system, which is the language, is the mood music coming out from both major parties in the country at the moment. We had Bridget Phillipson saying, well, you know, that's what they're going to do.

They're going to make it child-centred, family-centred, should they get into government and have mental support in schools to a much greater extent than happens now. So what would you welcome on that front? Do you look at both parties and see any gaps in what they're offering? Absolutely. Well, so we welcome the change in language and the understanding that additional needs and external factors and mental health are all part of the picture. This is welcome. And four or five years ago, when we first started campaigning, that really wasn't part of the national dialogue. So we like to think that we've had impact there. We are concerned that actually some of it is just tinkering around the edges

and what this is touching on is the fact that education broadly isn't working for the majority of children we had um Simon Jenkins writing about it in the Guardian yesterday um and and our children are holding a mirror up to us we have a fundamental breakdown in how we actually respect and respond to families. And in fact, I was just listening to Kevin Collins, who is preceding Bridget Philipson for the Centre for Social Justice. And he said that we aren't, you know, we do need to treat families and trust them and work with them as primary carers. I think many, many families feel that they simply aren't seen that way. The DfE launched yesterday a Moments Matters campaign, which is, you know, he had a runny nose, send him in. And actually, that really does undermine the fact that parents

are by and large making the right decisions and have the authority to make the right decisions on whether their child is fit to attend. So I do think we need to flip the narrative and start really changing the conversation around families because it's extremely deficit-based. We can't be trusted, we're pointy-elbowed or we're lazy and we don't value education. That simply is not true. Ellie Costello there and if you're interested in hearing more about that attendance mentor scheme that we mentioned, you can head to BBC Sounds and listen to the Woman's Hour episode for the 8th of January. Next, for the first time, Royal Mail has dedicated a set of stamps to a female pop group to commemorate 30 years since

the band was formed. I am, of course, talking about the Spice Girls. They've become the sixth band to receive a stamp collection preceding them, a list of all-male bands, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen, The Rolling Stones and Iron Maiden. After being formed in 1994, Spice Girls' first single, Wannabe, hit the charts in 1996 and by the following year had gone to number one in 37 countries. The group's catchphrase, Girl Power, went mainstream, influencing the young female fan base. Today, some argue they continue to shape music, culture and fashion. Others have an entirely different view, if they care at all.

Emma was joined by Lauren Bravo, a culture journalist and the author of What Would the Spice Girls Do? How the Girl Power Generation Grew Up, and also DJ, broadcaster and Spice Girls fan, Yinka Bukini. Lauren began by reminding us of the landscape in music at the time the Spice Girls released that famous track, Wannabe. So it was boy bands as far as the eye could see, or at least it was from where I was standing as an eight-year-old pop fan.

Of course, we were coming out of Britpop and all the machismo that kind of went with that. There were brilliant women in guitar bands. We had American punk like Riot Grrrl. There were amazing R&B artists. But as far as mainstream pop was concerned, record executives, I think, were still laboring under this misapprehension that only girls, sorry, girls only bought records by boys, or I should say men. And the Spice Girls, they were told repeatedly when they started out, you know,

we won't put you on the cover of magazines because they won't sell. Girls only want to buy records by boys. And so, you know, they didn't really set out to sell this message of kind of soft feminism to preteen girls. But it kind of lit a fire under them when they realised how much misogyny there was in the industry and it really became their manifesto. I was thinking back to my tapes on my CD rack this morning. And apart from Lauryn Hill, and Janet Jackson, everything else was boy bands, you know, and I'm a similar age to what you're describing there. Yinka, for you, when the Spice Girls hit for me, certainly, it was different. It was an explosion, even if you didn't know it to be.

And I believe you won a radio competition. Yeah. So I am one of five girls in my family. I'm the youngest of five girls. There's seven kids all together and there are five girls. And so it was Spice Girls mania from the moment they dropped Wannabe until the group disbanded. And I remember I must have been maybe eight, maybe nine, and a radio station did a competition

where you had to answer the phone within three or four rings or whatever it was, and you had to sing the lyrics to spice up your life. You couldn't say hello, you couldn't say what's up, you had to sing the lyrics. So between the hours of 7am and 8.45 before we went to school in the morning I answered the phone and between the hours of 3pm and 6pm I answered the phone because I was the one who knew the lyrics to the song and we won and I think I

think we only won a signed CD and a poster I didn't get it I mean I was the bottom of the pecking order but Spice Girls were, you know, the first movie I remember going to see Spice World with my sisters. It's the first cassette that one of my sisters bought. They were very much the soundtrack to our household. And as a woman, do you think it did anything for you particularly, and a legacy for you now when you look back? Do you know, I think it was a precursor to what feminism means when you're six or seven. You don't know that, you know, singing, you know, girl power and, you know,

friendship lasts forever has any impact whatsoever. But now I'm an adult. I think, yeah, those foundations were probably built during those playground gists when, you know, I was the default scary Spice, but I still had a good time doing it. And we were singing lyrics about women being friends. Well, on that, because Lauren, we're talking about what you've looked into with how, you know, culture is impacted. And it can take a while to sometimes see the results.

There are those who accuse the Spice Girls of co-opting feminism as a marketing strategy. But there were real world effects. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, we've heard so many artists kind of these days will credit the Spice Girls for being hugely influential. But they had an enormous impact beyond that. And I'll be honest, when I started writing my book, I thought maybe it was a bit of a stretch, this kind of concept. I thought maybe it was a long feature at best. And actually, as soon as I started looking back on it, thinking about my own youth, you know, interviewing other fans my age, it became very clear that you can draw a direct line from the Spice Girls to kind of what then went on to become the fourth wave of feminism.

You know, there's definitely some connective tissue there. And it's true that they weren't perfect feminists. Of course, it wasn't an academic approach. And I think it was quite hard for perhaps our mother's generation to swallow it. But like Yinka says, it was a sort of feminist starter kit. You know, it was a pair of training wheels and a good push to kind of get us going. And for a lot of us, it was the first time that we sort of encountered the idea that perhaps our gender would hold us back. And here were these kind of five incredibly loud, confident women. I mean, they wouldn't have been embarrassed talking about the cystitis, would they? I think they would have been straight at the doctor.

They would have been absolutely talking about it on top of the pops. And the fact that they weren't that polished and they were often sort of critiqued for not being the most talented. But I think that was actually part of their charm was that they were just so confident anyway um and you know it did sort of create this generation of little girls who weren't afraid to run around in the playground yelling at boys you know stomping our enormous shoes and believe that we could kind of be anything we wanted to be yeah those shoes those trainers were massive weren't they Inga they were huge you have you met a few of the Spice Girls in your life? Yeah yeah I've met Emma and I've met Mel B and I am so happy they were nice because you know the whole thing about meeting your idols and are they going to be as perfect as you think

they are but yeah absolutely lovely and I also went to the reunion show as well. So at Wembley. And that was incredible as an adult to sort of to see that with my adult eyes and realise what the lyrics actually mean. Well, yeah, I mean, we're always listening back to lyrics. It has a different experience. My first show here, I was very lucky that Mel C came and sang Here Comes the Sun and did a reworking of that for us, which was so, so beautiful and lovely to hear her doing her thing and on her own as well. Although there are rumours, Mel B recently said just a couple of days ago, I believe on USTV, that they're actually going to be releasing some really good news in a few weeks that involves all five of us. So as we hit the 30 years, there is apparently some good news coming. Let me ask you, Lauren, as well about the cultural climate for women in music. I'm just aware last week, female pop stars celebrated a record breaking year on the UK singles chart. 31 weeks atop of the top 40.

They accounted for 48.5 percent of all songs that reached the top 10 and seven of the year's 10 biggest songs last year were by women. Do you think you can draw a line? We can, absolutely. But, you know, we only need to look at an artist like Taylor Swift to see that things haven't necessarily changed as much as we would hope. There's, you know, women can still achieve this phenomenal success, but there's also still this weird kind of mistrust, I think, of any woman who has that huge success with a fan base that is made up predominantly of young girls, of LGBTQ people, of anyone who perhaps doesn't fit that sort of, you know, mainstream patriarchal idea. And this constant looking to sort of trip them up

to poke holes in their success, I think that's something that unfortunately we do still see with female artists today. This almost desire to prove that it was kind of all a con all along. You know, we saw the Spice Girls often called like great businesswomen because, you know, they were very keen to slap their branding on a lot of products. And it becomes this backhanded compliment, almost as though there must be some great trick going on. You know, if you're selling millions of records, it can't simply be

because you're making music that people absolutely love and enjoy and want to spend money on. Well, sometimes that obviously comes from the media, but it also can come from those in the industry as well um as you as you're alluding to there there's a message here can we take a moment to remember eternal please who preceded the spice girls and were adored by girls so i think we should read that out at this point and you were nodding there about their barriers yeah what do you want to say well i was i was sort of just thinking that i do think the Spice Girls crawled, so a lot of girl bands and female artists of the like can run and thrive now.

But I do think, I agree with what you were saying, Lauren, that there is change. It just feels slower. Last year was a very good year, and hopefully we see that more. But the barriers need to sort of be lowered because I think that women are able now, especially with the stats that you read out, we're showing that we can sell and we can be in the mainstream

and we can be in the charts. So it's just that opportunity and it seems a little far and few in between for female artists. Although with those stats, there was some concern that it was still just a very specific group of women that can get to that place. And also, you know, there are much older artists as well that we still need to look at not being represented necessarily in that, which I think I was reading just around one of the music critics at the papers talking about that,

that these figures, again, are skewing a slightly different picture. It's not good news for all women. No, it's a start. Journalist Lauren Bravo and DJ Yinka Bukini there. And again, many of you wanted to get in touch. A message here from Tabitha, who's not a fan. She says, as someone who was 25 when the Spice Girls appeared, the ongoing interest in them is astonishing.

At the time, I dismissed them as such a cheesy Barbie doll view of women and girls. And Ben on X says, an important conversation about the Spice Girls. But now let's hear about the Bangles as well, please. And thank you. Thank you for all of your messages. That's all from me on Weekend Woman's Hour. Emma will be back with you on Monday at 10. And she'll be talking to Diane Udell, also known as Jet from Gladiators, about the series coming back to our screens. Plus, who is Nikki Haley? We'll hear more about the woman emerging as Donald Trump's

nearest rival in the run-up to the US presidential election. Until then, have a great weekend. Thanks for listening. There's plenty more from Woman's Hour over at BBC Sounds. I'm John Ronson and I'm back with season two of Things Fell Apart, my show for BBC Radio 4 that unearths the origin stories of the culture wars. This time around the stories are all about the battlefronts that engulfed us during lockdown. The stories twist and turn until each one ends with the explosion of a new far-reaching culture war. If you tell me that my nephew had superhuman strength, if you tell me that he didn't feel any pain, well, he's dead now.

That's Things Fell Apart, Season 2. Listen on BBC Sounds. 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.