Woman's Hour - Women's relationships with the dark

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

NB: The music in this broadcast has been removed from the podcast for rights reasons.We've just had the shortest day of the year, and the most amount of darkness. But how do women live their lives in the dark today? You might have to work at night, or find it the best time to be productive. Or you might harness darkness as a time to think and meditate. Anita Rani speaks to two people who have considered the pros and cons of darkness in very different ways. Lucy Edwards is a Blind Broadcaster, Journalist, Author, Content Creator and Disability Activist and Arifa Akbar is theatre critic for the Guardian whose investigations into the dark formed her book, Wolf Moon, which came out this summer. Earlier this month we asked you for your night time experiences and were contacted by listener Catherine Smeeth who is a 55-year-old newly qualified class 1 HGV driver which is the heaviest you can get at 44 tons. She does a 300 mile round trip in an articulated lorry with a double decker trailer. Catherine got her licence 3 months ago and says the night roads are "great for a newbie getting to grips with the road". She works 12 hour shifts overnight, and recorded one of them for us. Dame Maggie Aderin Pocock is a legend when it comes to the night sky. She is a space scientist and educator, having presented the Sky at Night and she is presenting this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. She has written books for adults and children, presented TV film 'Do we really need the Moon?', received a Damehood in 2024 for services to science education and diversity and in 2023 had a Barbie doll made in her name. So who better to ask about how the night sky can inspire and comfort us? We’ve heard about darkness and fear and overcoming that and how the lights in the sky can be both awe inspiring and comforting. But what about the past? What kind of relationship have women had with the dark over time? To help answer that, Anita is joined by archaeologist Dr Marion Dowd and Professor Jane Hamlett.Moving on from the past to modern day celebrations at night. And where better than with nightclubs and music. Anita is joined by Woman’s Hour’s resident Boxing Day DJ Jamz Supernova who suggests some tracks for getting the party started and keeping it going. Presenter Anita Rani Producer: Corinna Jones

Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Hello, good morning. It's Boxing Day. And I hope the dust has settled after a lovely Christmas day and you're having a very peaceful morning. Or maybe you've got lots of plans and you're taking a moment here before you head out. Over the next hour on the programme, we're going to explore women's relationship with the dark. It's a few days after winter solstice, the shortest day and the point of the year when the nights are at their longest. To set the scene, the lights have been dimmed here in the studio as we think about how the dark makes us feel.

Maybe it's comfort. It could be fear. It might be calm or the irritation of impracticality. It might be tiredness. We've got some wonderful guests who are going to be talking us through this. Broadcaster and Disability Advocate Lucy Edwards. Theater critic Arefa Akbar. They're going to be describing their own very personal.

personal relationships with the dark. We'll hear from listener Catherine, who takes us on her nighttime HGV lorry run. We've got Dame Maggie Adairn Pocock talking about her love of the night sky and how passionate she is that women see space as a viable career option. Archaeologist, Dr. Marion Dowd, historian Professor Jane Hamlet, will tell us how women's lives are being impacted by darkness. And finally, we have our very own in-house DJ, the rather aptly named Jam's Supernova. She'll be joining us. to talk about getting the night going. And I have to say, it is rather mysterious starting the program in pitch black.

We've got the lights off. I've just got the glow of my computer screen in front of me. And it's made me feel very cozy. And radio is an intimate medium anyway. But all of a sudden, I'm just sort of just feel as though it's just me and the microphone. But I do have guests. So may I request to put the lights up? Because I need to see your faces, Aretha.

Jams. Oh, that was nice. It was quite intimate, wasn't it? I quite like it. I mean, I'm somebody who likes to have things quite cosy and I prefer lamps to bright lights anyway. There is an intimacy and almost a darkness in radio, don't you think? Yeah, definitely.

Sort of the radio could be emanating from darkness. I'm often got lights dimmed or off sometimes, but the radio's on. There's a direct sort of intimacy in contact. I particularly love radio for at night as well. You know, when you've just got it on in the background. Shipping forecast. So emotional in a way. It is.

And jams amongst many other things. You record a radio program. But what happens if you're recording something in the daytime, but it's meant for the evening? Yeah, so what we do is we'll set the clock in the studio to be the desired time. So let's say you're doing a show at 1am. You would set the clock to emulate that. And then you would dim the lights and we'd pull the blinds down.

So then you kind of feel like you are broadcasting at that time of day. And it makes a difference. Yeah, massively. Nighttime broadcasting different to daytime broadcasting. Yeah, so. different. In what way? I think my tone of voice is different. If I'm in the daytime like, you know, in my normal Saturday show, I'm kind of more

up and more, you know, energetic and more reflective of what people are doing on a Saturday, whereas when it's like the evening the different jam supernova voice comes out and I can pause and think a little bit about what I'm saying in the music that I'm picking. That's very nice. Yes. I like that. Right.

It's not a live programme. I must tell everybody. So if you do want to get in touch, we won't be receiving them directly. It's pre-recorded. However, If you do want to tell us anything and want to get in touch with Woman's Hour, then please do so in the usual way. You can email us by going to our website. And of course, you can follow us on social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour.

But first of all, we're asking, how do we live our lives in the dark today? You might have to work at night or find it the best time to be productive, or you might harness darkness as a time to think and meditate. Well, my first two guests have both considered the pros and cons of darkness in very different ways. Lucy Edwards is a blind broadcaster, journalist, author, content creator and disability activist. And Arefa Akbar is theatre critic for The Guardian whose investigations into the dark formed her delicious book, Wolf Moon, which came out this summer. Thank you. Lucy Aretha, welcome to the programme. Thank you. As I just mentioned there, Arefa, you're a theatre critic, so your job is essentially at night time and also in the dark.

Yeah. And you're writing reviews. So how does that work? Do you take notes in the dark? I do. Yeah, we all do. All the theatre critics do. Whether we can read them afterwards is sometimes debatable. But first of all, I'm quite scared of the dark, and that's partly what inspired the book.

But in a theatre space, it's communal darkness. And communal darkness, for me, is utterly safe, and it's a great leveller. So the lights are off. You're in this auditorium together, and there's a sort of comfort and excitement, I think, in it. And when I make my notes, if I were to put a little. pen light on or a phone light on, I think people would get really angry because the darkness is part of the deal here. You tend to remember what you've seen, but I'll put keywords down and feelings and thoughts. And when I get outside, it'll, you know, I'll have wonky words

all over the page or I'll fill a page with four sentences. But it's really useful because it's in the moment how you're feeling and what you're thinking. Why did you want to explore darkness in your book? It started off out of fear. You know, I was thinking, why am I afraid of the dark? I'm 50-something women. I'm really independent, sort of fearless in many ways. So what is it about the dark? The inside dark scares me than most. Unknown inside rooms that I don't know, hotel rooms, spaces inside. Ironically, I'm fine outside because I grew up in a family with a father who loved walking. So I sort of inherited that love of nightwalking. But still, there's this fear. That led me into

a bit of an expedition into darkness, into night time. When I realised that night time and dark spaces, this sounds obvious, but it took a little while to realise darkness and night time is different for women. It sort of became a gendered expedition into the dark. And we will talk

more about that in a moment. But Lucy, I want to bring you in as well. Thank you for joining us on Boxing Day. We're talking about the dark. What would you say your experience of it is? It's so fascinating. I live my whole entire life in the dark I can't see. And for 12 years, it's pretty much been this way, minus a tiny bit of light perception that I actually lost about seven years ago now. So my authentic kind of vision of darkness has always been, I guess, when I was losing my sight, when I was really young, like from 11 to 17 years old, that was the, you know,

the place where I couldn't see the most. You know, I got night blindness first because of my retinal detachment. So the dark outside was always really scary. So the opposite, like inside for me, even now, I am so happy in my own space because I've learned it. I've got kind of muscle memory and the ability to like touch and feel like anything in my own home. It's like my sanctuary. Could you explain to us what it was like when you first lost your sight?

Absolutely. So I would say there was the most scariest moment. now I'm well adjusted and I love being blind but it hasn't always been that way so I had well have a really rare genetic condition called inconscionant to pigmenty

and that led me in my right eye to have retinal detachment at 11 so that made me visually impaired however I could sort of bumble along I always say that at school I didn't really want people to know that I was visually impaired and I would hide my cane and I'd rather kind of not use

it. Now it's a very different story. I think when you lose your sight at 17, you're kind of just terrified. I remember walking outside the front door with my late guide dog, Olga, my first guide dog, and putting one foot in front of the other was terrifying, even thinking to, you know, trust this lovely gorgeous doggy with your life and hold that harness for the first time was utterly just earth shattering really. So how did you overcome that? build strategies to cope with that. It was a long process. It was quite terrifying.

It felt like Groundhog Day when I first would wake up from the morning to the night and then going to sleep, I'd be like, there's nothing different about my life, but why do I have to wake up blind? And the why me kind of set in. But the more I did things independently in my beautiful darkness, that's how I like to call it. I, you know, I can make cups of tea and I, you know,

people often look, look maybe at my life and think, oh my gosh, you don't, don't do that. You don't want to touch hot water or you're going to hurt yourself. But because I've got strategies now, like liquid level indicators, other adaptive tools, like my tools in technology is AI these days. I don't feel alone in my darkness and my reality is very fulfilling. And I find other ways to kind of bring light into my life, but just not in the, yeah, the typical sense. I've just written down the phrase, My Beautiful Darkness.

Yeah, I love that. Arafa, in your book, you explain how you're an insomniac. I bet there's quite a few people listening who can relate to that. You kind of fall into two categories, don't you? I'm the person who always says, oh, yeah, I sleep really well. And there's eye rolls around the room from the people who can't. Envy and resentment. Yeah, yeah.

I've been told that many times. You're also scared of the dark, but you really enjoy night walking. So how does all that fit together? And I just already I can hear and feel all the paradoxes and contradictions around darkness, the beautiful darkness that Lucy said, talked about so beautifully, and the terrifying darkness that we as women, but, you know, as people feel often and are conditioned, I think, to feel and head out. So I think they sit side by side, the terror and the sort of thrill of it.

And we talk about the thrilling darkness. There's a sort of fairground ride fear. You know, for me, the inside, I imagine all sorts of things. I sort of project it into the darkness. Maybe that's a result of being told lots of bedtime stories that are really quite scary that my parents told me. It was a South Asian tradition to tell you terrifying stories of terrifying creatures that children love. Children love macab tales. And so I grew up on a diet of that.

And that's this flip thing of fairground-ride fear. You know, you love it. You're scared and you're thrilled. And so that's the sort of space that I was looking at. Obviously, the practical sides of the fear, you know, the fear is real. So many people, everyone from Peter Sutcliffe to Wayne Cousins has shown us the fear is real. So there was that side to look at. The practicalities of night walking and being a woman in the double.

But then there's also pleasure and liberation that you get when you go out, even when, you know, when you deny yourself sleep, there's that heady sort of, I'm going to go out, I'm going to disobey my body clock, and I'm just going to go out and have fun, and I'm going to do things to excess, I'm going to express myself. There's a wildness to the night hours, I think, that allow you to be wild and a sort of boundary crossing to be purposefully awake for the sake of hedonism, for the sake of congregating and pleasure. I know, Jams, you're a DJ, and I grew up on, you know, sneaking out 14, 15, 16 years old, and we'd go to the Limelight or Buzzbees, you know, these clubs that were bringing in versions of house, acid house, and then it turned into rave. And I just remember how important and vital that felt in my life. And I've just returned to that club scene, and it was like a third. I just realized how important it is sometimes.

For me, because I feel is completely the same about that kind of clubbing world because it's where I found my community, if you like. And I think for a lot of people who come from the margins, you find your subculture, you find your crew. It's so true. It's another, I always think of it, like, you know, you might read to work out your brain. You might go to the gym to work out your body.

And I feel like going out out as if going raven is another way of working out. out a part of your psyche. When you're saying you coming back to it, it makes me feel so excited because we need people to still want to go out at night time, otherwise we don't have a night economy. And we also think it's frivolous, but for me, I realised it was vital. It was a vital abandoned part of myself. So I went off to the Bergheim on my own. I love this.

Okay. We're going to wait for this story. No, no, bring it in. You went to the Bergheim on your eye. On my own. Yes. This is the Uber Club in Germany, in Berlin. famous, it's the one that basically you have to queue up to get in and they're famously

refuse entry. So did you dress up first of all? I really did. I consulted a friend who lives in Berlin, who's German and she said the less, the better. That club particularly is really about bringing out a part of yourself, a nighttime part of yourself. Yes. So I looked like a sort of burlesque version of myself, but actually that was true to me. I wore black chain mail, a lot of gold. So I went blingy. And I got in. I was in shock for the first. However, it felt almost, this sounds really, you know, sort of pretentious,

but it felt like a religious experience. Yes, I've had that in the same club. I've had the same experience in Burkhaina. All three of us have been. Panorama bar. Panorama bar. I want to bring Lucy in here. I mean, Lucy, feel free to tell us about your clubbing experience,

but also I'm intrigued to know about how, after Arefah saying that she's an insomniac, how seeing darkness yourself do you struggle and your own sleep patterns how you how you kind of struggle or not struggle with those it's really interesting just hearing you all talk the psychology of late nights and kind of thinking about me waking up I would have a lot more of a body clock when I had a bit more light perception but I have this condition named non-24 meaning I kind of wake up at like three four a m being like is it lunchtime have I just slept a little bit and it's only when my phone is kind of talking to me and saying, no, in fact, it is 3.m. I'm then trying to tell my body, no, you know, we do have a Sarcadian rhythm.

Like, please don't wake me up necessarily. And I have this battle all the time with like nighttime tea and being like, let's, let's have Zen spa music and let's wind down. And all of those things do really help me. But I do find that I have a bit more broken sleep. But also just picking it from what you guys were saying. understanding that we're as women and as a disabled woman myself, you know, I can't see whether it's dark or light inside or outside my home,

yet I'm still worried about walking in the dark. And I think because of what we've been taught, like as women, and then that kind of leads me on to thinking, oh, well, you can hear a pin drop at night. And my hearing, although it's possibly the same as everybody else's, I do hone into different sounds more. And I think I work myself up more with the crunching of the leaves, which are somewhat objectively beautiful, of course,

but I'm thinking about those footsteps behind me. I'm overthinking those things. And I'm like, am I just doing that because I've been conditioned to? Not because, you know, it's the same experience whether I'm out in the day or night. That's really an interesting thought. I went to the Isle of Sark, which only allows for natural darkness. I went out at 9 o'clock at night, and I was petrified.

And I talked to the guesthouse manager the next day, and she said, when she first arrived, She had to unlearn a whole lifetime lessons of taking care because women are held to account. They still are held to account if they go out and something awful happens at night. I just want to bring Lucy in again and you pick up on what you were saying about my beautiful darkness and that phrase that you gave is Lucy. What's the best bit about the dark for you?

Oh, it's gorgeous. I think number one, I am able to not judge people. on their physical appearance and it's not great to do that anyway but being blinders taught me that judging a book by its cover is not the thing to do. I just, I love it. I think also it's allowed me to really experience and think about the things that I can do, not what I can't. The beautiful sounds and the soundscapes and the sound baths that I can go to and all of the technology that I use to really, you know, from a little bit of echolocating I can't say that I am

an expert at that like Daniel Kish and all those experts in the States but yeah you can very much feel where the wall is by clicking your fingers knowing whether a space is big or small and I guess just really

the darkness is a place of like tranquility for me and a time for myself and I think I've learned that meditation is a massive part part of my life, you know, I can kind of be, you know, run full of people and kind of be one with myself, especially, you know, getting the train and things. I'm thinking about, you know, working with my guide dog and getting to the destination. But really, if I am standing in a party full of

people, I can be quite insular if I need to be. And I think that is a strength. Well, how do you navigate that? Because we are in peak party season. Honestly, it can be quite overwhelming. I have earbuds that can kind of, very much drown out at the top notes and the big bassy notes of the sounds. So that really does help me so I can hear people. I think what's really interesting in a pub setting, I'm going out a lot with my friends. And it's always been a problem where everyone else around me is lip reading in these clubs.

And, you know, my husband's often saying to me, oh, Lucy, they're talking to you. And I'm like, oh, but my ears work. This is so weird. But yeah, no, I do have like tools and technologies now. I hold my phone and give them an earpiece. And I'm like, hello, and then they can speak to me across the table. So I don't know.

I feel like most of my answers are technology now. That's incredible. And as part of the book, Norefa, you investigated people who work at night. Yeah. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport workers, hospitality. What stood out for you? How many women there were in these jobs? And the ONS National Surveys show that while the night economy is traditionally male,

the female numbers of night workers is rising. So I did a night shift at a care home and there were men too, male carers, majority women, the nurses were women. If you twin that to some of the sleep science I looked into, it's quite worrying because there's evidence to suggest that women biologically experience lack of sleep more acutely. There's not enough scientific research in sleep, by the way. It's so much a mystery of why we actually sleep need. sleep. But what I found with the female workers was extraordinary because they often take on the night jobs in order to accommodate motherhood in their lives and mothering and caring for the children. So they'll do a night shift. And this was overwhelmingly the case with the nurses I spoke to

and I spoke to a theatre doorwoman who was caring for her disabled sister. They'll do an entire night shift. They'll travel home. They'll get the children ready. They'll get the food, you know, their dinner ready and they'll do all the housework and they might snatch some hours of sleep in between. So, you know, imagine the circadian rhythms there. And I didn't properly address what you said about insomnia either and lack of sleep. But what I found was there's a lot of biology to women's insomnia or sleep disturbance because of hormonal shifts. Pre-menstrily, there are days, you know, that your hormones are sort of encouraging less sleep or missed sleep. Menopause, which I experienced, has huge shifts in your hormones, as we know,

which causes sort of early wakefulness. I don't know if, you know, you guys have experienced it, but that pin sharp waking up at 3 or 4 a.m., your brain is absolutely clear. Yeah. And you're, you know, you're writing mental lists and addressing mental arguments and anxieties. And that's a result of shifts of hormones. And it's a menopausal thing. So, Some intomnias are through hormones. Yeah. I laugh because I just, that is me a lot, actually. 4 a.m. Ping.

Yeah. And it's like boom, but then I'm having like metaphorical arguments or like doing having a full on workday but all in my head whilst lying down. Lucy's also nodding away. That's something you can relate to Lucy. Oh my gosh. So clear. You could hear a pin drop you like, what's that?

I'm sorry. Is there a burglar? I'm checking your phone for the alarm system. That's because the amygdia, the fight or flight system. is activated. The adrenaline's up. The best way to counteract that is visual imagination, apparently, is to sort of imagine yourself out of that adrenaline state. For now, thank you, Arefa Akbar, whose book Wolf Moon, is out. And Lucy Edwards, who's accessible makeup range, Etia, is out very soon. Thank you, Lucy. Well, earlier this

month, we asked you for your nighttime experiences, and we were contacted by listener Catherine Smeath, who is a 55-year-old, newly qualified heavy goods vehicle driver. That's the heaviest you can get at 44 tonnes. She does a 300-mile round trip in an articulated lorry with a double-decker trailer. She got her licence three months ago and says, The Night Roads are great for a newbie getting to grips with the road. She works 12-hour shifts overnight and recorded them for us. It's 6.45 in the evening.

It's wet and it's cold and it's very, very dark. And apparently there's a full moon tonight, but I can't see it. and I've just arrived at work where I'm going to pick up my truck and my trailer for my regular run that I do up to Derbyshire from Suffolk and I'm really hoping that my trailer is in the warehouse in the dry and not out in the yard in the dark and the rain. Okay so I've got my truck for the night and I'm just filling it up with fuel before I hook it up to my trailer. It's been a really busy day here in the yard. Everybody in the warehouse stuff all look really, really stressed. So as much as I enjoy company, as much as I've been starved of it today,

I'm just really looking forward to getting out on the road. I've been at work just under an hour now and I'm all hooked up. I'm done on my vehicle checks. I've secured my load. I've got 44 tonnes on a double-decker curtain-sided trailer for the next three and a quarter hours all I'm going to see is the lights of other drivers. Yeah, let's go. It's just before midnight at the hub after leaving the yard three and a quarter hours ago. It's a nice straight forward journey. I've just parked up my truck. If I do anything, I'm going to use the loo. And the loo's here, women's loos, are pristine because there's hardly anybody who uses them. There's hundreds of trucks here at the hub. I don't know how many, but there must have hundreds,

hundreds that go through every night. And I've only ever seen five other women drivers in the time I've been coming here. While I'm driving, I like to listen to podcasts. And to be perfectly honest, if I didn't have that, I think I'd find this job a real struggle. Sometimes I can't hook my phone up to the cab, so I'm relying on the radio. But thank God for Radio 4 and the World Service,

which is brilliant at night time. Don't know what I'd do without it. Okay, I'm in the warehouse now. And queuing again, but inside now. And I made it in without taking my wheel nuts off on the very narrow lane getting in on the metal barriers. So, going. The trucker's etiquette on the road of flushing each other in after we've done our painfully slow overtaking and then acknowledging that someone's flashed you in with your

indicators is much more adhered to at night time during the day it's a bit hit and miss but at night night it's really really rare that another truck doesn't do that which i really love and it makes you feel a bit of camaraderie and you're a bit less alone So sailing by is on the radio. I'm still in the queue to be unloaded and the shipping forecast will be on in a minute. And I will hear it again probably later on. When I'm driving back to the yard, I like to hear it. Not that I'm going anywhere near a ship. It's not much use on the road.

Hiya! Alpha five. So that's that sorted. And now I'm heading back to the yard. My ETA will be just before 7 in the morning, which is when all the day staff will be there. So the yard will be very busy when I get back. Hopefully a nice straightforward drive home.

I've done various jobs in my life. a prison officer, being a self-employed gardener, and then for 10 years before doing this, I was a post-de. I wanted to show my daughters that you can even, even at the age where a lot of people are looking at winding down, you can still do new things, learn new things, learn new skills, push yourself way beyond your limits, and do things that scare you absolutely witless. Well, it's 7.45am and I am back home and the sun is up and I'm in my garden and I'm just saying hello to my chickens who would have got up probably not long ago. My daughter's already gone to work so I am going to have my breakfast, dinner, whatever it is and I am very, very ready for my. bed, I will put in my earplugs and put on my eye mask and hopefully sleep till about five o'clock.

What a fascinating insight, Catherine. Thank you for sending us that lovely voice note of an evening with you driving your heavy goods vehicle. I love that you're doing it to inspire your daughters so that they can see that it's never too late to do something different. You're listening to Women's Hour. It's all about women and the dark today on Boxing Day. Joanna Joanne also contacted us saying, I worked in Bristol, worked nights as a police officer in the 80s and 90s and loved it. It was a 10pm to 6am shift for seven days straight once every month, busy with nightclub fights and burglaries, etc. But at 4 a.m. we had tea back in the station and then to walk the city at dawn was just beautiful. Every night different and usually memorable.

I'm sure Jams will have something to say about that sort of dawn time as well when we come to talk to you again in a moment. But first, Dame Maggie, Ada in Pocock is a legend when it comes to the night sky. She is a space scientist and educator having presented the sky at nights and she's presenting this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which I love. She's written books for adults and children, presented TV films, Do We Really Need the Moon, received a Damehood in 2024 for services to science, education and diversity. And in 2023, had a Barbie doll made in her name. So who better to ask about how the night sky can inspire us and comfort us.

Dame Maggie, welcome to Women's Hour. So lovely to have you. Thank you so much. Lovely to be here. So as a scientist, do you actually spend a lot of time in the dark? Well, yes. As an astronomer, definitely. Yes.

It's funny because my queer span both branches. Because I'm a space scientist. I build instrumentation that go into space. And for that, you don't need much darkness. But I've also worked on ground-based telescopes. Some of the huge ones, like the VLT, the very large telegraphes. in Chile and the Gemini telescope. And there, yes, I go sort of a nocturnal

because I need to link my equipment to the telescope. And so I'm up all night and then sort of driving back at dawn because when the light comes up, we can't do the astronomy anymore. So, yes, I do love the night in that way. When were you first drawn to the darkness? It sounds very emotional. It does, doesn't it? It does, doesn't it?

So something straight out of Star Wars. So for me, I heard Lucy say she's non-24, probably to my mother's horror. I've always been an insomniac. And so the night sky was my friend. Because, and also I think someone mentioned sort of inside darkness. Inside darkness can be quite scary. Yes. When I look outside and I see the stars and the moon and things like that, that is all, that's the comforting, the darkness I crave.

because it feels sort of warm and sort of like you in the studio at the start when everything was dark and sort of cozy the nighttime sky gives me that but the inside darkness seems sort of cold and a sort of bit worrying but the outside darkness sort of gives me a sort of a comfort

yeah I mean I think a lot of us can relate to that when I'm out certainly filming in the countryside and I get to clutch a night sky and in all its glory it just takes you away out of yourself It's very humbling and connects you to something much bigger and there is no fear in that moment when you see a beautiful moon and all the stars.

Yes, I call it the moon for mindfulness. Okay. When I'm sort of a hustle and bustle in life, if I sort of catch a glimpse of the moon, I just calm down and relax and take a deep breath and then I take in the stars and everything seems just a lot less busy, a lot less scary. It is, yeah, moon for mindfulness for me.

When did you first realise that you could study the night sky. So at a relatively early age so my father used to tell me about sort of the moon being his friend so I always described myself as a self-certified lunatic which is hereditary actually

because I've passed it onto my daughter and we do sometimes step outside and howl at the moon to the shock of the neighbours. Very important. More women should do it. You know, yes, and because it's cathartic and wonderful and yet quite primal too. So I love doing that.

But one of the things I did was At the age of 14, I ground and polished my own telescape mirror. And so I realised that I present a program called The Sky at Night now. My predecessor, Patrick Moore, you say, well, you know, with a telescope, you can see this, this and this. And I thought, I want to see this, this, this and this. Yeah. And so, yeah, at the age of 14, I sort of went and ground and polished my own telescope mirror. And that sort of led into a career in instrumentation, making instrumentation for sort of a space satellites,

but also for the ground-based telescopes as well. I'm still thinking about how unearthly ground and make your own telescope mirror at 14. That's quite a thing. Well, actually, if you watch the Christmas lectures, we do a demonstration of it. Perfect, done, and it'll be on eye player if you've missed it. What about women and space? The only people who have visited the moon are 12 white American men. Yes, yes.

Surely room for women. Well, the 12 white American men went with the Apollo program. Yeah. And so, but now we have Artemis. Now, Artemis in Greek legend was the sister of Apollo. And so NASA are now saying, yes, it's been 12 white men, all from the States. So now we want to send a woman, we want to send someone of a different ethnicity, maybe someone from another country, maybe someone called Maggie.

Surely you're top of the list, Maggie. I write regularly, but they're not returning my letters. But I think it is important because it was such an epic moment. It's such a, to step out onto another body apart from Earth. It's such an exciting thing to do. And it's such a small demographic that have done it. So they are trying to shake it up. And sort of in the coming year in 2026, it's going to be so exciting

because we are sort of looking to go back to the moon with Artemis. That's very exciting. Can I pick up back up on the sphere of the dark? Because Arefa mentioned it earlier in the program and you've just mentioned it now. What is that fear? Where did that come from? The fear of the inside dark, as opposed to the outside. Yes.

Actually, it's funny because I think I categorised dark in different ways. So there's the inside dark. because I think it's the familiar suddenly doesn't look familiar because when, especially as a child, but when you're inside and it's dark, you're not used to seeing it that way. Because usually there's house lights on or there's daylight coming in through the windows.

And so things that usually look quite innocent, there's a sort of a shadow over there. Oh, is that someone there? It's just that fear and it tickles at the edge of your brains. And we sort of, I think someone was saying that we create things and sort of, you know, superimpose things on it. So I think that's the inside dark. And to me, there's the countryside dark where you can sort of look up at the night sky and take it all in and it's glorious. But then there's also the big city

dark. And I was born in London and shot grew up in London. And I used to catch night buses. Yes, yes. Tells about the night bus. Yeah. And so it's that fear of interaction because you don't have the big sky above you. You have streetlights and it's quite harsh. And there were other people interacting and you're looking at those people thinking oh well you know am I vulnerable here and so at an early age I developed my um my nighttime walk which looks like my nighttime walks don't mess with me maggie is currently bouncing in her chair with a real shoulder swagger yeah yeah night time walk for me exactly that confident but telephone in one hand and a set of keys in another you know yes yes is it yeah for protection and I'm close to my destination yes and I could

talk to anybody at any given moment and also avoid people. I cross roads. Do you do this as well? Yes, I think it's almost instinctive. And I don't know if it is being women. But it's just sort of, you know, don't want that confrontation so try and avoid it.

Are you still an insomniac? And does that work well with the job? Does that help you? Yes. Well, it's quite interesting because for me, because I have a condition of dyslexic, which I do see as my superpower, but I also recently discovered I'm ADHD as well. And so during the day, there are so many different distractions.

And so usually when I'm writing books or producing anything, it's usually about 3 o'clock in the morning. And I've procrastinated for long enough. And I think, okay, I've got to do this now. But then there's a calm then. And sometimes I might look out of the window and see clouds or see the night sky. And I'm just calm. And I think, okay, I can do this.

And then I will hyper-fixate. I will dive in, you know, hookline and sinker with no other distractions. So yes, I do quite a bit, yet non-24, I think sums me up nicely. I do quite a bit of my work in the wee small hours. Not 24. And do you ever fear working at night now? Not so much. I suppose quite a bit of that work is done at home.

And even sort of during lockdown and things like that, I do like stepping out. And when I was a student in London, I went to Imperial. I'd go to places like Hyde Park. And there was a fear about it, but I needed that open sky. And so, yeah, with my sort of swagger. walk, I'd get there. And then once I was in the park, there were very few people. And sometimes I'd see foxes and hedgehogs and I had the night sky there. So yes, I think I crave it, that outside darkness. Yes, I can relate to that. And there is something about even the

night bus, just what happens to humans at night. We just see a difference. The night bus is a particular experience at 4 a.m. in London. Yeah, people that you wouldn't necessarily see in the daytime. It's good. Good experience. But not. Not when you fall asleep on the bus. That hasn't happened to me for a long time. Miss you'll stop. End up at the bus station. Oh, no.

That's happened a few times, but not for years. I hasten to add. Maggie, Dave, Maggie, thank you. Stay right there, though. You might want to chip in some of the other bits and pieces we've got coming up. Let me bring in my next guest. Because we've heard about darkness and fear and overcoming that and how the lights in the sky can be both all inspiring and comforting.

But what about the past? What kind of relationship have women had with the dark over time? Well, to help answer that, I'm joined by archaeologist, Dr. Marion Dowd and Professor Jane Hamlet. Welcome to the programme. Marion, caves. Tell us about life in the past. So my work over the last 25 years or so has been looking at how caves in Ireland have been used over 10,000 years. And I suppose when I started this work initially, I expected to find lots of evidence of people living in caves.

And, you know, we have this very pervasive idea of the Flintstone. and cavemen in caves. But actually, what I found was that for about 8,000 years throughout prehistory, caves were almost exclusively reserved for ritual activity. And just to, you know, mention, Arifa talked about theatres and darkness. And, you know, I think a lot of these caves in prehistoric times are essentially theatres of ritual.

And it's all about, you know, engaging with the darkness and seeking out darkness, particularly in the Bronze Age. and that this darkness aspect is fundamental to these funerary rituals or religious rituals and the offerings that people are placing deep inside caves. And so I think it's something that as archaeologists generally, it's only recently we've started to look at the physicality and the physical experience, the sensory experiences that people had when they used things like caves or passage tombs and engaging with the dark and how that was.

What did you see a link between women and caves? In the archaeological record, not particularly. There's one very interesting burial that we have from the west of Ireland. It's about two and a half thousand years old. And it's of a woman who was in her 40s or 50s, which in the Bronze Age was incredibly old. And she had been brought into a very, very deep part of the cave where you have to really squeeze

and her body would have to have been dragged and pushed through very, very narrow passages. And so I find her very interesting. I wonder what she did in her life or what kind of lifestyle she led to be placed in this incredibly inaccessible part of the cave. But generally, the archaeological record doesn't tell us if it's males or females who are using caves.

But then if we look at the medieval mythology from, you know, 10th, 11th, 12th century, Ireland, we've got lots of interesting references to caves being places of supernatural women and women thriving in the darkness of caves. And there's often this kind of combat in the mythology, the medieval mythology, between the supernatural cave-dwelling woman and a mortal man.

She's never in combat with a mortal woman or with a child. And the kind of theme is very generally that if he can entice her out of the cave, she dies, but if she can entice him into the, the Cape, he's essentially a goner. He's never seen again. And so there's lots of ways that that can be read. We don't see it turning up archaeologically, but it's very strong in Irish mythology. And it persists into the folklore of the 19th and 20th century in Ireland and Scotland as well. Fascinating stuff. Jane, I'm going to bring you in because your area of history

is 18th century onwards. What do we know about women's lives in the dark then? We looked at late 18th century and early 19th century. Actually, one of the really big changes is is the arrival of more light. Gas lighting is introduced from the late 18th century and starts to be used to light the streets and it's also used in the home. And this is actually really quite transformative. So if we look at street lighting,

so once the streets themselves are lit, they're much more open to surveillance and it's much easier to kind of see what's going on. So actually the experience we've all been talking about, of walking about on the streets at night, that wouldn't be possible at all without street lighting. So street lighting sort of starts off in the late 18th century and then when gas is introduced, this really kind of brightens it up. And by the 1840s, almost the whole of London is lit up by street light. So this kind of opens up the city, I think, and it makes it a space

where women can go out and feel slightly safer. And in fact, this city is celebrated in in some Victorian paintings in the late 19th century show London as a quite sort of modern well-lit space and women are shown kind of actually going around the city by themselves and it can be quite a sort of contemplative and even romantic space. So I think streetlight makes a really big difference to women's lives. Of course, there is a darker side to the city as well. Was there a fear of streets and the dark before lights were introduced?

Yes, I mean it's quite hard to track, But I would sort of assume actually that there has always been a fear of the darkness and what can take place, you know, beyond surveillance, beyond light. I think, though, that actually it's quite interesting that at the same time as the lighted and kind of policed city emerges, actually fears about the city as a dangerous space for women also grow. And I think that's partly because of the expansion of kind of popular media in the 19th century and the kind of publicity that high-profile cases of violence against women.

So, say, for example, the Jack for Ripper murders in 1888, they get an awful lot of press attention, and that gets circulated all over Britain. People are reading about that. And I think those stories really feed into people's fears, and I think they really sort of help build this idea that the streets are not the safe place for women. And what about gas lights in the home?

How did that change the lives of women? Gaslight in the home, really made quite a big difference because although people had had things like candles and oil lamps before, gas light was stronger. So you could light a larger area with a gas jet and you could do it more brightly, if you like. And also, it was becoming cheaper and cheaper. So by the end of the 19th century, gas was the cheapest way in which you could light your home. So I think having access to that kind of light in the home made a really big difference to women. if we think about things like entertainment in the evening.

So actually the range of activities that you can do at home in the evening increases greatly if you've got access to stronger light. So things like reading, playing the piano, you know, parlour games. We'll be sort of favourite Victorian evening activities, if you like. But also things like women's work. So, you know, even during the day, on a kind of dark day, the home is often quite a dark place. So if you have kind of reasonably strong in,

interior light. It makes work in the kitchen quite a lot easier, for example. So I think women's domestic labour would have been very much improved by the arrival of this kind of brighter light. Marion, I've got to ask you what the experience of working in caves is like, because you work in dimly lit spaces. Yeah, I find it very interesting. I mean, often I'm directing a team of archaeologists, and so the experience working with a group of people in the darkness or close to darkness is very different to if I'm in a cave on my own. And what I always find very interesting is that, you know, we might be underground for three or four hours. And then when we come out for lunchtime, people get very irritated, actually, when they come outside and they see that

it's now raining and it had been sunny in the morning. The changes. And people often talk about how kind of aggressive everything seems when they come out of that kind of very soon. dark space. You know, everything seems amplified. The colors are amplified. The sounds are amplified. And it takes a little while to adjust. I found it interesting listening to the other people here today talking about the fear of the inside darkness, because that's what I really enjoy. And I really like that sense of working in these kind of small spaces that are very dark, as opposed to the outside darkness. But I suppose what I've always noticed with myself and with other people working in caves

is that nobody is unaffected by the darkness. No one spends a few hours in a cave and comes out and says that they have had no experience. They'll either feel very afraid or very calm. There's always a reaction to that

prolonged time spent in darkness. Harifa. You know, I've been an In Veteran Somniac and I went on to a cave retreat in Spain for a few days. It had such a powerful effect on my sleep. I've never slept so well. There was a calmness in that very dark space. Marion? It's absolute darkness and really the only place in the modern world and in the

past world that you could experience absolute darkness is in a cave if you're a sighted person. You know, we talk about the darkness of night, but even in the countryside, it's never totally silent. It's never totally dark. There's always a light from a house in the distance or the moon the stars. We talk about things like sensory deprivation and sensory chambers, but they don't offer the full range of sensory experiences that a cave does. And I'm jealous to hear about someone spending a retreat. Yeah. Just you on your own? Yeah, it was. It was a group of us, actually, but I went on my own. I think it's the lack of shadow. I couldn't imagine any scary thing in the corners. There was no light and shade. It was just a sort of comforting, blank

kit of darkness. Wow. For now, though, Professor Jane Hamlet and Dr. Marion Dowd, thank you. We can now move from home entertainment at night, facilitated by gas lamps to modern day celebrations at night and where better than with nightclubs and music. We've been joined by Jam Supernova, resident Boxing Day DJ throughout the program. We've been hearing about the inspiration of the night sky.

So first I have to ask you, about your name. Not related to the night. I just found it in a book. I've got to bring in Dame Maggie here because you are smiling from ear to ear. Tell us about what supernova is. Yeah, a supernova is when a star maybe 10 or 20 times more massive than our sun explodes and releases sort of new elements which form sort of new life.

And it's one of the brightest things in the whole of the universe. Well, would you look at that? And the stars going supernovae in other galaxies. So as a DJ name, I think you've hit the high spot. Thank you. And it's so appropriate. for you because that's exactly what you do whether it's on your

six music show or I've seen you play live in various places like you know that is what you bring you bring the crowd together into stage behind that well I've only really thought about the new life element recently which has come from people telling me that was my mum was like you know it's a star that burns brightly and then disappears you know

so now thank you I've got a new meaning yeah new life so we talk about just working in nightclubs I mean you were telling us earlier that you can sometimes quite a long time without sleep. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it ever since I've been young, really, doing all-nighters. There'll be some weekends where on a Friday I get up and do the school run, have a day, you know, sort of a day-moaching, like admin, working out,

and then I'll go to my gig, and it could be abroad or it could be somewhere in the UK, but my set time might not be until like 2am. Yeah. And I'm just not really good at napping, so I'll just kind of roll all the way through, and then I need to be back on air on a Saturday for my show at 1pm, so normally that means the first flight, back, which can be like 6 a.m. at the airport. So then I don't want to go to sleep because I'm scared. I'm the opposite. I'm a deep, deep, deep, deep sleeper. So I don't want to

not wake up. So then I'll just go straight to work and then I'll sleep in the evening. You know that it's coming. Yeah. Is there a difference between DJing in the day and DJing at night and what you play and planning your set? Yeah, massively. I mean, obviously I love festivals and they are, you know, they are the lucrative element of what we do. And the mass, the mass appeal you see so many people you played in front of so many people but DJing in a nightclub at a night time

is always my favourite way of expressing myself because people are different like they're more looser with their inhibitions and you were saying something about the theatre and even the cave the idea of the theatre of rituals that is what the club is and if the club can get the lighting right and the sound right

then you have the ambience that's perfect and I've been doing club nights in Peckham for a while And at the beginning we just went We were like, we need content to sell the night So the next people come But in trying to get content We were light in the room too much

And it was losing the vibe So then recently we were like You know what, forget the content Actually it doesn't matter And I don't actually feel comfortable filming people dancing Let's bring it all the way down And then it's been the most like Transformative experiences

Watching people really dance Yes Because you're free And that's what the club experience is all about to be with people in that nighttime space where you're not in your other life, your work life. And my favourite thing about being in a club is when the DJ, as you would, takes you on the journey. So come on, Jams. Three tunes then the sort of the warm-up, when you're properly in it, and then maybe one of the last tunes. Talk us through what you do,

and then we'll have a burst of the songs that you've picked. With the warm-ups that you can be more experimental. So I picked to Sergio Mendez, Magalena, edit. And it's really sparse. It's mostly drums and vocals, but it's familiar sounding enough for people that have a sort of interest in global music that they can sort of sing the chorus and they know it. And then it's sparse enough for me to go in whatever direction

I feel the night needs to go. So that's kind of how I'd warm up. Oh, yes. Even the rea was like, I know this one. Maggie's in. Maggie's skanking. Good. Maggie, we're going out.

We're all of us. I so want to. The Boxing Day Raver. It begins here. All right, so we're warmed up. All right, we're warmed up now. I'm going to play a guaranteed banger, tried and tested, saw Luke Unabomber player at Glastonbury. He's like a selector journey.

Oh, he's the one. You know, take him on a journey. And I was like, really like that track, Shazemda. Start working it into my own sets. Unashamed. I don't care, Luke. Love it. Sorry, thank you for letting us.

It's by Axel Bowman, and it's called Nocturn. And it's like a peak time track, but you almost wouldn't think it is. It's how you drop it. It just keeps on, like, building and building and building. And I just watch people become very. to it and it kind of excise me Let's go feral Who needs the burghine when you've got you

In a studio We can just carry on like this I am so into this Brilliant So that's the now we're up We're in peak time You know you've been fist pumping You've lost all your inhibitions

And now I need to take you home You have to leave at some point I'm sorry I'm sorry for you've got to go home So I want you to leave feeling joy That's the most important thing On the dance floor I think So I love this track It's called Parabin Disco

and it's from a guy called Dimitri in Paris and it's just a feel good disco track. I want there to be tears. That'll do it. Happy tears. And there's the applause. Yeah.

And now we are leaving and it's that twilight, it's that time, it's dawn, it's for M, tell us about that when you, we've already left and then you're packing your records away and what do you see at that time? What is that experience of finishing work

at first thing in the morning? Oh wow, because it's so weird because I'm quite sober. So I'm just like, right, have a little glass of red wine as I'm packing down and then normally going outside and waiting for my cab to arrive

and I just love watching groups of people huddling that don't want to end the night trying to working out what to do like you know whether they're huddled over a phone whether they're going to go down to the chip shop and get a last bite to eat

or they're going to go to an afters and I know I'm going to call it but I like the anticipation for everybody else and you see the crossover of people wanting to continue the night or going home from the club or going to Chippee or whatever, and then people going to work. I've always just loved that intersection of watching when the world's merge,

you know, like the night gremlins and the people starting their day. This has been such a fascinating programme, and we've covered so many bits of the nighttime experience in darkness. I just want to thank all of my guests for joining me. It's only approaching 11am, but I think it's kind of in-between time, isn't it? It's the only time of the year we can do what we want. So I reckon we could just leave the studio. and get straight to the club.

Let's do it. All right. Somewhere will be open. And I'll just make sure I'm back again in time for Women's Hour tomorrow at 4.30. We'll get her back. Enjoy the rest of your boxing day. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time.

Hello, I'm Nula McGovern, and I want to tell you about a BBC podcast called Send in the Spotlight. The number of children with special educational needs is increasing. Too many parents are having to fight to get those needs met. and councils are spending money that they do not have. Against a backdrop of government reform, I bring together families, teachers, experts and decision makers to reimagine the system.

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