Standard Issue Podcast

In 2024, alongside Steph McCall and Olympic athlete Rose Harvey, Natasha Edwards co-founded BOLDLI running club, a response to safety concerns around women runners. Now, BOLDLI provides resources to help women gain the confidence to run when and where they want, and this year they’ve teamed up with the Altra Kielder Marathon to launch the Stay Out There: She Runs Free initiative.

Jen was tickled pink to catch up not only with Natasha but also with former world, European and Commonwealth champion, Paula Radcliffe –

You can find out more information about the Altra Kielder

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Karis Kelly's award-winning play Consumed is about to tour the UK, so Hannah grabbed the chance to chat with the playwright about Northern Ireland in the arts, mother-daughter relationships, religion, superstition, OCD, trans-generational trauma, blood on stage and a lot more.

Tickets for Consumed can be bought here:  https://painesplough.com/productions/consumed/

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Sally Gardner has had a long career of writing for children, for adults, and for everyone between. She chats to Hannah about her latest novel, The Bride Stone, growing up in London's Gray's Inn and about her belief that being dyslexic helped rather than hindered her writing career.

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Are you ready for our close ups? Maybe not, but tuck in anyway as we watch Gloria Swanson's glorious swansong in Billy Wilder's dark comedy about lost fame, madness and how to arrange a funeral for a chimpanzee. 

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Adventurer, award-winning travel writer and Director of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Jean McNeil knows a lot about the world and our ever-more threadbare connection to it. 

She chats to Mickey about her latest book, Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, a front-line witness account of the impact of climate change, and about her travels to and writing about remote, inhospitable places. Which started with being raised in one. And the fact Jean trained as a walking safari guide? Well, that’s (big) catnip to our Mick. 

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During her career as a midwife, Dr Laura Abbott – now an associate professor in research at the University of Hertfordshire – became interested in the plight of women who gave birth in prison, or were separated from their babies by incarceration. And so she founded the Lost Mothers Project: a research project exploring the effects of mandatory separation of babies from women with Criminal Justice System involvement. As the Lost Mothers Project prepares to take its findings to Parliament, Jen chats to Laura about the vital work being done, an increased awareness of the England and Wales prison system for women, and why change needs to come now.

You can find out more about the work of the Lost Mother’s Project, including Scenes From Lost Mothers, here.

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Starring Michael J Fox, Christopher Lloyd and a genuinely beautiful school building, Robert Zemeckis’s time travel comedy blockbuster continues to be a cultural touchstone. At the time, it dazzled at the box office and with critics alike. But 40 years on, how does it fare with Mick, Hannah and Jen? Do the inevitable time travel plotholes matter? How much did the young Jen fancy the young Fox? Does Mick own this 1980s smash on DVD? And, perhaps most importantly, what in the Doc Brown is going on with Hannah’s hair? 

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Oddbody is Rose Keating’s debut short story collection, an anthology of bold and unsettling tales inspired by her love of horror – and the genre's intersection with the female experience. In this episode, Jen gets inside the weird and wonderful mind of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award winner, as she and Rose talk about how the body horror genre lends itself to the lived female experience, the inherent comedy of horror, and the horror (the horror!) of eggs.

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Author Esther Freud first shot to fame with her debut novel, Hideous Kinky, back in 1992. Her tenth novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, reunites readers with sisters Lucy and Bea, and astutely captures the realities of being a sister and having a sister. Spoiler: as much as pop culture would like us to think it, a sister is not a built-in BFF. 

Our Mick chats to Esther about sisters, siblings, parents, the slippery nature of memory, and love in its many forms.

My Sister and Other Lovers is published by Bloomsbury and out now

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