The You Do You Show

My guest this episode is writer, director and producer Danielle Dash. You may know her from her award winning 2012 web series Dear Jesus, her incisive pull-no-punches culture writing, and her Twitter, a platform she uses to raise her voice about pop culture she cares about, work she supports, and GIFs that deserve our attention. We talk about the gospel music that makes her feel uplifted and hopeful, the relationship she forged with her school friends through storytelling, Twitter as a portal to new friends connected by mutual love and admiration, and Real Housewives.

This week I went round to Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s house to have a cup of tea and a chat. Gabriel is a writer, actor and director – his first short film, THRUSH, won the Vimeo Best Narrative award, he’s been named a Dazed Visionary by Dazed and Confused, and he was nominated for a BAFTA for The Last Hours of Laura K, a twenty-four-hour long piece he directed and co-wrote. Right now he’s in the final stages of prep for bringing his new play Whitewash to Soho Theatre, a semi-autobiographical play about London, family, and the intersection between race and class. We talk about the experiences that inspired the play, as well as his childhood obsession with ghost-adjacent pop culture, the song that reminds him of his best friend, and a compelling theory he has about the viewership of reality TV.

This week I had the absolute pleasure of going round to have a coffee with writer and actor Milly Thomas. She’s written a whole host of plays but it's Dust - a really frank, portrait of suicide and what comes after it - that we talk about most during our conversation. We also discuss portrayals of mental health in pop culture, the music that’s guaranteed to make her cry in a Pret, and the Gordon Ramsay one-liners that make her spit tea at her laptop. Extremely mixed genres there but it works.

My guest this week is the poet and author Andrea Gibson, whose writing and performance explores love and loss and anxiety and gender amongst so, so much besides. We talked about Andrea's forthcoming tour and recent book, Lord of the Butterflies, how they found their way to the stage through watching jazz in New Orleans and longing to perform while simultaneously gripped by stage-fright, the concept of kindness as coolness, and Harry Styles! Perfect combo.

This week my guest in Charlie Craggs, founder of Nail Transphobia, an organisation that sees Charlie tacking trans issues through conversation, education and manicures. She’s also the Editor of To My Trans Sisters, a collection of letters written by trans women in which they share their stories. We talk about everything from Charlie’s early obsession with Posh Spice to the music that made her feel a sense of community during a really difficult time at school, to dealing with the concept of ‘cool’ as an adult, looking back on how that’s changed since her teenage years.

My guest this week is illustrator and mental health advocate, Venus Libido. Her art reflects life in 2019 – messy and complicated, a constant balancing act between self-love and self-doubt. Though her pieces are often tongue-in-cheek, lots of them shine a light on issues of mental health. It’s something we talk a lot about throughout the episode, as well as its intersection with the act of creating work, social media and, of course, pop culture from the music of Michael Jackson (featuring a discussion of the recent HBO/Channel 4 documentary Leaving Neverland) to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. First though, Venus tells me a little bit about how she started out as an illustrator…

Gina’s a force of nature online and off, and it was such a pleasure to talk to her about everything she’d achieved over the last few years. After 18 months of solid campaigning, this January Gina succeeded in making upskirting a criminal offence. She’d been upskirted herself at a Killers gig in the summer of 2017 and learned then that what had happened to her was not a specific offence. She shared a facebook post about it which went viral, before a petition was launched to have her case reopened. It gained so much traction that, along with lawyer Ryan Whelan, she was eventually able to bring a private members’ bill backing the creation of a specific law to make upskirting an offence. It clearly was not easy, particularly when the bill was blocked in the Commons by Conservative MP Sir Christopher Chope – a moment which Gina talks about really movingly in this episode – but she didn’t back down and eventually she achieved what she set out to. We talk about how she did what she did, how pop culture was a port in the storm for her through the worst moments, and how she harnessed it to serve the campaign.

Eliza Hopewell is an artist best known for her candid unapologetic plate paintings. Her work is hugely popular, but its that very popularity that forced Eliza to stop what she was doing in the middle of last year and take stock. We talk about how, since then, she’s reframed her work, her prices, and ultimately, her self-worth, as well as her early obsession with PJ Harvey, the song that got her through a difficult breakup, and her current fixation on the sublime simplicity of the work of Alex Katz.

My guest this week is Katy Hessel, the creator of The Great Women Artists, an Instagram account that celebrates all the female artists it’s very likely you’ve never heard of. Katy believes that art should be for everyone, and that’s just that bit harder to affect if the vast majority of the art we see if by men. We managed to cover a lot of ground, from what inspired her to start The Great Women Artists, to Skins-era new rave to the feminist advice she’d give to her younger self.

My guest this week is the culture writer Simran Hans. As a film critic for the observer Simran has led me to see so many films I might otherwise not even have heard of, let alone been inspired to watch. Even over the course of this interview, she made a couple of incredible viewing recommendations that I scrambled to write down in the edit and am planning to watch over the next couple of days. As a fan of her fluid and engaging writing I’ve wanted to get Simran on the show for ages but how great a guest she would be on You Do You was made all the more stark when I listened to her chatting as a guest on the final episode of one of my favourite podcasts SRSLY just before Christmas. On the show, she provided an in-depth analysis of the merits of my most beloved Nancy Meyers’ film, The Holiday. Based on that analysis alone, I thought it was pretty likely that we would get on. We get through a lot in this episode from the inexplicably enduring allure of The OC’s Seth Cohen to the perceived unattainable cool of early seasons of Channel 4’s Skins, to our mutual recent experience of a 1975 gig. Let's get into it!