The below is my whittled-down selection of podcast episodes from various shows featuring Fi & Jane as guests, including a couple of respective solo episodes I enjoyed – a sure-fire way to get to know this much-loved duo in a whole new way, as podcast guests, with their ‘host’ personas left behind. The result is that we see their more vulnerable, personal side, together with revelations about their careers and lives to date. Listen and enjoy.

The Shift
Fi Glover and Jane Garvey on Fortunately, friendship and pushing boundaries in your 50s // Nov 2021

I’ve long been a huge fan of former Red magazine editor Sam Baker’s podcast The Shift, which explores the experience of midlife (i.e. after your fifties) and features a smorgasbord of high-profile, interesting guests. Fi & Jane come on, aptly, as a pair for this one – they discuss openly how they became a collective ‘voice of a generation for p*ssed off older women’, open up about their own friendship and the success of their former podcast Fortunately. Listen on your podcast app >>

White Wine Question Time
Fi Glover & Jane Garvey – Leaving the BBC and podcast ‘Fortunately’; Oversharing; the fight for gender pay parity and their return to live radio. // Oct 2022

Hosted by Kate Thornton, Yahoo UK’s White Wine Question Time (WWQT), which (as it says on the tin) takes place over the course of three glasses of wine, has enjoyed a slew of brilliant guests over the past four years. In this episode (which you can also view a filmed version of), Fi & Jane are fresh from their announcement of moving from the BBC to Times Radio – they speak candidly about this decision, while Jane opens up about her sister’s comments that she didn’t ‘sound like herself’ while hosting Woman’s Hour together with her much-publicised fight against the gender pay gap at the BBC. Listen on your podcast app >>

How To Academy Podcast
Fi Glover and Jane Garvey – Did I Say That Out Loud? // Feb 2022

The How To Academy podcast invites influential guests to share new ideas for changing ourselves, our communities, and the world. In this episode, recorded live in London just before Christmas 2021, Fi & Jane get a bit meta when discussing the freedom associated with podcasting as a medium compared to radio, plus the power of social media to ‘tell your own story’. Listen on your podcast app >>

How To Fail
S6, Ep 8 How To Fail: Jane Garvey // Nov 2019

In this moving episode of Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail, Jane Garvey presents the host with not three examples of failure (as the format demands) but actually seven, as she ‘struggled to narrow it down’. She speaks honestly about the grief of having gone through multiple miscarriages (as Day has herself), together with sharing her secret to being a good interviewer. Listen on your podcast app >>

Women’s Prize For Fiction Podcast
S2 Ep6: Bookshelfie: Fi Glover

Fi shares her selection of favourite books with journalist Zing Tseng as part of this popular Women’s Prize for Fiction series, including I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron, plus why she’s chosen them. Memorably, Fi discusses her experience of growing up in Hong Kong – an experience which influenced her love of another book, After You’d Gone by contemporary bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell. Listen on your podcast app >>

To learn more about Fi & Jane and their show, read our interview in Issue 25 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

What’s your favourite Fi & Jane guest appearance? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter!

The post Top Guest Appearances: Fi & Jane appeared first on POD BIBLE.

As listeners of Off Air with Jane and Fi will testify, nothing quite compares to the much-loved duo’s wry rapport and composure while discussing everything from Downing Street shuffles to, say, the merits of a baked potato. The voices behind the eponymous Times Radio show are, of course, Jane Garvey, who presented Woman’s Hour until December 2020, and Fi Glover, the broadcaster behind The Listening Project (2012 to 2022).

Each episode begins with a familiar format: a chatty introduction from the hosts, recording shortly after they have come ‘off air’ from their live show, which runs Monday through to Thursday. This framing device allows them to debrief from the most recent live segment – they’ll comment on their most recent guests (everyone from Jamie Oliver to MPs), before listeners hear a full replay of the interview itself. Before we get to the interview (and in the episode’s closing segments afterwards), Jane & Fi typically read through some reader emails – always with amusing commentary – and discuss a mixture of domestic anecdotes, for instance the most recent Nigella Lawson recipes they’ve tried out, with some glorious digressions – plus, what’s trending on the news.

It would be totally remiss of me not to mention Fortunately… with Fi & Jane, the award-winning BBC Radio Four show and podcast that featured the powerful pairing since 2017. It hit headlines when they left the BBC for Times Radio in October last year, leaving behind their original show and its 30 million downloads. Four months in, if you’re a long listener yet to follow Fi & Jane to their new home, be reassured that Off Air has proved a popular follow-up – and these are my cherry-picked favourites from the show to help you catch up. Feast your ear lobes on the below…

Chat & Chop – with Jamie Oliver

The first-ever episode of Off Air started with a bang: the pair discuss settling into the Times Radio studio, outline the show format going forward (so this is a good gateway episode if you’re new to the show), then they are joined by Jamie Oliver, who discusses his latest book One Pot and expounds his wisdom of decades of campaigning for healthy eating for children, amid the cost-of-living crisis.

A saccharine note of journo pap – with Elizabeth Day

This episode comes fresh off the back of the controversy around then-Prime Minister Liz Truss, making for a politics-themed beginning followed by a discussion of the difficulties of starting a new job in middle-age. The highlight of this episode is guest Elizabeth Day, a fellow podcast extraordinaire and bestselling author, who as coincidence would have it has interviewed Truss on multiple occasions and shares her insights. Talking of inside scoops – I particularly enjoyed Fi & Jane’s discussion of their former fellow BBC employees’ toilet habits, together with their own ‘favourite cubicles’ at their newfound Times Radio home.

If music be the food of love, order her a Happy Meal – with Fred Sirieix

One for First Dates fans. After a chat about everything from slippery pavements to elderly parents, the pair introduce guest Fred Sirieix, the TV dating show’s charismatic maître d’ frontman, and get into an animated discussion about relationships, together with the politics of cooking for dates and significant others.

I love Nando’s mash – with Romesh Ranganathan

Actor/comedian Ranganathan, also a fellow podcaster, is the guest on this Nando’s centric episode – he tells listeners all about his spontaneous decision to get an Albanian flag tattoo, his committed love of the popular chicken franchise (and the trio open up about their go-to orders and preferred sides) and what he would do (as a former maths teacher) if he were Education Secretary for a day.

At least I’m owning my hypocrisy

This fascinating episode opens with a discussion of Joanna Lumley’s controversial comments about the #MeToo movement. Later, Jane & Fi meet Teresa Weiler, an adopted child who discovered that her biological parents were siblings – a revelation which led to her deciding not to have kids.

Fantastically successful – with Grace Dent

Some amusing reader questions – including a deep dive into an awkward supermarket scenario – begin this episode, while the highlight is food critic & broadcaster Grace Dent, who opens up about giving up alcohol and her ‘deep love’ of breakfast buffets (funeral buffets also get discussed – plus the politics of consuming a post-death vol-au-vent…)

Listen to Off Air… with Jane & Fi on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps.

To learn more about Jane and Fi, thier love of podcasts, and the new show read our interview in Issue 25 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

The post Where to start with… Off Air with Jane and Fi appeared first on POD BIBLE.