Loose Ends

Stuart talks to the award winning writer and composer of Calendar Girls and Kinky Boots - Tim Firth - about his latest stage creation, The Ladies Football Club. Can the man who got his break with a play about two yucca plants strike fresh gold with this tale of the women who began to play football whist working in Sheffield's munitions factories during World War I and end up playing to many thousands in a South Yorkshire women's league.
Taskmaster and Mr Bigstuff star Fatiha El-Ghorri says she's ironing her swaggest hijab to head out on her debut stand up tour - Cockney Stacking Doll. She'll also have the story of her journey out from divorce and back on the dating scene in her new Radio 4 comedy - A Match Made Inshallah.
Tom Hodgkinson's the editor of The Idler and author of books such as How to be Idle, The Idle Parent and - here's the outlier - The Ukelele Handbook. So perhaps busier than he makes out? His new book is a fresh look at one of the world's oldest philosophies - How to Live Like A Stoic. Stoicism is having a moment in the manosphere but he explains how "bro-ism" has got stoicism all wrong.
With music from the cast of the smash hit musical Operation Mincemeat and from BBC Introducing "one to watch" , Lois.
Presenter: Stuart Maconie
Producer: Olive Clancy
Assistant Producer: Samuel Nixon
Technical Producers: John Coles, Amy Brennan, Phillip Halliwell
Production Co-ordinator: Pete Liggins.

Joining Clive this week are the actress and singer Keala Settle, who's starring in a newly re-imagined production of John Ransom Phillips' Mrs President.
Presenter Michaela Strachan is heading off across the country with her show Not Just A Wild Life, to celebrate 40 years of her career in television.
Comedian Ross Noble joins us mid-tour to delve into his Cranium of Curiosities.
Star of stage and screen Melvyn Hayes brings along his new autobiography It Ain't Half Late Mum.
And there's music from Beverley Knight, who's about to grace the stage in the West End premiere of Marie and Rosetta.
Presenter: Clive Anderson
Producer: Elizabeth Foster

Stuart Maconie is in Glasgow for the city's annual folk, roots and world music festival - Celtic Connections.
He's joined by comedian Marcus Brigstocke, whose tour Vitruvian Mango sees him trying to figure out what it is to be a man, and why he feels like more of one when his wife asks him to reach something from a high shelf.
Ashley Storrie will be chatting all about the new series of her award-winning BBC show Dinosaur. Autistic palaeontologist Nina is knee-deep in mud on an Isle of Wight dig site, living the dream. Well, either that or she's desperately missing reality tv marathons on her own sofa with some sausage rolls.
In writer Louise Welsh's latest novel The Cut Up, Glasgow auctioneer Rilke is once again drawn in to drama, murder and detective work, as he curses his very loyal but very troublesome friends.
With performances from Newfoundland folk band Rum Ragged who are keeping the music of their Canadian island home alive. Plus Glasgow-based female and non-binary music collective Hen Hoose share a track from new album The Twelve.
Producer: Caitlin Sneddon
Production Coordinator: Lauren Stewart
Engineers: Andrew Hay, Fiona Johnstone, Sean Mullervy

Joining Stuart for this week's Loose Ends are actor Nigel Havers, who tells us about his remarkable shepherd's pies and the sex appeal of Mrs Thatcher.
Comedy writer and performer Rosalie Minnitt on how dreaming of cows and seeing moonlit owls doesn't bode terribly well.
Comedian Mike Wozniak on how a luxuriant moustache can help balance out an underdeveloped lower face.
And there's music from Dan Gillespie Sells, performing a song by his band The Feeling, and Liverpool's electro-pop trio Stealing Sheep, with their track GLO.
Presenter: Stuart Maconie
Producer: Elizabeth Foster

Stuart Maconie's tiptoeing the line between dark and light in this week's Loose Ends.
When she won Strictly Jill Halfpenny got the highest ever score for her sequin studded jive, but there's not a glitterball to be seen in her latest role as the traumatised mum Eve in the dark psychological thriller Girl Taken, which also stars Alfie Allen as the creepiest teacher you'd never hope to meet.
Ian Smith is a comedian who mines his own anxieties for his art - be that his Radio 4 series called "Ian Smith is Stressed", the unintentionally hilarious news from his hometown in the Northern News Podcast or his new tour, "Footspa Half Empty".
The comic, actor and Dead Ringers impressionist Jess Robinson's very funny and also very sad new memoir contrasts her own twentysomething exploits as a stage ingenue with her Jewish Grandmother's diaries at the same age - Life Is Rosi: Grandma, Me and Our Diaries at 23. Grandma Rosi loved music, boyfriends and having a laugh too but was enduring Germany during the rise of Hitler at the same time.
And as they head out on tour, we have performance from The Charlatan's new album We Are Love.
Producer: Olive Clancy
Assistant Producer: Samuel Nixon
Technical Producers: John Cole and Mark Ward
Production Coordintor: Pete Liggins