A feel-good podcast, sharing experiences of creating something wonderful out of challenging and difficult experiences - making lemonade!
When life gives you lemons…
In 2024, I presented my first documentary for Channel 4 - ‘My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom’ - which followed my journey to explore the sexual abuse I’d suffered as a child, and my attempt to transform my experience into a sitcom.
You can watch both the documentary and sitcom here
The programme was incredible well received in the national press, but I also began to receive hundreds and hundreds of messages from people about their own experiences and increased understanding and awareness of this terrifyingly common issue. (In the two months since the programme was broadcast, I haven't had a single day without receiving new messages).
And that was just the start...
More importantly still, making the documentary and sitcom proved life-changing for me - my relationship to what happened to me as a child, and how it has affected my entire life since, has changed dramatically. I can't change what happened, but it no longer rules my life in the way it did before.
So now I’m starting to explore the reason for this - how creating something (and it can be almost anything) can transform the lives of anyone who’s experienced something difficult or traumatic. Trauma and hardship are destructive - they destroy futures, potential, relationship, memories, lives. What better answer is there to destruction than creation?
But there is something for everyone here, no matter if they’ve experienced difficult, traumatic, or life-altering events or not - how we can all harness creativity to turn the negative things we go through into something powerful and positive.
This podcast will be my exploration of the transformative power of creativity. Over the course of 10 episodes, I’ll be meeting and talking to others who’ve turned their lemons into lemonade - some famous names, some people you won't have heard of, all with extraordinary stories. I’ll also be helping someone on their own journey to create something positive, as well as inviting our listeners to take part and share their own stories. My first guests are lined up and ready to go, and I can promise it’ll be a funny, moving, inspiring and unexpected journey!
Your support will help at every stage of production - from researching and booking guests, paying for studio hire, equipment, to editing and launching the podcast.
The podcast will launch in Spring 2025.
You can find more information about the podcast and the other work I'm starting to develop on the Making Lemonade website, as well as the progress of setting up the not-for-profit Making Lemonade CIC.
This project successfully funded on 10th September 2024