Loose women

Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled conversation’. The 11 p.m.–midnight slot is an ideal opportunity for cardigans to be unbuttoned and tongues unloosed, a chance to show that Radio 4’s venerable magazine programme for women can still shake up the station. Lauren Laverne was brought in from 6 Music to host the first few editions, signalling that there would be nothing mumsy about these hour-long chats around the table with a selection of well-chosen guests. Her style is refreshingly different, frank and a little bit cheeky, not at all Radio 4. How could it be when she spends most of her working life talking to musicians or hanging out at Glastonbury?

‘Welcome Richard,’ she announced on the first edition I happened upon while getting ready for bed. ‘How’s it hanging?’ I nearly swallowed my dental floss. It’s just not an expression you expect to hear on Radio 4, no matter the hour. That night’s theme was masculinity and Laverne was talking to the comedian Richard Herring. ‘What makes you feel like a man?’ she continued. He waffled for a bit, about gender and the like, before Laverne went straight to the point: ‘It’s just the penis for you?’

None of her other guests that night (a doctor who works with patients suffering from erectile dysfunction, a lyricist, a philosopher and a colonel in the British army) could quite match Laverne’s willingness to face up to the biological fait accompli. ‘I always need to fix things,’ said the doctor and gender specialist. His wife complains, ‘I don’t need it solved. I just need you to listen.’

Other editions looked at dating, where the guests were all female and their conversation focused on Tinder, the phenomenally successful dating app; or at our capacity to tell lies, where again the guests were all women and included Kellie Maloney (the boxing promoter who used to be known as Frank) and an undercover reporter who often works for the Daily Mirror.