Is there anybody Annie Macmanus isn’t friends with? One moment she’s having the chats with Zadie Smith about popping around to the writer’s house and finding Smith’s husband, Nick Laird, fixing the gutters. Another, she’s reminding her fellow broadcaster Sara Cox of some wild times together at Glastonbury. Do these guests become her friends because she’s so good at getting them to open up, or are they opening up because they’re already her friends? Either way it makes for some fine, revealing conversation, mostly centred around the concept of change and, as Macmanus puts it, how we are with it.
You probably already know Macmanus, who was born and raised in Dublin but has spent most of her adult life in London, where she made her name as the Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac. She’s also the writer of two well-received novels, Mother Mother and The Mess We’re In. Now she’s the host of the wildly successful podcast Changes, an interview-based series that has been on the go in its current iteration since May 2020.
She has hosted a wide range of stars, some of them multiple times. The names are culled largely from artistic circles, with the likes of Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim), Samantha Morton and Idris Elba on the roster. But she has also spread the net to include more unexpected interviewees – Amanda Knox, “the girl accused of murder”, as she puts it, and most recently the activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
It’s in the artistic realm that Macmanus really shines: she’s an empathetic interviewer but also deeply engaged, and draws some winning tales from her guests: Elba talking about his full embodiment of an egg in a frying pan, freshly cracked and sizzling, in an early drama class; the editor and writer Lorraine Candy describing the creeping sadness that spread through her like ink during her late 40s (before HRT set her to rights); Louise Kennedy matter-of-factly laying out the different times her granny’s Belfast pub was bombed.
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She brings that same compassion to interviewing Manning and Knox. At times I wish she’d ask more uncomfortable questions, though to do so would introduce a tension out of keeping with the style of Changes. Ultimately, Macmanus is here not to confront as a journalist but to elicit as a confidante, all the while deftly bringing us back to the concept that defines the podcast.
In episodes that last anywhere from the succinct 29 minutes with Kennedy to a more ranging 65 with Louis Theroux, she shows a lockpicker’s skill in opening up her subjects, steering them through thoughtful questions and the listener through some entertaining anecdotes and a more profound contemplation of changes and how her high-profile guests turned to face the strange.
Macmanus is winning and, yeah, now I want to be her friend too, which I suppose is the magic of it all: in a podcast that’s clearly carefully edited and well produced, with each guest researched extensively by a very prepared host, Macmanus makes it seem like a spontaneous chin-wag as if we were all just pals in a room together. Just you, me, Annie and Idris. No wonder I can’t stop listening.
