Best of Access All 2023

27th December 2023

bbc.co.uk/accessall

Access All – episode 84

Presented by Nikki Fox and Emma Tracey

NIKKI-            Hello! This is Access All, and we are here to wish a very merry Twixmas. What am I going on about? Well, Twixmas, that’s the bit between Christmas and New Year where I don’t wash my hair and I look like Doc from Back to the Future. But there’s also a lot of time in that time to listen to your favourite podcast, Access All.

MUSIC-           Theme music.

NIKKI-            Hello, it’s Access All. I’m Nikki Fox and I’m in London.

EMMA-           And I’m Emma Tracey and I’m in Edinburgh.

NIKKI-            Now, we’re here really just to keep the magic of Christmas going – fingers crossed. We’re looking back at some of our favourite interviews from the year so far. We’ve got some fab guests who we have on every week, so we can squish them all down into one handy pod.

EMMA-           Do you remember that surprising conversation that we had with Melanie and her sex worker, Chayse?

NIKKI-            Oh, I love that one, Emma.

EMMA-           Yeah, that’s in there. And we’re also going to play back the bit of Jack Thorne’s interview where he talked about being diagnosed autistic, and whether that has informed his work or not. Really interesting as well.

NIKKI-            These are really great. We can say that with confidence because we were there at the time.

EMMA-           Yeah.

NIKKI-            So, stay where you are, whether that’s in bed or by the fire or eating a Ferrero Rocher. Just enjoy the memories.

[Jingle Bells] So, shall we start with a bang? Jack Thorne. Jack is the fella behind the Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen drama, Best Interests. That was an emotional watch. And that was on the BBC back in June. And he’s also had a hand in the new Doctor Who and so much more.

EMMA-           When Jack joined us he’d recently announced that he’s autistic. And of course we asked him about the diagnosis. And we were wondering whether it has informed his mountain of work. [Jingle Bells]

JACK-             I did Desert Island Discs and someone wrote to my agent afterwards going, I think Jack is autistic. So, I phoned my agent and said, ‘Do you think there’s any truth to it?’ and she said, ‘Well yes’. And I was like, ‘Really?!’ and she was like, ‘Yes’. And then I went downstairs to my wife and went, ‘Do you think there’s any truth to this?’ and she was like, ‘Yes, yeah’ [laughter]. And so I started pursuing it. It took a while but eventually yeah, I got this diagnosis. And it’s made sense for a lot of things for me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it means for my life, and I’m trying to stop it being an excuse for me to hide, which is my tendency. It’s had a positive impact on me generally.

NIKKI-            What was it you think your family and friends noticed in you to say yes straightaway?

JACK-             I think it’s probably in lots of little things. The thing that became apparent to me, that they talk a lot about women being diagnosed as autistic very late on because women become very good at masking, and I think I was very good at masking. And I think it’s probably helped my writing actually because I think I was constantly looking at other people for how they worked in order so that I could present something that worked as a version of me. I’m a very happy person now. I think it probably did leave me quite unhappy for a long time, particularly through childhood and in my 20s. I’m in a good place now.

EMMA-           You talked about masking, which is where autistic people look at what other people are doing and do that. And you said you looked at other people to see how they worked. But I’d imagine none of them have worked as hard as you and written as many successful things as you. Here’s just a list of some of the things that Jack has been involved with:

                       Written the stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; the film Enola Holmes; the television programme, His Dark Materials; he’s been involved in writing Skins, Shameless and This is England; co-wrote Then Barbara Met Alan – amazing, and Please Don’t Take My Baby – amazing. We’ve had quite a few autistic people over the past year on Access All and lots of them talk about their ability to hyperfocus. Do you think that’s part of what makes you so prolific? Or if not what’s your secret?

JACK-             When I got diagnosed the first thing I sort of said was, ‘Where am I on the spectrum?’ and the doctor said, ‘We don’t believe in that anymore’. And I sort of feel like that about it. And that’s part of I think my journey with it, which is just kind of like I don’t quite know what it has made me and I don’t quite know what it will make me. And so things like hyperfocus I just worry about it a bit as a sort of, like, definition.

I like writing, I find great pleasure in writing. My wife used to, whenever I was in a mess, she just used to say, ‘Go away and write, and then you’ll come down a human again’. I think that that has been my saving grace really through my life is the ability to be able to write and find comfort in creating situations where I can understand situations better. I don’t know whether it’s hyperfocus or whatever, but I think it’s that I take great pleasure in understanding. And I think that the thing that exhausts me, if I have to spend a day on set I come home and I am totally exhausted; if I have to spend 14 hours writing I’m not exhausted at all. I’m a bit tired but I’m not really exhausted at all. It’s the navigating through how to be the person that people want me to be in those situations that I find really, really tough. I just find writing very soothing since I was a kid. So, I think it’s just I love it.

NIKKI-            [Jingle bells] You know me, traditionally fan girlie over some of our guests, and I was a bit with Jack actually because he’s doing so much. It feels like there’s a real change within particularly the sort of acting industry at the moment, and he’s kind of, like, a big part of that, isn’t he?

EMMA-           Yeah. And what I loved about that clip, he said that it brings him so much joy to understand people’s experiences. And that’s really what he does so well is get under the skin of a person and how they would experience the world, and write it down. And then it feels like you’re watching someone really experiencing something when you’re watching an actor in one of his dramas.

NIKKI-            It’s exactly what Ruth Madeley said about Russell T. Davies, as well, wasn’t it, that he takes the time to understand?

EMMA-           Yes. Obviously the best writers do.

JINGLE-          Access All with Nikki Fox.

NIKKI-            Well, let’s stick with TV and film now, eh, Ems. Because if you’re using this in-between bit of the holidays to watch all the Harry Potter films – I love this part where you can just watch back to back films.

EMMA-           Yes.

NIKKI-            Well, you’re probably have guessed with the Harry Potter films that the lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, well he doesn’t play all his own Quidditch, does he? He didn’t do all his own stunts; I’m sure he did a lot of them but not all of them. The job went to our next guest, David Holmes. Now, David became paralysed from the chest down when a stunt went wrong during rehearsals for Deathly Hallows Part 1. When he joined us in November to promote a documentary all about his life, called The Boy Who Lived, he let it be known that he is still most definitely a stuntman. [Jingle bells]

DAVID-           I grew up in a very hard sport where gymnastics nothing is gained without hard work. And it instilled an amazing lesson which I carry with me every single day. So, even now to this day I still try and find ways to push myself. So, I sit at the bottom of a pool with a scuba bottle on and I do breath holds. It was only two weeks ago I managed to break my record.

NIKKI-            Did you? What’s your record?

DAVID-           Well, even with a reduced lung function I can do 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

NIKKI-            You what?!

EMMA-           No! You’re just an extreme, extreme sportsperson. I watched a film about free diving there recently and it’s so scary. You just love the scariness, do you?

DAVID-           Yeah, well you’re only living when you’re nearly dying, right?

EMMA-           Oh my god.

NIKKI-            [Laughs] do you know what else I love? Your mate, your best mate who is now your PA, isn’t he?

DAVID-           Tommy.

NIKKI-            Yeah.

DAVID-           Tommy’s the yin to my yang, the man that grounds me, yeah.

NIKKI-            Is he really?

DAVID-           Yeah.

NIKKI-            Because I use PAs to get around, I’ve got my lovely Libby and we’ve got such a beautiful friendship. But Tommy was your mate, wasn’t he, beforehand.

DAVID-           Yeah.

NIKKI-            And obviously you and him now work together, which is great.

DAVID-           I love him. There is no truer commitment and dedication of friendship than what that man does for me. And I’m very, very grateful.

[Clip]

TOMMY-         I’ll give him a little bit of sympathy, but then it’s got to be right, come on, game face on, we’ve got to get on with this.

[End of clip]

NIKKI-            How did that all come about? Did you guys just decide together, oh do you want to do this? Or he was just like I’ll do it?

DAVID-           No, he was, when I came out of hospital him and Mark, who’s in the film, Mark’s brother Darren, another good friend of mine, him and Mark were the two men that carried me up the stairs from my first home visit to get me in the bath and help me wash. And Tommy has been picking me up ever since. I have been in his arms. I would like to not be in his arms more than his own child, [laughter] but over the years we’ve been working together I probably have.

NIKKI-            Ah.

EMMA-           Friendship is massive for you, isn’t it?

DAVID-           Huge.

EMMA-           Friendship is massive. And another friend, who probably hasn’t carried you up the stairs, maybe he has, Daniel Radcliffe.

NIKKI-            I bet he has.

EMMA-           Do you think he has?

NIKKI-            I bet he has.

DAVID-           He’s helped me in and out of bed before, absolutely, yeah.

EMMA-           You’ve been friends all the way through, haven’t you? Like we see you in the documentary in hospital and he’s shoving marshmallows in his mouth. Tell us about that friendship?

DAVID-           I mean, it built from the early days. I was Dan’s PE teacher throughout the Potter films. So, he would come to me in the stunt stores, we would lock up the doors and I would let him play. We would jump off a portacabin, swing swords around, we would bounce on the trampoline – all the things that would make an insurance company pass out with worry well, I made sure that we created an environment that he could still just be a kid and jump around.

NIKKI-            Shout out to dad on the Christmas special. My dad is our biggest fan.

EMMA-           Hey, Mr Fox.

NIKKI-            Dad absolutely loved that interview; he thought David was a right cracker. I mean, he is definitely an example of someone just getting on with it. Because being in and out of hospital that amount of times, you know, the stuff that he’s had to put up with, it’s a lot to deal with. But he really has got something. What makes him that way I do not know; because I’m just trying to sleep with a CPAP on at nighttime and that’s nearly finished me off. But what makes him the way he is I do not know, but he’s so resilient, so strong, I love it.

EMMA-           Yeah, because I don’t think it came across in the interview so much, but he’s in constant pain and he’s losing movement and he’s getting more infections, etc. etc. Like, it covers that in the documentary, that’s just not me giving away all his secrets. But we didn’t cover that in the interview so much because that’s not the most interesting thing about him.

NIKKI-            No, absolutely. Nicely said there, Ems.

EMMA-           Thanks, Nikki.

NIKKI-            We loved him, didn’t we? And I love all his mates as well, they’re dead tight.

                       Now, someone else whose mental strength has been tested recently is comedian Rosie Jones. I mean, she’s really had to work on being resilient. Rosie joined Emma and I in the studio in the middle of filming a documentary for Channel 4 all about ableist trolling. The reason why she was making that documentary was because she’d received so much of her own, particularly after she went on BBC’s Question Time. And all the unpleasant stories that she uncovered and obviously having to deal with her own trolling which was, I mean, on another level, she wasn’t herself that day at all. She seemed quite unhappy and it was awful to see really. She gets pretty graphic here when revealing what people have said about her, so just be warned. [Jingle bells]

ROSIE-          Literally every ableist abuse under the sun. They told me that I should be in a cage.

NIKKI-             What?!

ROSIE-         I shouldn’t be on TV. I should die. And it was because I was exposing myself to a different kind of audience. I think Question Time is brilliant, but it attracts a lot of angry people, and not only being female, disabled, gay. So, would I do it again? Yes. But I would go in there more prepared. I’d probably shut my Twitter down for a few weeks. But yeah, it is hard because I will always be political, I will always speak for what I believe, I will always champion diversity. But it’s hard, and it’s exhausting.

NIKKI-             When we were talking about it before, I find that really upsetting actually that level that you got. When we were talking about it as a team I was like, “Oh yeah, when I first went on Watchdog I got told that I had eyebrows like McDonald’s golden arches”. Do you know what I mean? It was the visual kind of stuff. And Nikki Fox looked strange. But that level, that must have been hard.

ROSIE-             Yeah. And I think being a woman and being gay means that every time I’m on TV I’ll get a comment about what I sound like, my disability, my weight, and then what I look like, my teeth, my hair, and then the gay stuff. And what is awful, is every single one of those negative thoughts, I can go on social media right now and a stranger will be saying them back to me. So you’re right, yeah, whatever thoughts you’ve ever had, I’m here to say you’re right. It’s so hard.

I’m trying to bring this back to my normal positive self, but it’s on my mind quite a lot, because I’m currently filming a documentary about online abuse and ableism, and that has been quite hard for me because a lot of the things that I’ve shut away, patched over, I’ve had to confront. And because of that, I’m in therapy. And I would recommend therapy for literally everyone out there, because I’m really dealing with a lot of internalised ableism and things that I probably painted over with a joke. But what I will say is, by talking about this I feel a lot of release, and it’s actually going. I am not Tigger, I am not that over-optimistic, eternally happy human being who goes, “I love being disabled every day”, because I don’t because society wears me down. I now think in order to eradicate that, in order to face the abuses, I’ve got to come here and go, “You know what, it’s not okay”.

NIKKI-            [Jingle bells] Well, that was lovely Rosie Jones. I mean, we could have played out that whole interview, couldn’t we, Em?

EMMA-           We certainly could. It was wonderful. Even though she wasn’t in her happiest place that day she was still hilarious, and we absolutely loved it. She talked about her tour, she talked about being a disabled comedian amongst non-disabled comedians. She was brilliant. Loved it.

NIKKI-            She really was. But at the moment she’s having a great old time of it: she’s working really hard; she’s got some brilliant gigs under her belt. And now I think she’s hosting her own show with a live studio audience. That’s what the Instagram tells me, Emma Tracey.

EMMA-           That’s what she seems to be hinting at all right.

NIKKI-            It does.

EMMA-           So, before she gets absolutely everywhere and everyone is watching her all the time go back and listen to our interview on the Access All feed.

NIKKI-            Oh yeah, please do, please do. And I’m going to find out what exactly it is she’s doing and we’ll get her back in.

JINGLE-          Access All.

NIKKI-            Just a little warning about this next interview: we do talk about sex. So, if you’ve got any kids around you might want to go into another room and have a listen.

EMMA-           Stick your headphones in.

NIKKI-            Or put your headphones in. Very good, Emma.

EMMA-           It was such a standout interview for us from the year, wasn’t it?

NIKKI-            Yeah, it really was. We met Melanie and sex worker Chayse back in April. Now, Melanie is a wheelchair using Australian woman in her 40s, and she hadn’t had sex until recently. During the pandemic her PA gave her a massage because she had a bit of a sore neck. Now, she hadn’t been touched that intimately before, and she suddenly realised how much she wanted to be touched like that. Now, her PA – this is just brilliant – happened to be a former sex worker. She was speaking to her PA about this, because they have a great relationship, and her PA said, “Well, listen, why don’t you hire one, Melanie?” Now, Melanie was a bit surprised at the idea to begin with, but then she couldn’t get it out of her head.

EMMA-           So, she did a bit of sex worker shopping, didn’t she?

NIKKI-            She did.

EMMA-           And here’s what happened next [Jingle bells]:

MELANIE-      Chayse listed that he did disabled clients, and I really liked his smile, and his rates were more reasonable than some of the others, which kind of shocked me how expensive it is.

That night I told Tracy what I’d done and she so pleased and proud of me that I’d taken that step and looked in. For the whole weekend I couldn’t get it out of my head. Then the Monday afternoon I found myself with a few extra minutes to kill and I looked Chayse up again and sent him an email. He called me within like 10 or 15 minutes and we chatted on the phone and I asked my million questions and told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it, the more I said I’d have to try it.

EMMA-            And what were the million questions? I’m interested.

MELANIE-       Oh, what were they, Chayse? Have you used the hoist before was one of my questions. “How hard can it be? It’s just up and down”, was his answer! My place or his? I asked if he had wheelchair access and he said yes.

NIKKI-             Logistics.

MELANIE-       So, my first session was at Chayse’s house, and I didn’t quite get the happy ending that I was after but it wasn’t because of lack of trying. Chayse went to all sorts of lengths to try, but it didn’t work out my end. But we got on really well.

CHAYSE-         What didn’t work out on your end, Melanie? [Laughs]

MELANIE-       I’m not going to say! I didn’t get my happy ending.

CHAYSE-         Yeah, I think the big ‘O’ is very situational in this kind of field, especially when you haven’t had one for yourself. This is what a lot of people don’t understand is that it takes time to find what you enjoy.

EMMA-            You mean orgasm?

CHAYSE-         Yeah.

MELANIE-       Yes.

CHAYSE-         I wouldn’t encourage her to come here the first time expecting to have the big ‘O’, because having those kind of sexpectations on a first meeting is quite impossible, and also a bad thing to have on your mind.

MELANIE-       It was my first time I’d been naked in front of a man.

CHAYSE-         Yeah, your situation is a bit different. And unfortunately Melanie’s never had one. You’ve got to figure out what is going to work for her so she can make it easier in the future.

NIKKI-             Melanie, I wanted to come to you as well because I know you’re very open and honest so I don’t think you’ll mind me asking. I’m physically disabled as well and I was single for a very long time, about 150 years really, Melanie, but I’d had sex before. No-one needs to hear this, but I’d had sex before but it had been quite a long time, and then I met my partner and everything. But for me, when we got to that stage, it was the physical things that I was most hung up about. It was am I going to be able to get into the right position? Is this going to absolutely whack me out, you know? Just those kind of things really played on my mind beforehand. When you’re with someone you love, or you’re with someone like Chayse who is a total professional, you know pretty quick you don’t have to worry. But did those things play on your mind beforehand?

MELANIE-    Yeah. Well, that’s the whole reason I booked Chayse was to explore what works and what doesn’t, what my body’s capable of and what it’s not, what I like and what I don’t like. I didn’t want to get into bed with or go home with a guy from a bar and find out these things in an awkward vulnerable unsafe manner. I knew by booking Chayse and paying for the service that I would be in control, and we would work together to explore all these different things in the bedroom.

NIKKI-           And you guys must have such a good relationship. I guess it’s a conversation, isn’t it, as well as…?

MELANIE-       Yeah.

NIKKI-             That must be probably one of the most important parts.

MELANIE-       Although I do like the spontaneity and the surprises that we come up with each other.

EMMA-            What did you learn about your own body, the positions and how you move?

MELANIE-       I know that my legs can be unpredictable and fling off the bed at any stage. [Laughter] That kind of hurts.

NIKKI-             They go up, then the go down. I’m with you there, Melanie.

MELANIE-       Yeah. So now I’ve worked out that they need to be fastened to the bed beforehand, and then there’s no worry about them flinging off the bed at any moment. I had to see my physio a few times after each session because we got into a bit of trouble with my legs going all sorts of places.

NIKKI-            [Jingle bells] Well, that interview with Melanie and Chayse really did stay with us, didn’t it, Ems?

EMMA-           Absolutely.

NIKKI-            And so did our next one, Victoria Canal. She’s a young singer-songwriter. She is mwah. Please google her. She’s also got limb difference, and I’d been dying to get her on the podcast for a very long time, since I saw her on Jools Holland actually. And we managed to get her in and we caught up with her just after she’d released her first songs, which were very personal and referencing her body and how she feels about it. She hadn’t done that before.

EMMA-           So, she told us how she’s starting to learn to navigate the music industry and to start feeling better about herself. [Jingle bells]

VICTORIA-     I have a pretty incredible team of people around me who put a lot of effort into how we approach anything when it comes to interviews, and what opportunities we’re taking. Everything is incredibly intentional, and I have my manager, Andrew, is my ride or die and he is protecting me every step of the way. And I think we’ve both been growing and navigating how to take advantage of opportunities as they come but without feeling like I’m being tokenised or cheapened in any way; which has been inevitable in certain situations because, I don’t know, I think it’s almost like trendy these days to highlight people like me. Which is I guess good in many ways, but then it all just feels like…

NIKKI-              It’s a fine balance though, isn’t it?

VICTORIA-     …it feels so performative in some ways, you know.

NIKKI-              Yeah.

VICTORIA-    So, I think it’s like a constant navigating and I just feel really lucky that I’m supported in a way that I don’t have to do it all alone. And we’re just trying our best, you know. But I definitely still struggle with not really knowing if I am where I am because of my disability.

NIKKI-              No.

VICTORIA-     Or just because of my talent or…

EMMA-           We now just want to shower you with soppy love.

NIKKI-              Yes. No, I didn’t even know.

VICTORIA-     You know what I mean though.

EMMA-           Yes, we’ve had those struggles in our minds many times, Victoria.

NIKKI-              Victoria, the amount of times, every morning I get up and say, I’m only on the TV because I’m a bird in a scooter. You do, you think like that.

EMMA-           Internalised ableism.

NIKKI-              Imposter syndrome kind of thing.

EMMA-            Yeah, it’s our version of imposter syndrome. We’ve sucked in what society thinks.

NIKKI-              Are you upset?

VICTORIA-     I’m not upset.

NIKKI-              You’re not upset?

VICTORIA-     I’m just a crier.

NIKKI-              Oh, I’m a crier too. Don’t, I’ll start crying, Victoria [laughter].

VICTORIA-     I mean, you know what, you were talking about mental health on this podcast, which is super important too I think. It’s tough out here. It’s tough to be labelled [voice breaks] and not have much control over how you’re perceived by the world. It’s definitely something that I struggle with sometimes, you know what I mean.

EMMA-           Yeah.

VICTORIA-     I didn’t expect to get emotionally, sorry.

NIKKI-              Oh Victoria.

EMMA-            But honestly, when I was your age, when we were in our early 20s, it’s taken us a lot of years to be hard-arsed about it.

NIKKI-              Yeah, it comes with time.

VICTORIA-     Yeah, I think that’s the other thing is, like, my personality is just I’m, like, incredibly open, to be honest; maybe to a fault sometimes.

EMMA-           That’s why your songs are so beautiful.

NIKKI-              Don’t change.

VICTORIA-     I won’t change.

EMMA-           And raw and gorgeous.

NIKKI-              I say it. My sister tells me all the time, sometimes I’m just way too open and too soft and stuff. But I don’t want to change. You don’t want to.

VICTORIA-      Yeah, I think there’s such strength in vulnerability. There’s no use in pretending that everything is just peachy all the time because who’s going to feel understood by that? And I think as a songwriter and just as a person I think one of the things that makes me feel most fulfilled is feeling connected to others, and you can really only do that when you’re being real about your experience.

NIKKI-              Exactly.

VICTORIA-     No one has a perfect life. Also that’s my experience being maybe not judged, but maybe pitied or observed a certain way because of my difference, or maybe I’m only granted certain things because of my disability. But you could say the same for anyone who’s conventionally pretty or anyone who’s queer who’s only getting a queer spotlight. Just all these things that are happening right now because of a label. And it’s so interesting that we’re in a time where representation is expanding, which is so positive, but then we’re still being defined by these things that are so one-dimensional. It’s like we’re all incredibly complex beings with multiple facets and so much to our stories, and so to be defined by one thing is just really isolating sometimes.

EMMA-           [Jingle bells] I’d like to think that she gained something from going that interview with us, because when she was getting emotional we were like, don’t worry, don’t worry, we’ve been around for ages.

NIKKI-            We’re like really old birds, Victoria, trust us.

EMMA-           We’re used to doing this.

NIKKI-            Yeah.

EMMA-           And I hope that that was of some comfort to her.

NIKKI-            Well, I think it was actually because I had some messages afterwards, and I do think she was very comfortable just talking to people who had also got disabilities as well. I don’t think she’d actually done that, you know. A lot of people do say that, don’t they, that it’s easier to talk to us because we kind of get it for that reason. She’s probably just done loads of interviews, like various music mags or whatever, with someone that’s, I don’t know, just not get it, just hasn’t got it, you know.                        

                       I’m going to say this might not have been our most professional interview, but Emma and I both know this next guest on a personal level. The guy in question actually presented this show before it was Access All, so we were all over the place really. But it was just great chatting to the one and the only Simon Minty. I mean, listeners might know him now from Gogglebox. He’s on with his sister. I mean, he’s amazing, Simon, we love him. He’s also very good at helping businesses get more inclusive. And he also medalled in the Dwarfs Sports Games, which we didn’t even know, did we?

EMMA-           No, that wasn’t something we knew about Simon Minty. But he was very, very keen, let’s say, to tell us all about it, wasn’t he?

NIKKI-            He certainly was.

                       [Jingle bells] When did you get so sporty, Simon? Come on, tell us.

SIMON-           There is an organisation in the UK called the Dwarf Sports Association UK, and it’s been around 30 plus years. And I’d always go to it, and for many years I was like a journalist, I’d write about it because I didn’t want to compete. And then over the last five or six years I’m like, stop it now, you’ve got to do something. You start with boccia, which is the beanbag game, most people  can play it. And then I did rifle shooting, but there was the World Games in Cologne, the eighth, so they’re every four years they are, they’re really rare.

NIKKI-            Wow.

SIMON-           Yeah, exactly. And they said we’re not doing shooting, we can’t get the rifles, the permit. And I said, I can’t just do boccia, I’ve got to do something else. So, I thought I’d do this, it’s called a bench press: you lay on your back, you push the weights up. I joined the gym a year before and I said to my trainer would you help me. So, we really racked it up. The last session I had with him we did it real condition, so I had to wear all my kit, he was timing me, I had to do a warm-up. I wanted him to get the whole of the gym to start cheering and clapping, but he wouldn’t do that [laughter]. And then I mean, the add-on by the way, I’m a little bit older than most of the competitors. And they do it by weight, so you’re categorised by your own weight, not by your age.

NIKKI-            Right.

SIMON-           Which I thought oh, I don’t stand a chance [laughs] I mean, I’m like 15 plus minimum, if not more years older than everybody else. But I did manage to medal. And the reason I medalled was because I had three good lifts of around 50kg. And the guy who won did 120kg in one lift.

EMMA-           Wow.

SIMON-           But he failed his other two.

EMMA-           So, you were slow and steady wins the race.

SIMON-           Exactly. I’m the tortoise yeah, you’ve got it.

EMMA-           You’re the tortoise.

SIMON-           Exactly.

EMMA-           Can I ask why is it weight? Why does it go by your weight?

SIMON-           I presuming that your weight means you might have more strength or more capability. I mean, people with dwarfism have different length arms, and I’m almost like surely it should be length of our limbs and so on.

NIKKI-            Yeah, yeah.

SIMON-           And there was the awful moment, the night before we had to do weigh in, and someone said you’ve got to go down to that room, and there was a big partition and I walked round the other side of it and there’s 25 blokes with dwarfism all in their underwear. And I thought, well I haven’t done this for a while, if ever. And we’re all standing around in our pants just chatting about what we’re going to do tomorrow, and all our bodies are a little kind of sticking out here and sticking out there – not that bit [laughter] – our general shape. I mean, it’s also I double up, I love it because of the sport and I’m a middle-aged man or older man doing athletics that I never did. And as you said, you never saw me like that, so that’s…

NIKKI-            How do you find the time? How do you find the time, Simon Minty?

SIMON-           When you’re an elite athlete like me, Nikki, you just, you know, your body’s telling you. I’m making this up. I don’t know [laughter]. I’m struggling now. The flipside, don’t forget, which is the bit I love which is hanging out with 600 people from all around the world, just like me.

NIKKI-            Yes.

SIMON-           We were in the club the last night and I couldn’t get out; there was a sea of people and I thought oh, I’m on my scooter, this is going to take forever to bump through them. And I started moving and then the sea just opened, they all moved out of the way and they all made sure everyone else… And I’m like when you’re with people like you, you just all get it. So, there’s lovely moments like that.

NIKKI-            I’m in it for the pants chat.

                       Now, that’s a sports mindset I think we can all get behind, don’t you think?

EMMA-           Absolutely. That’s my kind of sportsperson.

NIKKI-            Yeah. That’s it for now, but we are going to be back in January with brand spanking new episodes.

EMMA-           And in the meantime use all that free time you’ve got there on the sofa, pressing the subscribe button. We will then drop onto your device every week and you won’t be able to get rid of us, which is a good thing.

NIKKI-            We also absolutely love, love, love hearing from you, so please do send us a message. You can do that on X, formerly Twitter. Our handle’s @BBCAccessAll. Or you can email us accessall@bbc.co.uk. Thank you so much for listening, and merry Christmas and all of that.

EMMA-           Happy Hogmanay.

NIKKI-            Oh yeah, you’re Scottish. No, you’re Irish.

EMMA-           Well, I’ve got a foot in both camps.

NIKKI-            Yeah, that’s it.

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