212 episodes listed below
Famous lives, patiently made human.
Full Disclosure with James O'Brien is built around patient, searching conversations with people whose public lives often hide more complicated private stories. The tone is warm but direct, moving from childhood memories and career turns into shame, ambition, family, power, and consequence.
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Full Disclosure with James O'Brien is a serious interview show that keeps its feet in ordinary conversation. The format is simple. A recognisable guest sits down for a long exchange, and the questions keep circling toward the experiences that made their public life possible. It is not celebrity chat as decoration. Fame is usually treated as a pressure system, something that changes money, privacy, family, identity, and the way strangers feel entitled to a person. Natalie Cassidy's episode turns EastEnders into a story about childhood, work, ownership, and learning adult lessons in public. Marcus Brigstocke's episode is much darker, tracing eating, alcohol, drugs, stealing, shame, and the slow route toward making comedy. Naz Shah's conversation carries the heaviest material, with forced marriage, sexual assault, violence, family secrecy, Pakistan, Bradford, faith, and political purpose all placed in the same moral frame. The show can also be lighter. Billy Idol's early family life and punk-rock image are handled with curiosity rather than mythmaking. Gary Lineker's live episode moves from goals for England to life after football, media work, public argument, and choosing what to do next. Eric Schlosser brings the pace of investigative journalism, corporate America, books, films, and the strange accidents that shape a writing career. Jeremy King talks about restaurants as places where taste, class, service, confidence, and outsider feelings meet. The recurring pleasure is the follow-up question. A guest gives an anecdote, and the conversation gently asks what it cost, what it meant, or what it concealed. The show is measured, accessible, and emotionally alert. It allows humour, but it does not use humour to dodge pain. It allows admiration, but still wants specificity. For listeners who like interviews that start with biography and end somewhere more revealing, it offers a steady, humane version of disclosure.
Made for: For listeners who like long, thoughtful interviews with public figures and want more than career highlights. It especially suits people drawn to memoir, politics, media, sport, entertainment, recovery stories, and the emotional machinery behind public success.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by letting familiar guests speak at length while still pressing for motive, consequence, and context. It is intimate without becoming cosy, and serious without losing conversational warmth.
Award-winning LBC presenter and best-selling author James O’Brien hosts a series of compelling conversations with fascinating people from the worlds of politics, news and entertainment. These are thoughtful conversations with a curious and interested interviewer.For advertising opportunities on this podcast email: [email protected]
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
James O'Brien's attentive biographical interviews reveal the private experiences, choices and accidents behind familiar public lives.
Full Disclosure with James O'Brien turns an interview into a careful reconstruction of how a life took its shape. O'Brien follows experience rather than reputation: Naz Shah speaks about family violence, cultural expectations and survival; Marcus Brigstocke traces addiction back…
From a Cumbrian farm to EastEnders, you get the person before the public version hardens.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A candid account of addiction's early grip and the path from private distress to public comedy.
Marcus Brigstocke looks back at adolescence through the linked pressures of eating, addiction, stealing, alcohol and drugs, always returning to what those experiences felt like from the inside.
Natalie Cassidy looks back on fame as childhood routine, with money and privacy becoming adult questions.
Natalie Cassidy's story frames childhood fame less as spectacle than as another part of family routine: early starts at her father's Islington newsagent, then a ride to EastEnders, where a puffer coat and a badly played trumpet made the job feel oddly normal.
A *Fast Food Nation* anniversary turns into a conversation about writing, opportunity, and luck.
The 25th anniversary of Fast Food Nation brings James O'Brien and Eric Schlosser together, though their conversation spends much of its time on writing.
Jeremy King recalls feeling like an outsider and the encouragement that kept him in the restaurant business.
Jeremy King talks about his restaurant career through the feeling that he never quite belonged. Asked whether being an outsider left him feeling inferior, he says his belief in himself grew through other people's generosity.
Naz Shah's story of being sent to Pakistan as a child becomes a sharp account of survival, culture and change.
James O'Brien's interview with Naz Shah, author and MP, follows the assault, violence, family trauma and cultural pressure that shaped a life she later chose to set down in a book.
A rural life story draws quiet political force from school memories, farm work, and a daughter's win with a one-ton bull.
James Rebanks comes through as both shepherd and writer, and Full Disclosure uses that double vantage to challenge the easy assumptions outsiders can make about rural life.
A warm actor interview shaped by a fallen prosthetic nose, studio coincidences, and a late embrace of the spotlight.
This single-episode review finds its shape in the odd angles of an acting life. A school Richard III puts Lindsay Anderson in the room, the first job becomes If, and years later the same performer is flipping burgers beside Sid James in the same studio for Bless His House.
Outback lives, told close to the dust.
Rural motherhood, told with grit and care.
Rebanks's father cried reading his book, leading to a handshake that resolved years of tension before his death.
Robin Askwith's first memory is red blankets, an ambulance door closing, and waking up in an iron lung after polio killed his brother.
Rutger Bregman discusses his career as a public historian and the motivation behind his new book Moral Ambition.
Marcus Brigstocke tells James O’Brien how childhood eating problems, boarding school, and early shame shaped his later addiction, with the line that addiction was “baked into who I was by the time I was 10.” He describes being sent to boarding school at 7, becoming the fattest child in school photos, and moving from food compulsion into drinking, shoplifting, weed, and solvents by his teens.
Natalie Cassidy says she grew up in Islington, started at Anna Scher Theatre at age eight, and found a path into EastEnders before she was ten.
James O'Brien marks the 25th anniversary of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Schlosser says the new afterword finds that “almost everything has gotten worse.” He links the book to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and the film rights he bought for Sinclair’s Oil.
Jeremy King says a throw of the dice kept him in hospitality instead of sending him to Cambridge, after he had already been moonlighting in a Chelsea wine bar while earning £1,050 a year in merchant banking.
Billy Idol discusses his normal upbringing in Middlesex and how it contrasts with the typical punk rock background.
Naz Shah tells James O’Brien why she wrote a book about forced marriage, her mother’s murder conviction, and the family history that many readers will not know.
James O’Brien interviews Gary Lineker about moving from Leicester football and 160-goal school and Sunday-league seasons to England, Barcelona, and broadcasting.
Rutger Bregman discusses his career as a public historian and the motivation behind his new book Moral Ambition.
Jan Ravens discusses her childhood in Hoylake, her admiration for Glenda Jackson, and the contrast between her comedic talents and a difficult home life with her father's mental health struggles.
Charles Dance discusses his humble beginnings, including a stammer and working as a builder's labourer, and corrects misconceptions about his background.