Very Loose Women

Very Loose Women is a long-running conversational culture show with the feeling of a table where private stories are allowed to become public, but not simplified. Its episodes are informal. They are also more structured than they first appear, often using small personal check-ins as a path into questions about art, bodies, work, power, and care. The show’s archive includes a retrospective on its own history, where contributors reflect on the exposure, creative disagreements, and emotional labour of making radio from lived experience. That self-awareness matters. Very Loose Women is interested in speech itself: what can be said, what should be protected, and what changes when a story involves other people too. Recent conversations range from Monique Jackson’s account of suspected COVID-19 illness to Jo Lennon discussing fiction, survival, and the pull of reality inside storytelling. Other episodes look at anti-psychiatry with Danielle King, multidisciplinary performance with Opia Collective, and creative blocks with Cassie Leighton. The show is often funny in passing, not as a performance of comedy but as the natural byproduct of people talking frankly. It can also become raw. Episodes touch on mental health services, chronic uncertainty, consent, betrayal, women’s voices, and the pressure to produce original work. The register is conversational, sometimes rambling, and often revealing. Rather than chasing neat conclusions, it lets uncertainty remain audible. That quality gives the programme its shape: a mix of radio diary and candid group reflection. The production has roots in Resonance 104.4 FM, but the podcast feed preserves the larger project. It is strongest when guests and contributors are working through an idea in real time. The result is not glossy lifestyle chat. It is intimate, socially conscious conversation with enough looseness to let real tension show.