Weekend Woman’s Hour - Cush Jumbo, Spice Girls Stamp, Assisted Dying

Cush Jumbo is the award-winning actor known for her roles on the stage and screen, from The Good Fight to Macbeth. She joins Clare McDonnell to discuss starring in - and executive producing – the new crime thriller series Criminal Record. Cush stars as DS June Lenker, a police detective locked in a confrontation with an older detective, played by Peter Capaldi, over a historic murder conviction.

For the first time, Royal Mail has dedicated set of stamps to a female pop group, to commemorate 30 years since the Spice Girls formed in 1994. Lauren Bravo, a culture journalist and author and DJ Yinka Bokinni joined Emma to talk about it.

Last week on Woman’s Hour we heard the candid admission by the former Labour MP and Government Minister, Dame Joan Ruddock that she was ready to end her terminally ill husband's life using a pillow in a bid to end his pain. Her husband the former MP Frank Doran had been suffering from end stage bowel cancer in 2017, and she struggled to get him pain relief medication in the hours before he died. She is now calling for a free vote in the Commons to legalise assisted dying. The public debate around the subject has been revived in recent months by leading figures such as Esther Rantzen - who revealed that she is considering travelling to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland if her cancer worsens. But others such as Baroness Ilora Finlay, a cross bench peer in the House of Lords and a palliative end of life care expert, are cautioning against a law change. She believes improved access to care and pain relief is the answer when people are dying rather than the taking of lethal drugs. She joins Clare McDonnell to reflect on the new push for a law change.

Shere Hite - a name many people will remember, but some may not know. She was a pioneering feminist sex researcher who published her ground-breaking book, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality in 1976. The book was seen by many as radical, changing prevailing notions about female sexuality. Shere went on to write and publish several more books, but endured intense and lasting criticism in the US, and eventually moved to Europe and renounced her American citizenship in 1995. She died in 2020. Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated Director, Nicole Newnham felt that despite how influential Shere had been in life, that she has since been forgotten. So Nicole produced the documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which is released in UK cinemas on January 12th. She joins Krupa to discuss it.

As the number of pupils missing a significant amount of their education is about double the level it was before the pandemic, Clare is joined by Ellie Costello, the executive director of Square Peg, a not-for-profit which helps families that struggle with school attendance.