Quote · Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe
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Lauren Laverne: Maternity Leave, Job Threat Texts, and Career Switchover
At 24:22 · chapter starts 22:20
The conversation turns to what working in television as a new mother was like twenty years ago, and Lauren Laverne is unflinching about how different the industry was. She had four weeks of maternity leave with her first son. [1] — Lauren Laverne "Lauren Laverne took only four weeks of maternity leave with her first son — and spent it receiving texts from colleagues warning her that p…" 22:10 During those four weeks, people on the TV show she was working on sent her texts warning that 'such and such is after your job'. She went back. She acknowledges it was a different industry then — and a very different era. She had no expectation of being able to continue her career after having children, and assumed her husband would remain the primary earner. Then, unexpectedly, around the time of her second pregnancy, her career accelerated dramatically and the household economics shifted — she was earning enough that it made more sense for her to work and for her husband to stay home with the children. It's a portrait of a specific cultural moment in the British media industry that has genuinely changed.
Lauren Laverne had planned to be a historian like her academic father. Instead she fell into TV via Never Mind the Buzzcocks, then into radio because it was 'showing off in private'. She now has the office full of books and records she always wanted — just arrived by a very different route.
