In her late 50s, Judith Holder, a television producer, found that none of her ideas were accepted. Twice nominated for a Bafta, she had executive-produced the comedy series Grumpy Old Women, recorded the voiceover and written the spin-off books. Now the message was: “We’re not going to commission anything for the older woman, Judith, because they are watching anyway.”
Clearly, this rankled, because Holder, 67, retired – then re-emerged as a co-presenter of the podcast Older & Wider, with the comedian Jenny Eclair. “The older women we had attracted with Grumpy needed some sort of gang show of their own,” she says. They are more than 200 episodes in, with 5.5m downloads. Last month, Holder made her stage debut in Older & Wider Live. The dates at the Leicester Square theatre in London sold out within 48 hours. It’s “a massive V-sign to a world that assumes that a woman like me is not worth a second glance”, she says.
Holder had spent her career behind the scenes. After university, she joined the BBC as a secretary and “worked up”. Later, at London Weekend Television, she filmed with Clive James and produced Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage – for which she got one of her Bafta nominations. But she was always “the person with the clipboard”.
Did she like being that person? “It was power of sorts,” she says. “But what talent wanted, talent got.” Her role was to balance the competing interests of channel, talent and the talents’ representatives. “The juggling was exhausting,” she says. “You have to present a different version of yourself all the time.” Finally, as she approached her 60th birthday, she realised she had had enough.
Retirement in Oxfordshire meant watercolour classes, bellringing, knitting, wild swimming. “I got myself a bike with a basket on the front,” she says – the ultimate accessory to a slower life. But this period proved formative.
“Rebirth is a ridiculous way to put it,” she says – but perhaps that is because she is reluctant to overclaim and sound like “the talent”. In any case, Holder wrote to the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, explained that she had been “writing about growing old in a comic way”, and was offered a visiting fellowship. There, she read Simone de Beauvoir’s book Old Age. “De Beauvoir says: ‘If there is any point to growing old, it is to discover who you really are.’ And that has stayed with me,” Holder says. “Doing this podcast with Jenny, we are ourselves.”
The podcast initially featured guests, but Eclair and Holder most enjoyed the pre-recording natter. They dropped the guests and made the natter the main event. “It’s a massive overshare,” Holder says, giggling. They cover everything from new sofas to grief, seed catalogues to vaginal dryness.
Did she always yearn to perform? If so, why suppress it for so long? “I didn’t really have much confidence,” she says. As an only child, she impersonated the TV chef Fanny Cradock to entertain her mother, who was keen on amateur dramatics. But Holder hated even to read aloud at school. In sixth form, she joined the drama group, “but chose to do the props”.
It was the podcast that broke the spell – and her friendship with Eclair that made the podcast possible. “She’s so supportive. I have come out of my performative shell for the first time in my life,” says Holder.
When she was backstage at Leicester Square for those live shows, Holder says: “In my head, I was going on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. The stage manager wore headphones. He said: ‘Right, we have clearance, ladies!’ And the music started. That moment – even now, when I think about it, I get a rush of excitement. I am actually going to step on to the stage.”
The live show didn’t have a full script. That would terrify some people, but for Holder the freedom felt permissive. “I don’t have to pretend to be … hmm, what is it I’m not pretending to be?” she muses. “I like being creative, I like being able to speak my mind, I like not having to please people all the time. I’m doing this on my own account – and feeling the rush of approval and empathy and warmth.”
New episodes of Older & Wider are released every Friday.
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