Enhance your holiday with Saga’s exciting new podcast

In December, Saga launched our first ever podcast, Experience is Everything, hosted by award-winning broadcaster Dame Jenni Murray. In the series, Jenni – who hosted BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour for 33 years and has her own column in Saga Magazine – sits down with national treasures and household names and talks to them about the lessons they have learnt in their lifetimes, with many surprising, comical and moving moments along the way.

Guests so far have included Paul Merton, Tony Blackburn, Sir Trevor McDonald, Professor Tim Spector and Alex Kingston, with all of them opening up about their personal and professional highs and lows.

Here are some highlights from previous episodes.

Paul Merton

On losing his second wife Sarah and the healing power of comedy:

"She died on a Monday and on the Sunday I went down to the Comedy Store show, which I normally did. I didn’t go on stage as I knew that would be interpreted as a bit callous. But I wanted to be amidst people that were laughing.

"I wanted to be in a laughing environment. And I was, and that helped. And then three weeks later, Have I Got News For You came along again. So I did that. Now, I could have said, 'Oh, you know, I know I don't want to do that.' But if I'd sat at home watching somebody else do it, that wouldn't have helped at all.

"And the powerful thing about laughter is when we're laughing at something, whatever it is, everything else goes for that moment. Mortgage problems, worries about children, how are you going to pay the gas bill. For that moment of pure laughter, the only thing you're experiencing is just pure laughter."

Tony Blackburn

On begging first wife Tessa Wyatt to take him back live on air:

"Why did I do it? No idea. It affected me, but it affected me badly, because getting divorced isn't a happy thing. And, my wife, she threatened to walk out on me and all the rest of it, and eventually she did. I was taking a lot of Valium at the time as well, just to calm myself down.

"But I don't know. I just talked about it on the radio and nobody seemed to stop me… I got a lot of letters at the time from people who were also going through a divorce saying how nice it is to hear somebody talking about it. But I shouldn't have done it. It just went on for too long. And it was stupid."

Sir Trevor McDonald

On how addictive the newsroom is and the impact it had on his family life:

"There is excitement and it is addictive. And having that addiction is, I fear, a part of what journalism is all about. I tell you the thing, my family suffered. I realised how much I missed because of work.

They would say, 'Can you go to Berlin?' You don't say, 'Oh gosh, but I haven't been home for three evenings and I can't.' You jump at the thing. We carried passports in our pockets going to the office every morning. We craved the idea of being sent abroad. And I spent a lot of time abroad and I'm sure that my family knew that I wasn't there all the time."

Tim Spector

On the impact his father's death had on him:

"It was a total shock because it wasn't like he was ill. He just didn't wake up one morning. He'd had a heart attack. I was off skiing and they couldn't contact me for a week as it was the days before mobiles. And so, I had to come back and go straight to his funeral. And it was, it was really tough. I felt cheated because I'd never really gotten to know him.

"At the time, I was 21 years old and felt invincible. So it didn't occur to me [that it could happen to me] because I was sporty, he wasn't. And it wasn't really until my 50s that when I got ill, that I thought about mortality and maybe my genes are going to catch up with me. I really don't want to die in my 50s. That does seem far too early."

Alex Kingston

On how she coped when her first husband Ralph Fiennes left her:

"Looking back now with hindsight and with age, he was a young man doing what young men do, which is they have to sow their wild oats. I was really quite naive, and for me, I guess I just thought, 'Okay, I've fallen in love. This is the man of my dreams. We're going to marry, we're going to have children, we're going to be living together forever.' Because that's sort of how I imagined relationships were and, and we were very young.

"So I think in the end, the reason why is just that he wanted more experience. I was totally content with being in that relationship, having children at some point, and that would be my life. But fate has other plans. You never know what your future is going to be until you can look back on it as I am now, really.

"I sort of felt when I came through this… like a phoenix rising from the ashes, and that's actually quite a good thing to feel, and that you are stronger, and that this heartbreak, or whatever this horrendous situation is that you found yourself in, that you've been able to remove yourself from and survive actually makes you stronger as a person."

The latest episode sees Jenni interview Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the 11-time gold-winning Paralympian, who talks about using a wheelchair due to her spina bifida, the pressure being an athlete has put on her body and the reaction and prejudice she felt when she was expecting her daughter Carys, now 23.

"There were lots of weird reactions,” Tanni tells Jenni. "Loads of people saying, 'How did you get pregnant?' Lots of people saying, 'People like you shouldn't be allowed to have children.'

"I changed hospitals because I didn't think the hospital that I was meant to have my baby at was kind of right for me. They didn't really understand my condition. I have no stomach muscles. And they said to me, 'When you go into labour, you mums find a way to push the baby out.' It's not like the muscles were going to suddenly start working! So actually I went back to Cardiff where I grew up and I had an amazing team around me."

Listen to Experience is Everything.