When an interview begins with a gobsmacked moment, about needing to retreat to a “breakout room” to absorb the shocking news that your best friend is missing and her estranged husband is being arrested for murder, you know you are in for a gripping listen.

As Gobsmacked!, the podcast, celebrates its fourth year, nearly 60 episodes, and listeners in 128 countries, we bring you an episode that sits right at the heart of what this podcast is here to do.

We are proud to welcome Hetti Barkworth-Nanton.

Hetti is Co-Founder of the Joanna Simpson Foundation, Chair of Trustees at Refuge, a Pride of Britain Awards winner, and a CBE recipient for her work supporting people affected by domestic abuse and homicide. It is a formidable public record, earned in the hardest way imaginable.

She walked into the podcast studio with an extraordinary résumé. What follows is not a polished tour of achievements. It is a real conversation about as real as it gets. About what it takes to fight for justice without being absolutely destroyed in the process.

Hetti embodies what Gobsmacked! exists to amplify. She has created platforms for people who are overlooked, underrepresented, or treated unfairly by life, and she does so without platitudes, performance, or looking away. A must listen.

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There is a saying that into each life some rain must fall. For Larissa Astara Gray, the storm came early. At just thirteen, her life was thrown off course by an experience that no child should have to carry, and what followed was not a straight line but an absolutely wiggly one. There are points in Larissa’s life where she is very lucky to be alive to tell her story, and that truth matters.

This is an honest and challenging conversation, not because it is sensational, but because the problems are real. This is not an academic exercise or an intellectual debate for Larissa. This subject is written into her body, her relationships, and her life experience. Drawing on that lived reality, she speaks with clarity and courage about how pornography and online sexual content are shaping young people’s understanding of consent, intimacy, and what becomes normal. Her willingness to talk openly gives us a chance to learn, not to look away. Silence has not protected young people. Avoidance has not helped. This conversation exists because the damage is already happening, and because understanding is part of how we begin to do better.

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So, as we power into a new year, 2026, Gobsmacked! serves up an incredibly compelling, and what will become a vintage episode to start us off.

You do not forget the day you meet Nicky Pattinson. She is impossible to overlook. She is life force embodied. From that flame-red hair, to those unmistakable, inimitable, deep Yorkshire tones, this is a woman forged on the anvil of life.

Nicky is a woman who has lived her life on the spin cycle. She has experienced deep tragedy, child loss, visceral grief. The kind of grief that poleaxes you. The kind that rewrites who you are.

And yet. And this matters.

What this conversation reveals is not just reflection, but momentum. Not just insight, but intent. Not just survival, but a unique perspective.

Nicky holds a worldview that is both fierce and generous. She speaks openly about how the darkest moments of unimaginable loss, resource us and can define who we choose to be

It whips along at pace. It is funny. And this is a conversation between two women who have grown in both admiration and depth, because there is no getting away from it. Our lived experience shapes us. It changes us. It forges who we are.

And as we reset, and set our course for a new year, there is no finer woman to share some wisdom with than this incomparable Yorkshire lass.

This is Gobsmacked.

And this is where we begin.

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