Early last year, Lauren Laverne was standing on stage with Sir Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen – as you do – while the latter gave an acceptance speech at the Ivor Novello Awards. “Bruce had played Sunderland the night before, in a rainstorm, and could barely speak,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I’m so sorry about the voice, I left it in Sunderland’. And Macca nudges me and goes, ‘That’s you! That’s your town!’ And I just thought, ‘Oh my God. What is my life?’”
What indeed. Certainly, it would have been hard for the young Lauren Gofton, growing up in suburban Tyne & Wear, to imagine she might one day be on first name terms with a Beatle. But then there’s much about the radio and TV presenter’s life that, even now, she finds hard to believe – not least the fact that, from Desert Island Discs to The One Show to her much-loved BBC 6 Music programme, she gets to spend her days exploring art, music, culture and ideas with some of the greatest creative minds on the planet.
“I feel incredibly lucky, and grateful,” says the 47-year-old, who’s just arrived home after her mid-morning radio shift. “I know some people see art and culture as luxuries, but these are the ideas that make us human. That’s what culture is – it’s that which is not nature. For me, it’s central to who we are, as people – and also to how we deal with the times we’re living in.”
These troubled times have also inspired the stylish ‘love and peace’ jumper Lauren can be seen rocking above. A collaboration between Save the Children and luxury fashion brand Chinti & Parker, the festive knit was specially created for the charity’s annual Christmas Jumper Day (which took place on 11 December, but you can still donate to their Christmas campaign).
“It’s hard out there – 2025’s been a really tough year,” says Lauren. “So I think peace and love is a wonderful message, on a global scale, but also just in people’s lives. Because life isn’t perfect, and people go through their own hard times – God knows, I’ve had lots of those.”
For Lauren, who was successfully treated for cancer in 2024, Christmas will, inevitably, be a time for reflection. But then it is always is, she says. “Charles Dickens, the man who invented Christmas, was very big on the idea of making room for our losses and our failures at this time of year. That’s why he invented Scrooge – a man who literally makes peace with his ghosts. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Those feelings of nostalgia and poignancy are part of what makes this time of year so special.”
Lauren and her husband, DJ Graeme Fisher, will be hosting Christmas at their home in Muswell Hill, north London. “There’ll be a big Christmas lunch with friends and family, then a walk,” she explains. “Graeme does the cooking, I do the cleaning up – always with The Apartment or It’s A Wonderful Life on in the background.”
Save the Children’s Christmas Jumper Day, which has raised more than £40 million to help some of the most disadvantaged children across the world and the UK get access to food, healthcare and education, is also “an annual tradition”, says Lauren, who’s been supporting the campaign since its launch in 2012. “When I started working with Save the Children, my own kids [sons Fergus and Mack] were little, and now they’re 18 and 15. When you have your own children, you really see how important those years are. Everybody deserves a peaceful, safe childhood – and early years intervention is so crucial when it comes to changing lives.”
Lauren was in the 6 Music studio on the day (“in full Bri-Nylon glory”), having returned to the station in February, six months after stepping away to undergo cancer treatment. “Going back to work was lovely,” she says. “When you have a cancer diagnosis, everything gets turned upside down. It’s so scary and bewildering. So finding my way back into work… it was like putting all those little bits of myself back together, like a jigsaw.
“Being really poorly, you do get a new kind of clarity about what you care about,” she reflects. “I was in the hospital for a month, and when I came home I was cancer-free, but really not well. It took a long time to get better, during which I didn’t have the bandwidth or attention span for getting sucked into doomscrolling online, or whatever. So it really recalibrated how I use my attention. At first it was enough just to lie in bed and listen to the rain outside. That was actually really nice. It was lovely to be at home, and peaceful.
“I’m trying to hang on to aspects of that, and integrate it into how I live my life. Because it’s never all bad. You can have an awful time, and still have moments of joy in there. I think it’s important for anyone who’s going through recovery to know that.”
Has it made her want to seize every day by the scruff of the neck? “I was quite carpe diem anyway,” she smiles. “In the years before I got ill, I’d lost both my parents – my dad died when I was 40, my mum died three years ago. Losing them had shown me how fragile life is. So when I got ill, I was like, ‘I don’t need this lesson, I’m already living well, eating healthily, exercising…’ I didn’t have a life I could overhaul.”
“I thought we were posh, until I moved to London”
Lauren has her parents to thank for instilling her with a love of culture. She has described the Gofton household as “this odd, middle-class outpost” of a large working-class Sunderland family. “I thought we were posh, until I moved to London,” she laughs. “My mum and dad were both from council estates, and big families – mum was one of nine, dad one of six. They were part of that golden generation who went to grammar school, and that put them on this different path.
“My brother used to call our house ‘the culture TARDIS’: it looked normal from the outside, but it was just full of books and records. My dad had been a bus conductor, and worked in the shipyards, and he eventually went to university and became a sociologist. So he understood this idea of ‘social travel’, as he called it. And my mum was off to Greenham Common or knocking on doors and arguing with people about South Africa. It was that sort of house.”
Aged 16, Lauren formed the pop-punk band Kenickie with two schoolfriends and her older brother Pete, adopting the name ‘Laverne’ as a mark of the band’s ironic, faux sophistication. “We had some amazing times, but the music business of the 1990s being your first experience of adulthood was pretty messed up, in a lot of ways,” she admits. “Safeguarding did not exist. My mum was really torn about it – I was going to go to Durham University to do Medieval Studies – but we decided it was a chance I had to take.”
That chance that would prove life-changing: while Kenickie were only bit-part players in the Britpop years, they were successful enough to bring Lauren to the attention of TV producers. “They were like, ‘you look the part, and you’ve got a smart mouth, come and do this show’.”
It was the start of broadcasting career that, over the past 25 years, has seen her appear on every BBC radio station and terrestrial TV channel, fronting everything from Saturday morning kids’ TV to The Culture Show. In 2018, the announcement of this ex-pop star as the new host of Desert Island Discs induced a fit of the vapours in parts of middle England, but she quickly proved the naysayers wrong with her empathetic but incisive interviewing style.
She doesn’t take any of it for granted, she says. And, at 47, she’s embracing midlife with gusto. “I’ve lost my parents already, I went through serious illness… I feel like I’ve done some of the really difficult things earlier in life than you normally would. So actually coming out of that, and looking to the future, I think I feel quite free.”
And her Christmas wish? It’s written right there on her jumper. “You don’t always get the perfect Christmas,” says Lauren. “But a peaceful Christmas is something we can still aspire to. I know, during my own difficult Christmases, that’s the thing I’ve tried to work towards. Even if you can’t reach merry, you can still land at peaceful. And that’s a nice place to be.”
To find out more about Save the Children’s work, visit savethechildren.org.uk
A version of this article was published in Waitrose Weekend on 4 December, 2025
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