Just The Tonic, Series 2, Episode 3: Help Musicians, with Lesley Garrett

Introduction (0:00)

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0:00 Katie: Hello, and welcome to Just The Tonic, the podcast that explores how the arts can have a really positive impact on our lives. I’m Katie Derham, and this is the third episode in our second series. If you missed the first series, you can catch up wherever you get your podcasts – you’ll find us in all the usual places.

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0:26 Across both series, we’ve heard that countless studies have shown the power of the arts to improve mental health and create positive connections between people. And regular listeners will know that we’ve been championing The People’s Orchestra, a fabulous community of orchestras and choirs based in and around the West Midlands. They’re gearing up for their big concert at Birmingham 2022, the cultural celebrations for the Commonwealth Games taking place in the city this summer.

0:55 “We all have a small part to play in something really big, and that’s a very heart-warming thing to do.”

1:00 Katie: Alicia Hillman is following in the footsteps of Soweto Kinch and Xhosa Cole, continuing the tradition of great Birmingham saxophonists. We’ll be finding out how support from the charity Help Musicians has made all the difference to her.

1:13 Alicia Hillman: It’s really allowed me time to just focus on developing, and really further refining, my skills as a saxophonist and a musician.

1:27 Katie: And I’ll be catching up with Help Musicians ambassador and soprano extraordinaire, the national treasure that is Lesley Garrett CBE.

1:35 Lesley Garrett: How can successive governments not understand what we give – we as musicians – to society, and the money we generate, and the great esteem that we are held in? We’re the best in the world at this. Governments give us crumbs. I’m sorry – it just makes me apoplectic, you might have gathered.

1:58 Katie: Such a wonderful conversation. We’ll hear more from Lesley later – do stay tuned.

"We Are One": TPO at the Birmingham 2022 Festival (2:05)

2:05 Katie: The Birmingham 2022 Festival, though, is the biggest celebration of creativity ever in the West Midlands, and it’s one of the largest-ever Commonwealth Games cultural programmes. The People’s Orchestra are front and centre. They’ve invited orchestral groups, choirs and individuals from the Commonwealth nations to join them for the Commonwealth Community Initiative – a week of events celebrating the best art and culture from the Commonwealth – and to top it off, there’s a showcase concert in Birmingham on Sunday the 24th of July.

2:35 [Excerpt from We Are One, spoken narration over music:] “…Although we hurt, we hurt the same. Times of sorrow may steer us to troubled seas, but they also shape us to be who we are. And although it’s easy to forget, remember: we laugh the same, we cry the same, our hearts beat the same. Never lose sight of this. We are one.”

3:05 Katie: Award-winning composer John Koutselinis composed We Are One – voiced by yours truly, I’ll have you know – especially for the Commonwealth Community Initiative, and John has a long tradition of working with The People’s Orchestra.

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3:24 John Koutselinis: I’ve been a film music composer full-time since 2011. It was a good nine years ago now – quite a while back – that I contacted Sarah Marshall, because at the time I was looking for my music to be performed. I’m an advocate for live musicians and live performance in general. Sarah was, and still is, the orchestra manager. I contacted her, and she was really lovely, and kind enough to take one of my pieces of music on board for The People’s Orchestra – and this is how our professional relationship started, and it’s been going strong since then.

4:05 Katie: So what was the idea behind We Are One?

4:08 John: My first reaction was, OK, it has to be celebratory. I really love John Williams’s fanfares – and they derive from classical composers who he’s very heavily influenced by himself. But it didn’t quite work, because I sat down and started writing a fanfare, and I thought it needed something a lot warmer to start with, and then maybe we could build into something big and exciting. We got on board a lovely choir, and a choir master in Ula, who is absolutely wonderful, and I ended up going to Birmingham, which is where we recorded it. It was a wonderful three days. The message was the resilience of the human race – love overcoming hatred – the fact that we’re one, no matter our background, the colour of our skin, orientation, anything. We’re one human race, and this is what I wanted to convey through the piece of music.

5:00 Katie: Our reporter Jamie Parker caught up with players from The People’s Orchestra at rehearsals.

5:05 Christine: Hi, I’m Christine, and I play tenor sax.

5:08 Jamie Parker: How have rehearsals been going for the main Commonwealth concert at the Birmingham 2022 Festival?

5:12 Christine: I think the rehearsals are going very well. We’ve got a very exciting repertoire to play that I think the audience will all recognise and enjoy hearing. The music for We Are One – the video for that certainly – is absolutely fantastic. I’m looking forward to being able to highlight our orchestra in Birmingham.

5:35 Eric de Silva (spelling unconfirmed): I’m Eric de Silva, and I play first violin. I’ve been involved with The People’s Orchestra for roughly four months, and I’m having a really good time.

5:45 Jamie: Can you tell me a bit more about the music you’ll be performing at the Commonwealth concert?

5:48 Eric: The music we’ll be performing consists of several well-known themes, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Jurassic Park. We are also doing James Bond – Spectre – [unclear], and music from Up.

6:05 Jess: My name is Jess, and I play the flute. I had quite a bit of a break from music, and then coming back – it’s just so much more fun when it’s just a hobby. There’s quite a buzz in the city at the moment with the Commonwealth Games, so it’ll be nice to experience that as a performer. There are a few players from Canada and from New Zealand playing with the orchestra at the Commonwealth concert, so it’ll be really fun to play with some different musicians for a change.

6:35 Jamie: What kind of legacy do you hope the Birmingham Commonwealth Festival and Games will leave on the residents of Birmingham and the West Midlands area?

6:42 “I hope that everybody that watches will realise that musicians all around the world, and from our little towns and villages that we all come from, can all get together and make a proper spectacle and a music extravaganza. We all have a small part to play in something really big, and that’s a very heart-warming thing to do.”

7:00 “Hopefully we can get our name out there more as an orchestra, get more players in, get more of a regular audience that will come to all of our concerts, and just make our name a bit more well known in the community. That would be amazing.”

7:10 “I’d like it to have a legacy that shows that Birmingham is a diverse, cultural place that has joy in it.”

7:17 Katie: Here’s Dean Williams from the Orchestre Philharmonia Mundi de Montréal, who’ll be joining The People’s Orchestra for their concert.

7:25 Dean Williams: I sent out a message over Facebook asking for orchestras who would like to do an exchange with us, and TPO answered. We did one exchange with them, and it was incredibly successful – we both had an incredible time. And basically, that’s what we want to do: we want to be able to use the uniting power of music to do projects like this. My orchestra, Philharmonia Mundi, has never done anything that I know of that’s anywhere near this big. This is something that, for any amateur orchestra, is just beyond the pale. It’s extremely difficult to organise, extremely difficult to put together – the logistics of an event like this, for an amateur organisation, are very, very close to impossible. And I’ve got to hand it to TPO for managing to pull this off.

[Excerpt from We Are One] [Music]

8:37 Katie: Well, we wish The People’s Orchestra all the very best for their Commonwealth Community Initiative and for their big show on the 24th of July. If you’d like to go along, head to their website, thepeoplesorchestra.com, for more information.

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Alicia Hillman (8:55)

8:55 Katie: The charity Help Musicians, which offers career support and advice to artists, reported that 96% of musicians saw the majority of their income wiped out during lockdown, and it is still a really challenging time for many. Birmingham saxophonist Alicia Hillman is really grateful for the help she received from Help Musicians.

9:15 Alicia: My family are all musicians. I’ve always grown up in a very musical family – my parents, my sisters, we all play; my aunt and uncle were all musicians. But the school that I went to didn’t offer saxophone lessons – that wasn’t an option – and my dad didn’t want us to be defeated, so he taught me himself. He’s never had any formal lessons on the saxophone, but he wanted to help me get to a place where I could try and get lessons elsewhere.

9:45 So I did my undergraduate studies on the saxophone at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and after four years I decided I needed to keep developing – there’s so much more I can explore. So I applied for a postgraduate, and I realised it would be such a shame to let financial reasons stop me from doing the postgraduate degree. So I reached out to Help Musicians, and I’ve been very lucky to be supported throughout the two years of my studying in Birmingham.

10:15 Really, it’s more than just financial support. In the last two years I’ve created a saxophone quartet, and having the extra time – not having to work too much outside of my studies – has allowed me to focus on building up this quartet. We now get lots of concerts, and we’ve just recorded a studio album as well. So it’s really allowed me time to just focus on developing, and really further refining, my skills as a saxophonist and a musician.

10:45 Katie: Alicia’s Saxology project was all about bringing the saxophone to as wide an audience as possible across the West Midlands.

10:52 Alicia: The premise behind my project was to create lots of different ensembles, all showcasing what the saxophone can do, but allowing anyone to join up and anyone to take part. So I played in saxophone duos, trios, quartets, octets, and a solo performance with the West Midlands Fire Service Band (name unconfirmed), because I’m a regular player in their band – that was an amazing opportunity to perform a solo piece with them. And the other kind of ensemble I led was a mass ensemble – a community-based saxophone choir, which was formed of students from Staffordshire Music Service and Birmingham Music Service. So, really young people who had just started learning the saxophone, up to people who’ve been playing it for 30, 40-plus years, and letting everyone come together and learn from one another. For me, Saxology was just such good fun – to see everyone meeting new people and learning new things.

12:05 Katie: Alicia also teaches pupils of all ages.

12:08 Alicia: I teach really young students, and I’ve also got a lady who I teach who’s 70 – she plays the flute and she’s loving it. Just seeing them persevere – when they start learning a new piece or a new technique, and they think they can’t do it, and then they persevere and keep practising – and seeing how happy they are when they reach their goal that they didn’t think they could… That kind of shines a light: OK, this is what it’s like to be a musician. It’s a lot of hard work, but also so rewarding. I don’t know what my life would be without music. I think music just brings a huge joy to my life.

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Lesley Garrett (13:04)

13:04 Katie: Many thanks to Alicia, and all the very best to her for the future.

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13:10 Like Alicia, much-loved soprano Lesley Garrett received support from Help Musicians early in her career, when she suffered a serious illness. She went on to become principal soprano with English National Opera. She’s performed at the Royal Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North. She’s a star of musical theatre too, having performed in The Sound of Music and Carousel – and of course, as I said before, she’s a national treasure. Lesley was recently on the top deck of one of the buses travelling around London to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. She is such a wonderful force for good in the music world, and it’s always great to catch up with her. I began by asking her about her musical roots.

13:50 Lesley Garrett: I can’t remember a time when music wasn’t absolutely part of me. I think it’s because I was born in South Yorkshire – on the South Yorkshire coalfield, in a pit village called Thorne – and all my family were miners, or railway workers, or steel workers. Everybody in the community were working people, men and women, and the glue that held us all together was music. It was so important to the community as a sort of relief, I think, from all the work – and it was free, of course. The Miners’ Welfare, when I was a little girl, as well as the schools, of course, and the local education authority, worked almost together. There was such a need for music, and such a passion to support it, and these great organisations were there providing instruments and training. They supported any kid who wanted to learn.

14:40 I was incredibly lucky, because all my family were profoundly musical. My parents both had beautiful voices. My mum loved the choral tradition – she sang with Doncaster Choral Society and Scunthorpe Choral Society all her life. My dad was much more of an extrovert. My mum liked to be in a choir, but my dad liked to be downstage centre! I think I take after them both, because I absolutely love choral music – I think I knew the Messiah before I went to school, I really did; my mum and her sisters would just sing it all the time.

15:15 And my granddad was a dance band leader – he had a dance band called Arthur Garrett and the Blackout Boys (name unconfirmed) – and he performed in all the clubs; he did the working men’s clubs. My granddad had asthma very badly, so he wasn’t allowed to go down the pit. So my great-granddad said to him, memorably: “right, lad – if thou’s not going down pit, thou’ll be put to piano”. Because in those days, the next best way of earning a living after mining was in music. There was so much music out there. And he began to win national competitions and do really well. He had the chance to go to London to further his studies. He’d already got his LLCM – the Licentiate of the London College of Music. In fact, hold on a minute, I can show you – it’s here, look at that!

16:15 Katie: Oh, fantastic!

16:17 Lesley: That was the 18th of April 1913. My granddad got that.

16:20 Katie: Do you know, I’ve got one of my grandmother’s, actually – the same thing on my wall at home! What’s fascinating as well is that obviously all this music was around you, and it was very normal to be musical, but you have taken it further, haven’t you? What was it, do you think, that made you say, “no, it’s not just something I’m going to do as a lovely hobby, like the rest of my family”?

16:45 Lesley: Well, I’ll just finish off about my granddad, because he was important to the story. He decided to get a job in Sheffield, and he joined an orchestra. Now, there were lots of small orchestras, all playing for the hundreds of cinemas. Silent movies were huge, and what was great was that on a Friday, when the new picture came, the pianist and the orchestra would have to write the music for the film – it didn’t come with a score; you had to make it up. And granddad turned out to be good at that, and he absolutely loved doing it. He used to play all the overtures to the operas, and the suites, and all that lovely incidental music. So when I told him that I wanted to become an opera singer, and I’d got a place at the Royal Academy of Music, and a scholarship to go, he said, “eh, lass, that’s grand. I’m that proud of you.” He said, “I love opera – except for the singing”!

[Laughter]

17:50 But he was obviously very proud – although a bit sceptical about my ability to make a living as an opera singer. The point of all this is that I can’t remember when music wasn’t part of my life. I never considered it a separate subject; I never even considered it something to study. It was more like breathing, or eating. It was nourishment. It allowed me to express my emotions, my feelings, from as little as I can remember. Music’s done that for me, and continues to, both as a listener and as a performer. It is the most cathartic experience for me to perform, even now, after over 40 years. When I perform for an audience, and I can feel that music coming through me and out to the audience, it’s spiritual – it’s a spiritual feeling. It nurtures me, and it always will.

18:45 My husband’s a doctor, and through knowing me and my world, he regularly now – when patients come and they’re possibly suffering from depression – will say, “have you thought of joining a choir? It will make you feel better”. He advocates this.

19:05 Katie: Your career has been so stellar, Lesley. But one of the things which I think people perhaps don’t realise is just how very tough it can be as a musician. Even though you’ve been hugely successful, have there been moments in your life where you thought, “crikey, this is hard work – can I go on? How am I going to earn a living?”

19:25 Lesley: Yes, most definitely. There have been periods where I’ve lost my voice, I’ve lost my health, I’ve had to stop singing. They were terrifying times. I think I was about 23 when I first had inklings that it wasn’t all plain sailing. I’d basically been singing the wrong repertoire – it was before I got with my singing teacher, Joy Mammen, who I finally met through the Royal Academy, and I still have singing lessons with her to this day, possibly because of this experience. I developed the beginnings of nodules, and I had to stop singing for a whole term – that was the treatment; it still is, actually. I had to rest. That was the first hurdle.

20:07 But then I was just beginning to have success. I won the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Competition, and I managed to win all the prizes in my last year, which was a sure sign that Joy was the right teacher and I was on the right path. I got into the National Opera Studio, and I got my first role at the Wexford Festival, and then I was kind of off. Lord Harewood took me on, I worked at Opera North… And then everything came crashing down. I had a very bad kidney illness – nephritis, it was called – and when I got out of hospital, I discovered I couldn’t sing any more. I’d lost my strength, I’d lost my vitality. I’d just lost my voice. Even though it was still there, I’d literally lost it.

21:03 It took me a very long time to recover – about nine months – and it was entirely down to two things. One was Joy, whose house I cleaned in exchange for singing lessons, because I had no money. I had a range of a second – I had two notes – and we just stretched that range and grew it, and basically got my musculature working again. It got me fit, and that’s when I realised how fitness is so important to good singing. Strength is what you need to be an opera singer.

21:30 But the other absolutely vital component in my recovery was what was then called the Musicians Benevolent Fund. They were amazing. They picked up this little wounded bird and set me back on my perch.

21:42 Katie: Was that basically helping you pay your rent?

21:45 Lesley: No, it wasn’t that. They helped me to find out what was wrong with me. They paid for me to see a very good kidney specialist, and to have treatment to sort out my kidneys. They had a medical officer who talked to me for a long time, and he got me to see a counsellor. My marriage had broken down at that time, and I was feeling extremely guilty about that – it all happened at the same time – and this doctor felt that the guilt was causing me not to be able to sing, and I think he was right. And they also – and this was almost one of the best things they did – suggested I went to the Alexander Technique, because I said, “I feel very unbalanced – everything about my life, and particularly my voice, feels completely unbalanced”, and that helped enormously. Without that support from what is now called Help Musicians – it’s changed its name – without that help, I wouldn’t be here. I’ve always said that, and since then I’ve worked for them and helped to raise money for other people who are in the dire straits I was in.

22:55 But I was never the same after that.

22:58 Katie: In what way?

23:00 Lesley: I think singing for me had been such a natural activity – such a form of expression. It was who I was: I was a singer. I didn’t learn to be a singer; I just was a singer. And I took that for granted, as you do if you’re born with something. And I never, ever took it for granted again. I realised it could be taken away from me at a moment’s notice. For a time I wasn’t able to sing as freely. It took me a long time to have the courage to sing freely again. After about a year and a half I auditioned, and when I got that letter saying, “I’m delighted to be able to offer you the post of principal soprano at English National Opera”, I think I cried for the rest of the day, I was so relieved and so happy. I felt so at home in that company. It was a wonderful company.

23:57 Katie: It’s such an interesting story, Lesley – such a powerful story – but also one which shines a light on the fact that the life of a musician is unbelievably precarious, or of any artist really. Those of us who love the arts – you do it because you love it, don’t you, and also because you can’t almost imagine doing anything else. And yet it’s so uncertain. It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?

24:20 Lesley: It’s a very tricky one, and it’s only got trickier in recent times, which we can talk about in a minute. But I think that’s why I felt so happy at ENO: because I had a salary, and if I became sick again, I would still have my salary. So I felt very secure, and that’s why I was able to rebuild, and really achieve my career, because I had that bedrock of security. But when I left there, of course, it wasn’t like that any more – and it’s not like that for most musicians. I was incredibly lucky to get that position; they’re very few and far between. I discovered after I left how precarious it is. If, as a freelance musician, you become ill, you lose your income immediately. That’s it. You have to put money by for those hard times. You never know where your next job is coming from. You’re at the whim of promoters, agents, managers – fashion, absolutely, fashion – all kinds of whimsical things. And now we’re all at the whims of social media. If you don’t have a following, you often don’t get employed.

25:40 It’s interesting – I spent some time on the top of my bus recently… I’m officially a national treasure now, Katie, so be careful what you say! I was on this bus with Katherine Jenkins, who I think is lovely – I really do; she’s doing a lot to popularise classical music, and that’s a fantastic thing to do. And we were talking about this, because she’s got a very big social media following – she’s the generation where that came naturally to her – and I don’t, really, because it all seems a little bit trivial, in a sense. But I know now that that is the way, apparently, you sell tickets and become popular, and we must embrace that. It’s just another example of how sustaining a career as a professional musician is very, very difficult. You’ve got a lot of masters to please to have the privilege of doing the one thing you want to do, which is just to communicate with an audience – to perform.

27:00 To allow people to access their innermost feelings, to allow them to express emotions they’ve buried for decades – because that’s what happens in concerts. That’s what happens when people hear music: they suddenly are crying and they don’t know why. It is therapy, isn’t it, at its best? And the magic of it will never cease. How can governments not understand how important that is? How can successive governments not appreciate that, and not understand what we give – we as musicians – to society, and the money we generate, and the great esteem that we are held in? We’re the best in the world at this. And governments give us – they give us crumbs. They give us what they can find in the bottom of the bin when they’ve finished with everything else. I’m sorry – it just makes me apoplectic, you might have gathered.

28:00 Katie: But you know what, Lesley – even more so this last couple of years, when people have needed music more than ever, so many musicians that we all know have been completely struggling to keep body and soul together, because of course they haven’t had anywhere to perform. So obviously charities like Help Musicians have been paramount in the work they’ve been doing. What examples can you share with us of how things have been over the last couple of years for musicians?

28:26 Lesley: Well, Help Musicians have had to start a telephone helpline – a bit like the Samaritans, I suppose, for musicians. There are so many musicians with mental health problems, because making music is what we do to be healthy. We’ve almost got no choice – you’re kind of born to perform. We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of musicians of all kinds, all of whom have lost their living. We have lost so many who’ve had to just get jobs – filling shelves, driving trucks – and I don’t think we’ll get those back. So it’s been a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. It’s very hard to practise when you’ve got nothing to practise for. Of course you do, but when you have to put food on the table for your family, you have to go out and find something – if you can’t manage on the furlough money, if you were lucky enough to get the furlough money. Lots of musicians didn’t get help from the government, because we fall between the cracks.

29:40 Music in any circumstance – but particularly in a circumstance where life is threatened, as it was in the pandemic – is vital. Absolutely vital.

29:50 Katie: That’s where so many online choirs were successful, I think.

29:54 Lesley: Yeah – that’s hard to do. I tried that; it’s really, really hard, technically, trying to keep everybody together.

30:02 Katie: It was a real lifeline, and it was great, but these things have a shelf life, don’t they? You need to be with people.

30:08 Lesley: Yeah. But the power of music to heal is a well-documented thing. There’s some fascinating research – I’m sure your husband’s probably heard of it as well – around sound therapy. Extremely powerful. I heard about a wonderful project they were doing at Plymouth University – I think it was a PhD student, a few years ago now. He was working with early-onset Alzheimer’s sufferers, and he set a list of tasks to music – just things like “I get up and brush my teeth, and then I walk the dog”, something like that. And when he set these tasks to music, they didn’t forget one. They got up and did all of those tasks.

30:52 Katie: That is an excellent tip.

30:55 Lesley: Absolutely. So you don’t need to convince me of the power of music to improve society, to heal at its most basic – but also to hold us together, mentally and physically. When you take in a breath to sing – not for nothing is it called inspiration. That’s always struck me: you inspire a breath, and then what you can make with that breath is also inspirational. A breath to sing is not like a breath to do anything else. It’s not like a breath to talk, or to whistle, or to shout. It’s a breath that’s going to turn into sound, and that sound has the power to heal. Now, that is the most profound thing any of us can do – and we can all do it.

31:49 I’m going to have to do it while I’m talking to you, because I just have to! You can start to sing properly – and this has nothing to do with doing it professionally. You have to stand tall, you have to stand square, you have to find the strength in your body. You have to allow your body to take in – to inspire – this magical air that’s going to create sound, that’s going to liberate you as a human being. You’re going to fill a room with sound – even if it’s your bathroom. You’re going to make the air move in that room. It’s going to connect you with your inner authority. It’s going to make you strong. It’s going to do you good. Anybody can do it – that’s what makes me excited. Even if the sound you make is horrendous, it’s yours. It’s your sound; you can do what you like with it. I just think the power of that is… Maybe this is what I should do with my retirement!

32:52 Katie: This is your mission, Lesley, now that you are officially, as you say, a national treasure, and you’ve been on a bus with Cliff Richard. Everybody’s got to listen to you, and everybody’s now got to sing!

33:05 Lesley: It’s so powerful, Katie. You sing, and it just makes you feel so good. For me, it’s like brushing my teeth – I just have to have a belt, and it connects me up. The whole of me is connected then – mind, body, soul, spirit – and then I’m able to be outward, to see outwards, because I’ve sent something out into the stratosphere. I’ve sent a sound out that I care about.

33:45 Katie: Lesley, you are an inspiration. It is true.

[Music]

Close (33:50)

33:50 Katie: Thank you so much to Lesley Garrett, to Alicia Hillman, to John Koutselinis, to Dean Williams, Jamie Parker and The People’s Orchestra. If you’d like to find out more about their Commonwealth Community Initiative and their concert on Sunday the 24th of July, head to their website at thepeoplesorchestra.com.

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34:20 In the next episode, Jamie will be chatting to The People’s Orchestra’s youngest player – eight-year-old (yes, eight-year-old!) cellist Aurora Chin Chan (spelling unconfirmed) – and we’ll be hearing from some fantastic young poets whose work is featuring in the Birmingham Children’s Poetry Festival, and from Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Casey Bailey. And last but most definitely not least, I will be chatting to the wonderful Ian McMillan, poet and presenter of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. He is fabulous, so I can’t wait for that.

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34:55 If we’ve inspired you to join a band or an orchestra or a choir, do search online for music groups in your area, or get in touch with Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Wales, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland or Creative Scotland.

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35:15 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on social media for updates – we’re on Twitter, we’re on Instagram – and if there’s someone you think we should be talking to on the podcast, let us know and we’ll do our very best.

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35:36 Thanks so much for listening. Just The Tonic with Katie Derham was produced by Jill Davis. It’s a Peanut and Crumb production, supported by The People’s Orchestra and by Arts Council England.

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