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Full Disclosure with James O'Brien

Jan Ravens: “I lived with a nameless dread”

Full Disclosure with James O'Brien

Global

Society & Culture

4.63.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jan Ravens, the acclaimed impressionist at the heart of Dead Ringers, grew up learning to change the mood of a room long before she ever changed her voice on stage. In this conversation with James O Brien, she reflects on a childhood shaped by humour, instability and her father’s illness, and how those early pressures sharpened the instincts that later defined her career.

She traces the journey from school impressions to Cambridge Footlights, becoming the first woman to direct its revue, and the leap from Carrott’s Lib to Spitting Image and beyond. Jan talks candidly about ambition, class, resilience and the unexpected power of comedy to steady you when life feels uncertain. It is an honest, warm and often very funny look at how she found her place in British satire.

Find out more about Dead Ringers 25th Anniversary tour here

Transcript

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0:00.0

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This is a Global Player Original podcast.

1:21.2

Hello and welcome to full disclosure, a podcast project that allows me to spend much more time than I'd ever got on the radio with

1:27.6

interesting people.

1:28.6

Jan Ravens, welcome.

1:46.3

Thank you. I'm researching this, like a proper profession. Oh, done. Thank you. And I was struck by the Venn diagrams. No one's ever sort of done comedy family trees. Have they like they did rock family trees? No. But quite a few people who've sat in that chair relatively recently like sort of Kulshaw and Alistair McGowan, but also Hugh Lorry, who you work.

1:51.3

I mean loads and loads, possibly more connections than almost anybody else that's ever come on full disclosure,

...

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