Amol Rajan Interviews - Season 2 / Year 2022

In an interview with Amol Rajan, Novak Djokovic opens up about his controversial decision to not have the Covid-19 vaccine and what effect that might have on his career.

In this probing hour-long interview, Amol Rajan speaks to actor Ian McKellen, one of the most celebrated performers of his generation and someone who has long defied convention and expectation.

Amol Rajan speaks to musician Nile Rodgers, discussing his childhood in 1960s New York, setting up Chic with his musical partner Bernard Edwards, and the racism that still troubles America.

Amol Rajan speaks to Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership.

Overseeing a team of 80,000 partners working at branches and offices of supermarket Waitrose and department store John Lewis around the country, White took over the retailer in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus lockdown forced her to shut shops all over the UK. During her two years in the role, she has had to close 16 branches of John Lewis and make many staff redundant in response to the unprecedented economic circumstances of the time.

White tells Rajan about her upbringing in Leyton as the daughter of a Windrush generation family, her time at Cambridge University, her fast rise to the top of the civil service and her position as chief executive of media regulator Ofcom. After discussing topics like code-switching, class and social mobility, White and Rajan visit her childhood home and branches of John Lewis and Waitrose, before she shows him around the partnership's main distribution centre, Magna Park in Milton Keynes, to show him a vision of the future of online retail.

Amol Rajan talks to a true game changer: Billie Jean King. A record-breaking tennis player on the court, and a boundary-busting social activist off the court, King dominated tennis whilst campaigning to get the women's sport recognised and female athletes treated as equal to the men.

At her spiritual home of Wimbledon – where she holds the record for most career wins – King talks to Rajan about her lifelong battle for equality and inclusion, and how she has balanced her activism with both a record-breaking sports career and a tumultuous personal life.

In a tennis career spanning nearly 30 years, Billie Jean King became the first female sports superstar, winning 39 Grand Slam titles and holding the world number one position for six years.

As the first female athlete-activist, King transformed the women's game. She and eight other renegades created professional women's tennis when they started the first ever women's tennis tour in 1971. King then co-founded the Women's Tennis Association and forced the US Open to become the first Grand Slam tournament to offer equal prize money to its male and female players.

During the 1970s, while at the very top of her game and height of her activism, King was contending with intense turmoil in her private life. News of an abortion she had was made public against her will, at a time before the Roe v Wade ruling made legal abortion a constitutional right in the US. Meanwhile, she struggled to come to terms with her homosexuality while married to a man, before being publicly outed. In 1981, King became the first prominent professional female athlete to speak publicly about her homosexuality and, as a result, lost all her endorsements overnight.

In discussing her extraordinary life, Billie Jean King and Amol Rajan also touch on topical issues such as the sport world's response to the war in Ukraine, trans athletes and mental health matters.

Amol Rajan talks to 19-year old Greta Thunberg, the climate activist who has become the unlikely voice of a global youth.

Thunberg isn't a politician or a scientist, nor is she the first to campaign against climate change. However, since overcoming severe childhood depression to focus the world's attention on the plight of the planet, the Swedish student has become symbol for a generation which – as she puts it – is not being listened to by older people who won't suffer the consequences.

In a challenging and wide-ranging conversation, Rajan discusses with Thunberg her latest book and interrogates some of the solutions it posits to tackle climate change. They explore green policy, climate justice, greenwashing and the role of both politics and protest in effecting change. Thunberg also shares the personal cost she has paid in being a global game-changer and offers a rare insight into the real Greta Thunberg.