Baroness Beeban Kidron has lived several lives in one. Award winning filmmaker, Hollywood director, crossbench peer and one of the earliest and most persistent critics of Big Tech, she has spent years sounding the alarm about the digital world long before the rest of us caught up.

In this episode of Full Disclosure, James O’Brien sits down with Beeban to trace the path from a radical North London childhood to the House of Lords, via Greenham Common, Hollywood and a career spent telling stories about power, exclusion and who gets heard. She reflects on the childhood operation that left her unable to speak, the camera that gave her purpose and the instinct that has driven everything since, from filmmaking to political campaigning.

Beeban explains why the arrival of smartphones felt like a turning point, how her documentary work with teenagers exposed the hidden costs of life online and why she believes the harms caused by tech are not accidental but built into the system. She speaks about lobbying, political failure and the transfer of power, money and control from public life into private hands.

It is a fiercely intelligent, deeply personal and often incendiary conversation about technology, democracy and what it will take to fight back.

Find out more about Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back by Beeban Kidron here

Full Disclosure is a Global Production

Listen or watch every Friday on Global Player, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Cressida Cowell is on of the most beloved children's authors, selling millions and millions of books worldwide, including 'How to train your dragon' which is now a global film franchise too.

In this episode of Full Disclosure with James O'Brien, Cressida tells us about her loving childhood with summers spent on Little Colonsay in the Inner Hebridies - a small, inhabited island that her environmentalist dad bought. From boarding school to sixth form, she charts back through her love or reading and illustrating to the struggles, and sometimes lack of, that she faced to become a successful author.

A self-proclaimed misfit at school who struggle with concentration and organisation, Cressida tells james how she felt powerless as a child and loved reading stories with strong female heroes - something she strives for in her writing.

But school never held her back, and with some good fortune of meeting the right people at the right time, Cressida discusses how she got her big break, 'How To Train Your Dragon' didn't become an instant hit, but a cult one and how Hiccup came to be.

Find out more about Cressida Cowell and her new book How To Train Your Dragon School: Fight of the Flamestrike here.

Full Disclosure is a Global Production

Listen or watch every Friday on Global Player, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

After Andy Burnham's landslide win against Nigel Farage's Reform party in Makerfield, we thought you'd love to hear his interview with James O'Brien again, first released in 2022

Dubbed 'King of the North' at the height of the pandemic, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham speaks to James about why he sees the country of his birth as containing 'two Englands'. After growing up in a catholic Labour family in Aintree, Burnham went on to study at Cambridge but did not fit in. He tells James why.