Jan Carson

speaker

829 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 14 May

Jan Carson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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Brendan O'Connor · Jan Carson - “Maybe the whole of Northern Ireland should have gone to therapy” · 18 Apr 2026 podcast

You know, we didn't go to the cinema.

The cinema started with an S in our household.

There was no dancing, no drink.

And

a very kind of constrictive attitude to the arts.

And I very early on realised that I was an artist.

I was that annoying child that was always asking why and curious and wanting to know.

And I've talked about this quite a lot.

If I hadn't had full access to the library in Ballymena, I probably would have gone a bit mad.

Yeah, I mean, we would have been in church six days a week, usually at something or other.

And I think there was two things that played out.

There was the kind of fear and wariness of the arts, which is quite, it's endemic in a lot of those very fundamentalist Protestant communities.

But there was also kind of the role of women.

So within the community that I grew up in, you know, the biggest thing you could aspire to was to get married and have children and build a bungalow at the bottom of your parents' garden.

And none of that appealed to me.

I wanted to be a leader.

And there was very little scope for that in that world.

A little bit.

I think we very much did that thing that British families do where you go abroad and you find the other British people and you eat the things you ate at home.

So my mum famously brought a lot of mild curry and cheddar all the way to the south of France in case the French didn't have cheese down there.

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