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Comedian Katherine Ryan would seem well placed to present a podcast that explores the ageing process: her fondness for tweakments, including Botox and lip-fillers, has been well publicised. But What’s My Age Again? is ostensibly about more than just surface-level looks. At the centre of each episode is a test where a blood sample is taken from an individual — in this case, Ryan’s guests — to show the extent to which their biological age differs from their age in years — or, as it’s now called, their “chronological age”.
This may sound like hokum, not to say a recipe for health anxiety. But Ryan’s resident expert, biologist Dr Nichola Conlon, is there to interpret the results and assure us that the concept of biological age is based on science. In any case, Ryan’s guests seem content enough to spill their blood for her, even if the results have the potential to unsettle them.
The first is stand-up comedian and podcaster Joanne McNally, who recalls her mother’s obsessive dieting and reflects on being an adopted child with scant knowledge of her birth parents’ medical histories. She also mentions her Botox treatment, which she stopped because, she says, it made her look like a “melted baby”. At this point you might expect her and Ryan to dig into the societal pressures that led them to undergo expensive and invasive procedures to halt the appearance of ageing. But it isn’t to be. McNally’s biological age turns out to be 20, a full 21 years younger than her chronological age, which makes her, according to Conlan, “an extreme outlier” and “genetically blessed”.
The second guest is another comic, Romesh Ranganathan, who says he went on a fitness drive after a health MOT eight years ago that revealed he was likely to die early. His biological age is now seven years younger than his actual age. And the latest is former England footballer Jill Scott, whose years of intense physical exertion mean her biological age is considerably older than her chronological one (this is to be expected of an elite athlete, says Conlon). Their conversations touch on fitness and self-image, but rarely going into depth or reveal anything surprising. It is jarring, too, to hear Ryan reading out lengthy adverts singing the praises of collagen supplements, a product aimed at middle-aged women which is not cheap and the benefits of which are unproven.
The world is already awash with podcasts in which celebrities have conversations with their famous pals, so new projects are rightly under pressure to stand out from the crowd. Ryan’s What’s My Age Again? certainly has a strong theme, but it is yet to meaningfully explore it.
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