Sarah Mitchell

Sarah Mitchell hails from Leeds and attended Salford University. She enjoyed waving at Newsnight cameras as they regularly filmed scenes of squalor around Salford’s Langworthy estate. In 1999 she moved to London and joined the BBC, initially working in a basement, cutting up newspapers for the archive. At the end of each day she would emerge, blinking, into the daylight, covered in newsprint. She later worked as a researcher for Information and Archives, where she learned to answer the phone very quickly and charge people lots of money. In 2005 she joined the Radio Drama department, where she organised a Hairy Legs competition for some of her female colleagues. She won the contest, tights down, and this remains one of her crowning achievements. In 2006, having taken redundancy from the BBC, she made ‘Shake It, Baby: A History of Burlesque’, an experience which left her knowing more about sequined g-strings and nipple tassels than most.