'We're back home when we're in Manchester' say Jordan & William ahead of Help I Sexted My Boss arena tour
Podcast hosts Jordan North and William Hanson are bringing their first arena tour to Manchester next year and the pair, former residents of the city, chatted to us all about it.
Burnley local Jordan North and Bristolian William Hanson are bringing their award-winning podcast Help I Sexted My Boss to arenas across the UK in March 2026.
With dates at the Utilita Arena Cardiff (March 20), OVO Arena Wembley (March 21), OVO Hydro Glasgow (March 27) and AO Arena Manchester (March 28), this marks the pair’s biggest and boldest tour yet.
We caught up with Jordan and William to find our more about what to expect from the show, why they love Manchester, and why everyone in the North West should head to their AO Arena date.
How are you feeling about the tour?
Jordan: “Nervous… I'm probably the most nervous out of both of us.”
William: “I'm nervous for different [reasons]. Jordan will be nervous because of the show. I'm nervous because we still need to write it.”
Jordan: “We’re half way through!”
William: “We're halfway through, yes, but, once I know what we're doing, I will be okay, because I work well within parameters. Jordan is nervous, maybe for that, but also for just, you know, the general tour, and also it's such a responsibility. I mean, every tour we've done, we've got bigger, which is a lovely position to be in. But, you know, it started off… ‘can we make 40 people laugh in a pub room in Camden?’ and now it's ‘can we make the AO Arena laugh?’ and that's quite a responsibility so I hope we do it justice.”
Jordan: “Yeah, we're nervous, but we're definitely excited and looking forward to it, like we know it's going to be a great night out for everybody that comes and sees it. You know, it's not like we've never not made people laugh before, so hopefully-”
William: “No, they just laugh with us, not at us!”
I'm not sure how in-depth this answer is going to be if you've only written half the show, but what can people expect from this tour?
William: “Well, I tell you what they cannot expect. It is not just the live proposition of our typical shows. It is not just Jordan me sitting on stage for two hours chatting. It is not a recorded podcast. It doesn't go out on the feed. Lots of other podcasts do that, and there's nothing wrong with that. We do something different. It's a ‘miss it, miss out’ concept so if you're not in the room, the arena, then you know that's the one chance that it's going to happen. That's the one occasion you have to witness that. It's a good night out. There is chat with us on stage, but there are song and dance routines, there are sketches, there are costume changes.”
Jordan: “It's like a panto. It's a variety show.”
William: “Potentially, stunts.”
Jordan: “Yeah? Like we go all out. It's like a big, cheesy, camp variety show.”
William: “No, it's not cheesy. No one would ever call us cheesy. It's Bongo’s Bingo meets podcast meets panto.”
Jordan: “There's loads of audience interaction as well and stuff like that.”
If people have never come across your podcast before, how would you describe the themes you tend to go through, the comedy, etc?
Jordan: “It's two friends who genuinely get on that come from very different backgrounds, and it's really simple, like the first part is just catching up, like you do with your friends, and we catch up every week. We literally ask how our week's been. So it's like when you go meet your mate in the pub or in a cafe, that kind of thing. And the second part is answering people's modern day dilemmas. And our listeners range from- we have what we call silver silver sexters - so OAPs that listen to the podcast right to Gen Z, and we get a variety of modern day dilemmas.”
William: “We have in the past, I know a couple of them, people that work at Buckingham Palace that listen to us versus people who definitely don't work in Buckingham Palace. So we are a broad church. I'm not sure their magisties have ever listened, don't quote me on that, but you never know. They could have heard our voice down a corridor.”
Jordan: “There's a very prominent member of the royal family, secretary, private secretary, who's a big G&Diva. Yeah, we should talk about that more actually.”
William: “We are hoping we might be the very first royal warranted broadcast.”
You mentioned there's lots of audience interaction, do you hear dilemmas from the audience during the live show?
Jordan: “Yeah, that's towards the end of the second act. It's always my favorite bit of the show because it's unplanned so you just don't know what's going to happen. And it's a good 20/30 minutes of dilemmas, and you can guarantee there’s always one that just brings a house down. In fact, probably the biggest laugh of the night is the dilemmas.”
William: “It's nice because you can start to read it, and you normally, then, depending on what it is, you hear some shriek from a row because they've obviously gone ‘oh my god, they're reading our dilemma’ and then sometimes, depending on where they're sitting, we can always say -what we actually can't do on the podcast is we sometimes want additional information, but we can't get it because they're not there but actually, if they are sitting in row three, we could say ‘well, actually, what happened here?’ Or ‘can you give us more information’, which is super helpful, so that is always lovely. And obviously, back in the day, when we started doing very small shows, people would just write them in on cards and hand them in. Can't do that anymore but there's a nice tech way that it happens, but again, we don't create them, they are created by the listeners or the audience in this instance, and it's great, because you just don't know what you're going to get. I think also in a live environment, compared to a podcast, because it's not going out on the feed, I think people share even more because they've maybe had one too many gin dubonnet”
William: “Especially our northern audiences. We're in Manchester, yes, and some of the most… there's no filter for the dilemmas when we're up north, let me tell you that, which is great.”
How are you feeling about your visit to Manchester?
Jordan: “Genuinely, we feel like we're back home when we're in Manchester and we're on stage. I always feel like it's our best night… It's where the podcast started. The company that produces Sexted ‘Audio Always’, they're a Manchester based company, so yeah, for me, it's the one we look forward to. And what's great about this arena tour is that Manchester is the last night, so it's going to be a big, big party. I love playing in Manchester.”
William: “Yeah, they're fun. When I was living in Manchester for nine years- and my grandmother, who got me into etiquette, was from the north, and she would agree with me- I think people have a better sense of humor up north, and so the comedy lands even better, because they don't take themselves too seriously.”
Was Manchester deliberately chosen to be the last show?
Jordan: “Yeah, absolutely, it was planned… because we want to go out with a bang, and what's great for me, is all my family come to it. I mean, the guest list is-“
William: “That’s why we're only in arenas… to accommodate his guest list. I think there are about 10 other tickets for the public and the rest of them are Jordan's family.”
Jordan: “That's why I love it, because all my family comes, and then we usually have to book a venue and have a party afterwards, which is always great.”
I was next gonna ask, do you have any plans yet for what you'll do in Manchester whilst you’re there?
Jordan: “Oh, yeah. We always go out.”
WIlliam: “I'll lie down in a darkened room, probably.”
Jordan: “William is a very sociable character. He'll be having lunch and meeting people and stuff, and I'll probably just chill in the gym… but we'll definitely have friends and family over.”
William: “We need to do the show first and then we'll worry about the after show.”
You brought the podcast’s live show to Salford on your last tour so what's different this time around coming to Manchester, about you guys, about the show, etc?
William: “The show's bigger so we can do more with the bigger space, which is both daunting and exciting. It's a totally different show so if you've been before, we're not just doing the same thing again, if anything actually… this is maybe like tour number five so we almost want to sort of rip up what we've done before and surprise those that do come every year… There will be points in the show where we sort of tailor it to where we are and obviously Manchester is where we first met, it's where we first recorded Sexted, I was at university, you're from Lancashire, etc so there will be a lot of local references and content.”
And did you live in Manchester too Jordan?
Jordan: “Yeah. I went to uni in Sunderland, and then my first job was at Radio Five Live and Capital in Manchester. So I moved there in 2011, I lived there for about three, four years, and then moved to Preston to work at Rock FM. So yeah, I loved it there.
William: “You used to get me on your Rock FM show. Annoyingly, we cannot find those tapes.”
Jordan: “That was the podcast before the podcast, there was a weekly feature on Rock FM, Wiliam: “Yeah and people used to hate me. Thank God they like me now!”
As former Manchester residents, does it feel strange going back to the city as tourists?
William: “Yeah, Manchester has changed. There's been so much development and that's one of the things I loved about Manchester when I moved there from Bristol. You know, Bristol is gorgeous and lovely and is very scenic, but Bristol is quite small ‘c’ conservative and kind of just stays the same. I can see the appeal for that but Manchester was this buzzy, vibrant city with restaurants, there were cranes everywhere. So as an 18 year old, I found that terribly exciting, the development that has then happened since I left Manchester in 2018 is extraordinary. There's everything out there, and half of me wishes I was still there, because I've missed out on so much because so there's just so much development… in a positive way.”
Jordan: “Yeah, I love Manchester as a city. I think it's a great night out. I've got so many friends there, I've even got family there as well and I always love going back, yeah, it's such a vibey city.”
William: “I like walking around going ‘oh, that's different’, ‘oh, that wasn't there’, ‘oh, that's closed, ‘oh, look, they've merged over here’. So it's great fun.”
You’ve mentioned how you've done many tours so could you ever imagine when you did your first live show that you, many years later, would be selling -hopefully selling out - huge arenas around the UK?
Jordan: “No, we always knew we were going to write a book, which is weird. We've done that. We’d say ‘save that for the book’ and it was our ambition to always write a book. But we never thought we'd be going on tour, never mind in arenas, the biggest arenas in the UK. We never thought that this podcast would coincide with touring. Like the whole model of it now is we record episodes every Thursday, and then every couple of years we go on tour. It weren't even a thing, was it? And then we've done so many like we've kind of learned our craft with touring, and I'm so, so glad we've got all that experience behind us, because we've done like tiny little glee clubs up and down the UK. We've got some air miles in us now and we've had, we've had on the majority a lot of really good shows, but we've had a couple of bad ones.”
William: “I mean, I wouldn't call them terrible, but they were comparatively for whatever reason, you just don't know, you don't know what's going on. I think the weather sometimes affects things.”
Jordan: “It keeps on your toes. We can come off and think ‘that could’ve been better’ and then you learn from that. What I'm trying to say is that I’m glad this isn't the first time we’re on tours and it's in arenas, because I don't think we'd be ready for it, whereas we are ready for this one.”
Is the next step after an arena tour, a TV show for you guys, what's the dream?
Jordan: “We've spoke to commissioners, we've pitched many ideas. It's one of them. Yeah, we'd love to do something on TV but also, equally, we're a podcast, we do well on that... You can watch us on Youtube, we do really well on YouTube, and social media. So yeah, if the right TV show came up, then yeah, we'd absolutely love to, but it's got to be right and timing, getting us together on a Thursday's hard enough. So never mind, filming a TV show, that takes months.
William: “Yes, television is a very slow medium. I remember my first piece of TV, which was for the one show 15 years ago, two and a half minute piece took seven and a half hours to film.”
When you described the show, you referenced the fact you're quite an unlikely duo so why do you think this unlikely duo has proven so popular?
William: “I think because we don't take ourselves too seriously and there's a great danger with anything or anyone in life that you take yourself too seriously. There's a great Dame Edna quote, which I think she said to Jeffrey Archer back in the day, which is ‘never be afraid to laugh at yourself, because you could be missing out on the joke of the century.’ …I think sometimes people don't realize that we are sort of slightly in on the joke, yeah, and they maybe don't get it. We just make each other laugh.”
Jordan: “And we’re good friends. We genuinely are friends. You know, we've known each other for years. We’ve know each other way before the podcast was even a thing, and I think that helps. We weren't thrown together and told to be funny.”
William: “And the best bits on your radio show, or on anyone's radio show or TV, is where things go wrong, or people are laughing and there's something very contagious about laughter, and we need an excuse to laugh in life at the moment.”
Final question, wherever people are in the UK, why should they buy tickets to see your arena show?
Jordan:“If you need a good night out, you need a really good night out, then come and see us, because we promise you, even if you've never listened to podcasts before or seen us online and things like that, then just come. If you are one of those that has said to your mate for a while ‘eugh I’ve not had a good night out in ages, then come and see us because I promise, we'll put on a really good show, and we'll try our best to make you laugh.”
Is there anything else that I've not asked you, that you think the audience should know?
William: “It's not high art. So you know, it's not like you've got to get your head round some intellectual concept. It's very, very straightforward, we're not Madame Butterfly?”
Jordan: “Who?”
Willam: “Oh don't worry.”