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Sister act: Gina and Stevie Martin on their new riotous Might Delete Later podcast

If you want an indication of Gina and Stevie Martin’s views on social media, you only need to look at their separate approaches to plugging their new podcast.

“I threw my phone at the wall one night,” comedian and writer Stevie, 32, tells me from her flat in south London. “I almost had a nervous breakdown because of f***ing aspect ratios and Instagram Stories. I’m like a grandma with it.”

Her activist sister Gina, who led the campaign to make upskirting illegal in 2018, laughs down the line from her flat in north London, recalling how much she loved organising all the branding. “It’s been so fun!” She pauses, hearing herself. “Stevie’s throwing her phone and the wall and I’m literally like, ‘I love assets.’ That’s our experience.”

Which is fitting, given that’s what their podcast is all about. The new weekly series is called Might Delete Later and is an honest discussion on all things social media, from unsolicited DMs to deleting tweets. Each week the sibling power duo delves into the Instagram, Twitter and Facebook feeds of people they know to scrutinise their best, worst and first posts. Comedian Nish Kumar, author Andrew Hunter and model and actor Jamie Windust are among the line-up for series one.

The first guest episode dropped last Thursday with body-positivity campaigner Megan Crabbe. “We talked about body image and as I was writing ‘Have you ever posed in a photo to make yourself look better?’ I was looking at our press photos, and I was like, ‘We have!’” laughs Stevie, who co-hosts a second podcast, Nobody Panic, with comedian Tessa Coates. Her own relationship with social media is “complicated”: it would be unfair to say she hates it “because I’m on it all the time — but I hate what it makes me do”. The most recent example: the podcast has forced her to write long captions on Instagram like her sister. “I used to write five words.”

Having opposing takes has helped the Martins breed an honest conversation on air. In the opening episode, they discuss their pitfalls: Stevie deleting tweets if they don’t get enough likes (“it’s turned me into a coward”); Gina not taking her own advice to turn off direct messages; how they both live in fear of those WhatsApp groups making fun of influencers.

Screentime: Stevie, left, and Gina, have been separated during lockdown ​
Screentime: Stevie, left, and Gina, have been separated during lockdown ​

Two years ago, they were at opposite ends of that fun-making. They both ended up crying at the dinner table on Christmas Day after Stevie referred to her sister as an influencer. Gina was in the middle of her Instagram-driven upskirting campaign at the time, while Stevie was in the midst of a Soho Theatre show “about how terrible social media is”. The argument came down to a misunderstanding. “[Stevie] was having a tongue-and-cheek laugh at some of the influencers who are putting messages out that are a bit problematic. But because I had a following, I felt it was me she was taking the mick out of,” Gina explains. They made up on the train back to London and have since settled into a relationship where they’re more sensitive to each other’s approaches. “Now we’ve started a podcast so it’s fine!”

Their dream guests? “It would definitely be AOC [US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] but I would just vomit and fall over backwards,” laughs Gina. Some more realistic guest aims: actor Rob Delaney (“one of the first Twitter adopters and he’s used it in all kinds of ways”); the individual behind a massive brand account like Netflix or Spark­notes; Ed Balls ­(preferably on Ed Balls Day, April 28, when the ex-MP accidentally tweeted his own name in 2011).

The pair have interviewed seven guests so far and have just bought microphones so they can keep recording in lockdown. How are they coping living apart? “I miss her so much,” sighs Gina, calling Stevie (or “Stevoid”) her best friend. The pair Skype their parents every Sunday and have only seen each other in person once in 11 weeks: when Gina and her boyfriend cycled across London to wave at Stevie on her balcony for her birthday. “Even now neither of us feel comfortable meeting up in a park.”

How are they coping? The pair lost their grandmother in April so understand how lockdown is a “very inhumane way to have to grieve”, and Gina admits that her daily screentime has rocketed to as much as 11 hours since George Floyd’s death, but she feels “obliged” to learn as much as possible.

In the last few days, she’s at least developed a method of getting out of bed:she can only look at her phone once she’s exercised. For her and her sister, 20-minute daily workouts have been vital. What’s their approach to social media been like in lockdown? Gina has committed to producing a daily positive content round-up on Instagram called Vitamin P, but she and Stevie admit they’ve neglected the most important positive content of all: the joint Instagram account (@two_torts) they run for their pet rescue tortoises, Gary and Alison, also sisters (Gary doesn’t conform to gender). “Obviously they’re furious they’re not getting the exposure our podcast has been getting,” says ­Stevie, joking that the animals’ sporadic bouts of activity are badly aligned with her sister’s love of content-planning.

They’ve pledged to share more: “Hopefully in a few weeks’ time I won’t get boiling hot and sweaty every time I have to write a caption,” says Stevie. At the very least, for the sake of her wall.