Marie Phillips

Reading The Medium Is Not Enough today, I came across this question and here’s my answer.

Just over ten years ago, I worked booking guests on a (non-comedy) panel discussion show which had a male presenter and three guests. I was informed by the producer that I could only ever book one female guest per show because to have two female guests would ‘unbalance the panel’. I would often come up with excellent panel line-ups with two female guests and one male, but I wasn’t allowed to book them.

Things may have changed a bit in the last decade but I doubt they’ve changed that much. Men are seen as appealing to everyone while women only appeal to women, so producers don’t want to overwhelm the show with what appears to be a ‘minority’ interest. An all-male panel is fine, an all-female panel would be weird.

Clearly this is self-fulfilling rubbish, and the more women are ghettoised into their ‘Loose Women’ corners, the more they are seen as being different. Producers might find that if they made a little more effort to feature women, everyone might realise that women’s humour appeals to everyone, more women would come forward, more producers would take a chance on them, and gradually the disparity would even out. A smart producer would spend some time looking beyond the stand-up listings on Chortle, and actually seek out and nurture female talent from uptapped areas - there are a lot of funny female writers out there who might do well on screen (and no, I don’t mean me).

This goes for non-white and gay participants too, of course, who you only ever get to see when the moon is full in a month containing the letter M.