Celebrity Juice is the only comedy programme on ITV's streaming service. Credit: Ian Gavan/Getty Images
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A few weeks ago, the head of ITV’s comedy department, Saskia Schuster, announced at Diverse Festival that the channel will no longer commission programmes written by all-male writers’ rooms.
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s incredible but true: ITV really does have a comedy department. A quick check under the comedy category on the network’s streaming service reveals that the only new British comedy programme available at the time of writing is Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice, so quite what this department is filling its working hours with when it isn’t attending diversity festivals remains a mystery.
So taking issue with this decision to man-ban seems a bit churlish – rather like quibbling with the captain of the Titanic over the band’s set list for the night of 14 April 1912. But it shows where the heads of the television establishment stand.
Unlike the BBC, ITV exists to make money by attracting mass audiences. It was designed from its very beginnings to get bums on seats, the more the better. As the number of platforms multiplies and popular culture fragments into smaller and smaller niches, how can ITV best respond? I would suggest by concentrating on making programmes (such as Love Island) that buck the trend, and not by focusing on spurious diversity initiatives.
The writers’ room for TV comedy is very much a US invention, and it has worked out very well for them. Over there, they are essentially hothouses where writers gather to hammer out ideas, arrange them into episodes, structure the stories and craft the dialogue.
In Britain, the ‘rooms’ tend to be reserved for storylining conferences on soap operas, and it’s almost unheard of for scripts to be produced the American way – over days of intense conferencing, idea by idea, line by line, scene by scene by committee. For one thing, there just isn’t the money in the system to hire that many people for that long. So what we’re talking about here are more like long meetings where people pitch jokes.
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SubscribeI think they already did – they all got sent to Golgafrincham and came to a sticky end. That was written by a dead white male though, so not funny, obvs.