Celebrity Juice is the only comedy programme on ITV's streaming service. Credit: Ian Gavan/Getty Images
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.
“Too often the writing room is not sensitively run,” Schuster told the festival. “It can be aggressive and slightly bullying.”
But what does she actually mean?
Telling jokes carries an appallingly high risk of social embarrassment – not for nothing do stand-up comedians refer to a bad performance as ‘dying’ – and a correspondingly small glimmer of reward. It is competitive – and about pushing at boundaries of taste. Putting writing of any kind on the line to be judged is never a pleasant experience. As a script editor on a soap, I once had to pass on adding one of the greatest writers of his generation to the team because I knew he would be torn apart by it.
But I can’t think of anything less likely to produce good ideas, or indeed laughs, than to don the straitjacket of sensitivity and the safe space, of watching what you say, which tends in my experience to create a working atmosphere with all the easy, relaxed affability of Act Four of The Crucible.
Schuster’s comments are also telling for what they reveal about how women are viewed by this culture. Anyone who has worked in television for more than a week, and particularly around television writers, will be amused by the notion that it’s a group populated by thrusting macho men and demure little ladies.
There are two implicit suppositions behind Schuster’s statement. The first is that women will civilise the rough and tumble chaps, a view of the sexes plucked straight from an Edwardian drawing room. The second is that different levels of employment of the sexes in any workplace are entirely because of male privilege and power. I think there are more male writers for the same reason there are more male criminals – because men are on average more likely to do stupid, irrational things that have a high chance of ruin.
Schuster has founded a campaign called Comedy 50:50, whose aim is to reach perfect equity between the sexes in writing comedy. Encouraging women to write and removing barriers to entry are laudable goals. Schuster’s group has assembled a list of hundreds of female comedy writers, which is a concrete, valuable resource. An aim of perfect equity, however, is restrictive, an attempt to stuff individuals with wildly differing experiences and backgrounds into equal-sized pens marked M and F as if that were the most important thing about them.
The writer Brona C Titley – fabulously for a woke individual, she has the kind of name dreamt up by the Carry On team for Barbara Windsor – told the Festival: “If you have the same type of writers in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, then you’re only getting one kind of joke.”
What a limiting view of people and of her fellow writers. Men do man jokes, women do woman jokes, homosexuals do homosexual jokes, black people do black jokes. Nobody has imagination or empathy or fellow feeling. We are apparently parrots loaded with one set of phrases, defined entirely by an arbitrary characteristic.
There is certainly a problem with the same kind of people telling the same kind of jokes, as anybody who’s watched or listened to any of the multiple shows “taking a sideways look at the week’s news” such as Mock the Week will know – the people employed are overwhelmingly middle class and Left-wing. But nobody seems in a hurry to understand or address this most glaring lack of diversity.
It’s also interesting to consider why this is happening now. The unspoken supposition is that television comedy writer is a prestige job with, in another grossly overused term imported from academia, a ‘platform’. But this is a shrinking sector, with fewer hours being produced than ever before: the days of ITV producing at least one half-hour’s worth of sitcom every night of the week – yes, younger readers, this actually happened – are long, long gone.
It’s just about possible to argue that the many tens of millions of viewers who tuned in to Only Fools and Horses or To the Manor Born were inculcated with monolithic cultural norms by John Sullivan or Peter Spence – but does anyone seriously think that coming up with gags for CelebAbility on ITV2 (highlights include the comedian Nathan Caton throwing cheese at people’s bare feet) is pushing society’s understanding of itself in any direction, and thus needs urgent gender representation?
This reflects a modern cultural quirk in the arts: an obsession with process rather than outcome. Think how often you hear theatre or television people proudly describe their adherence to quotas and fashionable nostrums of social change and representation as ‘important’, when the opposite is the case.
All art, even the desperately silly and trivial, is now regarded as political and with a mystic power to remodel society. The language of HR courses and inclusivity awareness workshops has cemented around the very daftest things. Somebody should write a comedy about that.
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Subscribe…well written, and much to agree with. But I can’t help but point out that feeling uneasy about wealthy foreigners with different beliefs and values “colonising” (mostly) London…is not significantly different in origin to people in much less wealthy and influential parts of the Country feeling uneasy about poor foreigners with different beliefs and values “colonising” (mostly) post-industrial towns and cities in the Midlands and North. But the first is apparently now virtuous…although I’m assuming the second remains hateful and “waycistttt!”
Just a thought to puzzle over…
This is one of those articles where the subject matter doesn’t interest me that much but I’m impressed by the quality of the writing. The same is true of Park Macdougald’s article on Kerouac in this edition of Unherd.
I sometimes wonder where Unherd is headed as a publication, and feel it has lost some of the sharp relevance it had back in 2020, but the quality of the articles is consistently high. I’m not sure why anyone becomes a journalist these days. There are so many talented people already in the profession and stable career paths are now so few.
I don’t think your average British person is pleased at all about any of this but as usual we are sold out by our elites who are only too happy to stuff their pockets with dirty money- the House of Lords has I think done well out of the Russians.
It’s the hypocrisy of it all I can’t stand. And that goes for football fans too – see the recent purchase of Newcastle by a Saudi led consortium to see how willing the fans are to forgive despicable regimes if it gives them a chance to get their hands on some silverware.
As an aside, I cannot understand why there has been so little comment and criticism of what the UK and other European governments are doing in seizing/freezing the assets of the Russian billionaires.
Many of the Russian oligarchs are in effect Mafiosi lords, as are many others from other countries not least the blood and oil soaked Arab billionaires. However, seizing Russian individuals assets with the flourish of a ministers pen, without due process and law and a right to fair trial, is just plain wrong. If you do that you are absolutely no different from Putin, and in fact provide justification for Putin. The UK in particular should *not* be going anywhere near such behaviours.
Many of the Russian oligarchs are in effect Mafiosi lords
So what is wrong with seizing their assets? I would have thought that it was a good start; the government can then move on to the blood and oil soaked Arab billionaires.
The problem is not seizing their assets. The problem is seizing their assets without law and due process. The government needs to present proof in a court. If even a single one of them is legit, how would we know they haven’t got caught in sweep unfairly?
Doesn’t bother at all, especially if said ill-gotten gains are used to restore Ukrainia.
All this seems incredibly remote yet tawdry seen from the rural parts of the UK. London is a different country, almost a different world, to most of us yet thinks it’s the centre of the universe.
It reminds me why having been born and brought up in London and having gone back there for a decade in the late 70s and 80s I left with no regrets and go back as infrequently as possible.
Basically, I care not whether London rebrands itself and goes back to sucking money from rich idiots.
Ditto why the Premier League holds little interest to me.
The British Empire was created by courting and flattering wealthy rulers, while slowly taking control. It’s a special London expertise.
From the 90s onwards, bankers in London, New York and Europe, helped create the oligarchs, funding their purchase of Soviet assets on the cheap, and then helped them launder and relocate their wealth. The same courting and flattery brought them and their money to the UK, to join the traffic jams of Middle Eastern-owned Ferraris and Rolls Royces cruising through Kensington.
Abramovich is Russian, rich and Jewish, Three strikes and you’re out.
Are there not shades of branding here similar to how Jews were represented as cosmopolitan capital in Hitler’s Germany?
Can we start naming and shaming the QCs and lawyers?
Should we do that? And perhaps also their doctors and dentists, the school teachers of oligarchs children, their interior decorators, gardeners, chefs?
To start naming minor individuals making a living by practising a perfectly legal craft , whatsoever it may be, is a very dangerous and slippery slope. In fact especially dangerous when it comes to the law as we are imposing the rule of mob rather than process.
Indeed. Call it sanctions sans frontieres….the worst of both worlds
How are you quite so certain that everything these “city professionals” did was legal ? Did they really check where the money came from as they are often obliged to do ?
Remember also that professionals like lawyers also have professional standards and ethics to maintain. So “being legal” is not always good enough.
At a US company I worked for, they talked about the “newspaper test” – “How would you feel if your behaviour were published in a newspaper ?”. I suggest this is a quite reasonable test to apply here and that “being legal” does not absolve individuals from personal and professional responsibilities and ethics.
So I strongly disagree with you.
I’ve worked in and with some of these firms. The tests are extremely stringent, and those very few who abuse those professional standards are quickly discovered in my experience. Which is not to say there aren’t a few greedy types who might try to get round the rules, but firms will boot them out fast – the financial and reputational penalties are too great to do anything other.
Oddly enough we too had a similar test to yours – “Would you feel comfortable if this were reported in the Sunday Times Business News?” It’s a good test
Speak for yourself, I never loved him. Switched my allegiance from Chelsea to Ipswich Town, it was that bad.
Capitalists will sell the rope used to hang them — old saying.
And not just London and not just Russian money. There is something peculiarly English about taking the moral high ground, long after the horse has bolted. Others may be entitled to view such behaviour as hypocritical, and rightly so. The ‘disease’ of the West appears to be that it will bloat itself on all manner of self-indulgence, and then pull the walls down on ourselves.n No wonder the East considers us ridiculous.
“He [Abramovich] bought a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it.”
Before asking British people to open their homes to Ukrainian refugees, could Boris Johnson’s government not have first commandeered the gigantic residences of Russian oligarchs in Londongrad and elsewhere to help house these people, and thereby set an example for the ‘little people’ to follow?
Good article..I do think that Francis Fukuyama’s idea, or as it became widely understood, led to a period where with Russia, and China, the West thought it had won, history had ended, and all we needed to do was *business* and trade with them and they would slowly become like us.
That attitude led to the very ‘relaxed’ set of judgements about both countries that only slowly even began change, as the article says, in the last decade or so.
The war in Ukraine has revealed the reality under the surface glitz of modern looking Moscow and the Oligarch’s parties that will probably require another multi year, if not multi decade, cold war to finally remove the lingering mentality of the USSR generations