It wasn’t until I
posted a tweet to advertise the next two months’ Mostly Comedy line-ups that I
realised the acts appearing were all men.
I’m annoyed about this, if I’m honest, as I try hard not to make this the case. There should
always be an equal spread of male and female comics, though
admittedly, however aware I am of this, sometimes acts’ availabilities mean the
line-up I aim for may not be the line-up I get. However
good our intentions may be, we ultimately want a bill that will sell, plus we
reach a point where we just need a bill confirmed.
It’s not that I
want to go down the same route the BBC famously – and controversially – went with panel shows, insisting that every show should have at least one woman
in the line-up. If anything, this made their male-to-female ratio worse, with them settling for just one woman per show, instead
of an even amount. Also, why make panel shows the scapegoat, when male bias is
a problem across the board, with too few dramas with strong female characters,
and with men dominating just about every other field of entertainment too. It’s
a deep-seated problem across all walks of life in fact, not just in television.
Looking back on
the rest of the year’s Mostly line-ups, the statistics are reasonable, but not
great; from January to July we’ve had eight women and fourteen men on the bil.
I’ll do my best to rectify this as the year goes on, though however hard I try, if a high profile act says yes to the gig, we’ll always book them over
a lesser one. Sadly, that’s business, though I’ll try to even the field by
approaching more women than men in the first place (like I do in my private life).