Girls On Top (The Times, August 2006)
Women’s comedy is right up there on the best of the autumn TV schedules, says Stephen Armstrong
Five’s new sitcom Respectable comes to us wreathed in black. This was the comedy supremo Harry Thompson’s final project before his untimely death last November and, surprisingly, it’s his first sitcom. It opens with three women taking a break at work — Kate is temping while she finishes her postgrad degree, so breaks off her chat to type into a laptop; Hayley reads out a list of the men most magazine readers want to spend a magic moment with; and Yelena decides her top three would include Slobodan Milosevic. It could be a 1950s typing pool pausing for coffee, if it weren’t for one thing — all the girls are dressed in lingerie, and there’s a dishwasher full of sex aids just finishing its cycle.
The sit in this com is a Madame Cyn-style brothel nestling in a leafy residential street. The joint is run by Maureen (Beatrice Kelly), a chain-smoking granny who has seen it all. Jodi Albert from Hollyoaks plays Hayley as a blend of the gorgeous and the gormless. She boasts a 24in waist and an impressive décolletage, but can’t work out why they don’t make diet bananas, wants to get a degree in beautology at Laboratoire Garnier and dreams of making it all the way to reality television.
Given Thompson’s form in creating laddish panel shows such as Have I Got News for You and They Think It’s All Over, you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of brash humour and a script laced with jokes at the expense of the scantily clad women. In fact, the central theme is a “will they, won’t they?” romance between a nervous new client, Michael, and the lovely Hayley — a bit like Ross and Rachel, but less New York coffee shop, more suburban knocking shop. Michael falls for Hayley and prefers to pay to chat rather than engage in the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.
“It’s not a family show, but it does have a lot of warmth,” explains Thompson’s co-writer, Shaun Pye. “It’s certainly not Nighty Night. All the characters are sympathetic, and we wanted people to think it would be nice if they ended up happy. It started out with a lot of dark gags about Albanian prostitutes. But we combed all of that out. We wanted women to enjoy it as much as men, basically.”
Respectable’s focus on character, conversation and interaction begins an autumn dominated by female-focused TV comedy. Jennifer Saunders’s new sitcom, Jam and Jerusalem, a gentle spoof on the Women’s Institute, airs on BBC1 in mid-autumn, closely followed by Dawn French’s The Vicar of Dibley. At the same time, Catherine Tate’s third series hits BBC2, Caroline Aherne has penned a one-off episode of The Royle Family and Green Wing has an extended special on Channel 4. On BBC3, there’s Pulling, a thirtysomething flat-share sitcom written by and starring Sharon Horgan, recently seen as the celebrity-booker in Rob Brydon’s Annually Retentive, and Dogtown, a dark series from twins Emma and Beth Kilcoyne.
Meanwhile, Ronni Ancona, a one-time Alistair McGowan collaborator, is piloting a new sketch show, the stand-up Karen Taylor is putting the finishing touches to Touch Me, I’m Karen Taylor for broadcast in the new year, and last year’s Perrier winner, Laura Solon, is recording a Radio 4 show while developing a range of ideas for television. “I think men are often happier finding humour in the situation of the sitcom,” Solon says. “I’m more interested in humour drawn from character and conversation. I like writing the minor details of a character — finding humour in the things they own, the minutiae of their lives, as well as the hearty one-liners.”
The change is long overdue. It seems as if laddish humour has dominated pop culture for almost 10 years. In 1996, perhaps spurred by England reaching the semifinals of Euro 96, Loaded launched, The Fast Show triumphed, Britpop’s cocky rivalry topped the charts and ads were packed with chaps in flats flicking noodles and lager at each other. Since then, music has turned to sensitive singer-songwriters, recent ABC figures showed Loaded’s circulation plummeting by 21%, and adland now prefers stark black-and-white shots of sporting überMenschen when shifting product to the boys. Comedy, however, has taken longer to come around.
Blokey shows have dominated the schedules. Just think of the list: Nathan Barley, Peep Show, Johnny Vegas’s Ideal, The League of Gentlemen, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Friday Night Project, the departed Men Behaving Badly, Nighty Night (you don’t have to be a lad to be laddish) and the brutal, repetitive slapstick of Little Britain. The storming of this male bastion, according to industry professionals, is down to two women: Victoria Pile, writer and producer of Smack the Pony and Green Wing; and Catherine Tate.
“Although French and Saunders and Victoria Wood have always been writing great stuff, I think a lot of women writers didn’t necessarily have the confidence to write proper female characters with their own voice before,” argues Lucy Lumsden, controller of comedy commissioning at the BBC. “They tended to focus on ‘Is my bum big in this?’ stuff — almost a male view of women. Smack the Pony and Catherine Tate gave this new generation the confidence to write for themselves.”
But it’s not going to be an autumn of drifting whimsy. There are probably more sex gags than the filthiest male stand-up could dream of. Given the frankness with which women usually talk about their lovers’ performance, of course, this doesn’t necessarily make for comfortable male viewing. As Yelena, Respectable’s Serbian war-criminal hooker, says: “Men are like cash machines. I empty them and buy myself nice things to wear.” That’s not the kind of thing you’d hear June Whitfield say.
