Gender

Last night I attended a recording of the ABCs The Book Show at The Wheeler Centre and hosted by Ramona Koval. The Book Show has a monthly series there called Reading on Vocation and the guests were Tim Ferguson, Des Bishop and Justin Hamilton, who were to talk about comedy. Notice something missing? Yep, I did too. Luckily there was a question time at the end of what was a generally informative and amusing hour, although the producers could have chosen comedians who actually had read a book by their comedic heroes, as it seemed to be the theme of the show.

I stood up and straight out asked Ramona Koval and her producers; could they not find one funny woman to participate in the show, especially in the middle of the Melbourne Comedy Festival? Ramona replied that they did ask female comedians to appear but they were all doing their shows—at 6.00 pm at night. Obviously women comedians have to do their shows early so they can get home in time to cook dinner.

The other question I asked was whether there were any women comedians the panelists admired, emulated or enjoyed, as the only reference to female comedians was a passing comment about I Love Lucy without even mentioning Lucille Ball.

To his credit, Justin Hamilton spoke very eloquently about Judith Lucy, whom he regards at the finest stand up comedian currently in Australia (no disagreement here), mentioning her book and that of Denise Scott, another doyen of the comedy scene.

This not an isolated case of gender imbalance in the public sphere and I will stay with comedy to illustrate my point. Television comedy is a particularly fertile (or testosterone-poisoned?) field to harvest. Show after show, from Good News Week to Spicks and Specks display a gender imbalance in favour of men that should be embarrassing. At least the two shows mentioned have male and female team captains and I have to say that Good News Week has picked up its game considerably this year compared to last year, where team captain Clare Hooper was the only woman swimming in a sea of testosterone and gay jokes, but the fact remains that in television comedy and in most multi-presenter shows, women are still a minority.

Probably the most egregious example is a show from Britain, QI, currently screening on the ABC. Hosted by the wonderful Stephen Fry (he is my secret husband and I call him snuggle-bunny), QI is the latest incarnation of the radio and television shows that the the British do so well, where interesting and witty people gather together in a format designed to show just how witty and interesting they are. QIs usual format has a host and four panel members. With Fry as host and Alan Davies as permanent panel member, already the odds are skewed in men's favour. The show has been going since 2005 and has had 8 series. Analysing the guest panellists on the series (thanks, Wikipedia!) I have arrived at the appalling statistic that of the 267 guests on all eight series, not even 20% have been women (16.85%, in fact). If this is bad, then taking into account the two spots already mentioned, the ratio of men to women actually on screen is even worse!

I am not saying that any of these shows are awful. In fact, I find all of them entertaining and sometimes howlingly funny. However, the entertainment factor is dimmed somewhat when I see that over 50% of the population doesn't have an equal seat at the hosting desk, panel or table. I cannot imagine what it feels like for women who watch these shows, but surely they must feel diminished ever so slightly.