Listening to women for a change

To set our scene.  It is yesterday morning.  The Today programme is on.  There’s a debate about Mehdi Hasan’s article about the political left’s position on abortion.  I disagree vehemently with everything he says*, but the thing that makes me curse out loud into the washing up is the opening exchange:

Suzanne Moore: I find myself, yet again, discussing abortion with two men on a programme which is famously bad at representing women, but…

John Humphrys (outraged, interrupting): Sarah was on yesterday! She happens not to be on this morning! But anyway, go on..

And (I hope) a nation of women yelled in harmony – “Because we’re  obviously only allowed one!”

There is, famously, only one female presenter on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme.  On days when she isn’t on you can go from the 7 o’clock news via the sports report at 7.30 to Thought for the Day at quarter to 8 and hear almost no female voices.   

Monday’s Women in Journalism report on the representation of women in the media graphically demonstrated that the male-dominance of Today is not unusual – 78% of bylines on front page stories are for men, 22% for women; 76% of experts quoted in stories are men, 24% are women (almost an exact inversion of the statistics for victims, of whom 79% quoted are women, 21% men). 

I went to a Fawcett Society debate at the weekend about the lack of women’s voices in the media, the City and politics. It wasn’t much of a debate, frankly. I guess it’s hard to have a thrilling exchange of views on a subject where everyone is in heated agreement. It’s ludicrous that only 4% of CEOs of FTSE 100 companies are women; that there are more millionaires in the cabinet than women; that there is only one woman editor of a national daily newspaper. And I for one am sick of it and of the glacial rate of change.   So, I was cheered to see that the BBC is trying, in a very small way, to do something about increasing the range of voices it listens to.

BBC Academy Female Experts Training Day

findaTVexpert is working with the BBC Academy on a media training day for female experts in Science, History, Politics, Business & Engineering. It’s a fantastic opportunity for female experts who want to put themselves forwards for TV & Media opportunities. Read the below, sign up now – and help spread the word on twitter, Facebook, etc.

Here’s a link.  If you have any expertise in an area the media should be covering please sign up and get on out there.   The Today programme needs to hear from you.

 

* For anyone interested in why I’m on the other side of the abortion debate from Mehdi Hasan, I refer you here - it pretty much says it all.

Falling out of love with The Thick of It

I worked for lots of women in my time in Whitehall.

The thing that all of them - Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge, Barbara Follett, Ruth Kelly - had in common with the men I worked for, was their absolute, unshakeable faith that they had what it took to run the country. They may or may not have been right. Politicians have as many personal imperfections as everyone else on the planet. What’s funny about politics is this mismatch of  total self-belief with the reality of what they achieve. As Armando Iannucci said last week “although it’s a big job it’s actually little people“.

But politics is hard. Getting anywhere near to the top demands huge self-confidence. There are no shrinking violets in the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet.  Which is why the sight of Nicola Murray agonising about walking in a straight line while holding a poppy wreath on last night’s Thick of It made my teeth curl.

I appreciate that a former civil servant complaining about a political satire is like a hotelier arguing that Fawlty Towers didn’t capture the reality of working in the hospitality industry. Being true to life isn’t really the point. I also get that the best comedy comes from putting people into situations they are totally unfitted for – Basil Fawlty again. (And that sequence did give rise to a classic Thick of It-ism “She’s officially a Cenotwat” for which I  forgive them a bit)

But none of the women I ever worked for would have had a problem with walking and poppy-wielding at the same time.  Nor would they need to be told by their male comms advisor (even if he was the incomparable Malcolm Tucker) that they needed to toughen up their act. Nicola Murray shone like a schoolgirl who’d just been noticed by the coolest guy at the disco. Harriet Harman would have eaten him for breakfast then spat out the bits. 

I accept there’s a limit to how many rampant megalomaniacs you can have in one TV programme – especially as this series of  TTOI is trying to reflect a coalition government as well as the opposition, so that’s three sets of dunderheads who need to be differentiated somehow.   I just wish it wasn’t the woman who’s the simpering nitwit while the blokes get on with their plotting. 

And, finally: I do appreciate how bloody annoying it must be for every woman in a TV programme or film to be expected to represent one half of humanity everytime she opens her mouth on screen. But the rarity of showing women in positions of power makes them symbolise something bigger than themselves, like it or not – even in (especially in?) a comedy. 

I really hope the worm turns in the rest of this series.  Not least because Rebecca Front has been one of my favourite comedy performers since we were at university together.  I thought, aged 18, that she was the funniest person I’d ever met.  I’ve followed her career with a proprietorial pride ever since, even though we lost touch years ago.  I still think she’s a genius.  I just think she deserves better.

Foopball, foopball, ra, ra, ra

In the wake of the coverage of Andy Gray/Richard Keys, I had  a blog post floating round my head yesterday about the  crushing ubiquity of football and the culture that surrounds it.    Had I got round to writing it,  it would have made some of the points made by Catherine Bennett  in her piece for today’s Observer Forget getting rid of sexism in sport.  Let’s get rid of sport:  an end to the blokey horror if it all, say I, to the absolute  inescapableness of it, to the obscenity of the money (pretty much any story in the Observer’s Said and Done column most weeks is enough to make you want to ban the game completely), to the new social necessity of following a team.

I blame Rupert Murdoch, for enabling the Topsy-ish growth of the Premier League, and Nick Hornby , whose   Fever Pitch made it socially acceptable for football to spread beyond the back pages, wheedling its way into every part of daily life like honey fungus.

Bennett makes another good point in her piece about the pervasiveness of sports chatter in the media: the low percentage of women and girls who enjoy the competitive nature of team games: 

the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that 36% of women “enjoy the competitiveness of sport”, as opposed to 61% of men. Why, then… should the sport-averse be subjected to extended sessions of compulsory sport, as if they were still in class, forced out into the mud to contemplate the skills of the school elite? 

Good point.  And why, if this is the case, are the government so keen to promote competitive sport in schools at the same time as they cut School Sports Partnerships to the detriment of sports that girls might actually enjoy?  I played lots of competitive sport at school – netball, hockey, rounders for the school, a county trial for hockey.  All at the point of my PE teacher’s gun.  I hated every minute and gave up sport as soon as I could, only to rediscover the pleasures of exercise years later when – by then pretty unfit – I joined a gym. 

Professional sport is entertaining enough to watch,  but it isn’t important.  I do  not feel it will be a national disgrace if “our medal tally” is worse at the London Olympics than it was in Beijing.  I do not care that ‘we’ are unlikely to win the World Cup again in my lifetime.  I was delighted about the Ashes, but no-one would have died if England had lost.  Sport, like most other things in life, is more fun to do yourself than watch someone else do.   Can we get a bit of perspective back please? 

The importance of ignoring economists

One of my already broken new year’s resolutions was to stop worrying about the economy.  This is on the grounds that I’m occupied pretty full-time worrying about things  in my own life that I can at least hope to change, without putting in extra hours fretting about things that  are beyond my control.

It’s quite hard not to worry about UKPlc’s GDP, though, especially if you’re woken every morning  by the massed doom-mongers of the Today programme (I loved  Chris Addison’s description of Today this weekend as: “Grumpy Old Men without jokes. If Today had a face it would look like Walter Matthau sucking a lemon”, and so it would)

So, when I am overwhelmed by the looming disasters and scary predictions about interest rates being peddled by Humphrys et al, I will try to remember this:

The future  performance of the economy, the passage from good times to recession or depression and back, cannot be foretold.  There are more than ample predictions but no firm knowledge.  All contend with a diverse combination of uncertain government action, unknown corporate and individual behaviour and, in the larger world, with peace or war.  Also with unforeseen technological and other innovations and consumer and investment responses.  There is the variable effect of exports, imports, capital movements and corporate, public and government reaction thereto.  Thus the all too evident fact: the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.

That’s JK Galbraith , who knew what he was talking about, on economists.   He seems to agree with my friend Philomene - although in rather more thoughtful language.  “Economics a science?” she once screeched at me in  disbelief.  “Witchcraft is more scientific!”

Where’s the audience for local TV?

Thank God I got round to finding out about local politics in Tower Hamlets. It’s  Dallas meets the Borgias with Oyster cards round here.

New readers wanting to catch up with a story of political double-crossing, conspiracy theories about religious fundamentalism,  suspicions of electoral fraud and  backroom deals in smokefree rooms can start here.  Those with a taste for a more analytical take on it all can pick it up here. 

With such rich source material a local TV station broadcasting news about the area should be a hit – there’s a  news programme /soap opera combo just begging to be produced already.   But, even in Tower Hamlets, I fail to see  local TV of the type Jeremy Hunt was proposing on the Today programme this morning taking off. 

As he explains it, the market has failed to give us a truly plural local media so he proposes to stimulate the market by relaxing ownership restrictions and allowing media companies to start hyper-local TV services to fill the gap.  

He gave some examples of where local interest might be strong enough to make programming worthwhile.  It won’t fill a schedule, but, yes, football fans in Bolton may well want coverage of their team’s performance against Man Utd  (as long as ESPN/Sky/MUTV are prepared to share the rights – and Wanderers fans don’t already have access to the BBC, the internet or a newspaper).  People in Middlesborough may  want to see their Mayoral debates televised – a bit more of a stretch this one, but I can see the public interest argument for giving them the chance;  but it’s hardly going to be stripped through a week’s programming at 7pm – and if there isn’t a regular local channel for people to go to, how will they find it when it’s on?  

It  may be a massive failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t see where the audience demand is for these services, or what the business model for a local TV service might be.  The  obvious conclusion is that creative use of the internet is the best way to achieve the  kind of services that Jeremy Hunt has in mind – a conclusion he seems to be reaching himself, if this speech is anything to go by.  Odd that he didn’t try to share this with us on Today.

Bigotry and outrage

Turned the Today programme off, violently, at ten past eight this morning, but not before shouting things at James Naughtie that, had they been picked up on Sky, I would certainly have had to apologise for.

I lost it when Naughtie said that, by agreeing to the leaders’ debates, Gordon Brown made the election camapaign into a personality contest so must accept it when his personality becomes the story of the day.  The idea that the media have been diligently following policy issues for years until being forced to talk about personalities by the sight of politicians debating in public is as hilarious as it’s infuriating.  The papers have been desperate for something like this to happen to liven things up. They’ve finally got the gaffe they’ve been waiting for.  Watch them make the most of it.

The people have shrugged – the bastards

Came away from last night’s programme about reconnecting people with politics sadly disappointed that as an electorate we are badly failing our MPs.  It’s a wonder they can find the will to carry on. 

We don’t go to their meetings (possibly because when we do we get harangued about doubting their integrity).  We don’t vote. We don’t respond to their blogs – although that side of the experiment seemed to die as soon as it was born and, as any fule kno, these things take time.  Not even Chris Brogan could build a vibrant blog community in a few weeks.   (And is anyone else as irritated as I am with the number of MPs who just use Twitter as an advertising channel for their activities?  Tom Harris, an MP who knows how to do these things, had a great blog post a while back with top tips for political tweeting which started with : 1. Don’t just broadcast – engage. Politicians who use social media to let everyone know what they think but who don’t even respond to others’ views are doing themselves no favours.  Quite right too.)

Anyway, back to last night’s MPs.    According to Ann Widdecombe we don’t even care enough to tell them what it is we don’t like so they can do something about it. (“They just shrug… I’ve been facing it for years… The shrug“)

Well, Mark Oaten found plenty of things we seem to think and not like about politicians, (“boring, egotistic, in it for what they can get, useless, lying, deceitful, full of waffle…”)perhaps they could start by addressing those, and realising one of the basic rules of communications – it’s not your audience’s fault if your message isn’t getting through.

Admittedly it’s hard to reflect the reality of several weeks’ events in one hour-long programme and perhaps the MPs were just badly served in the edit suite.  And I do have sympathy with MPs  (some of my best friends…) who on the whole work incredibly hard for little thanks on some intransigent social problems and seem genuinely motivated by a desire to do good.  At the moment they do seem pretty unhappy with their lot, as they fight against a corrosively cynical press and a strange uncertainty about their role.  In our highly centralised, party-dominated, control-freaky political system what is a backbench MP for?  Legislator? Holder of government to account? Lobby fodder? Social worker?  Maybe that’s the question they should be trying to answer, before they start worrying about why we aren’t engaging with them.

Why don’t you…

The infallibly interesting Seth Godin has a post today about why he doesn’t watch TV any more and lists all of the things you can do instead, now that there’s so much more choice of things to do in your spare time.  I was struck by the fact that all but a couple of his “new” choices have existed for years – I admit that running a store on eBay or starting up an online community do depend on a degree of 21st century connectivity, but most of the others are just slight variations on things my mother used to tell me to do when I was loafing around the house as a teenager and she thought I should be doing something more productive.  (This might mean my mum is a visionary marketing guru who was  years ahead of her time, but I doubt it.)

I don’t watch a lot of TV when it’s broadcast now because I’m working/my kids monopolise the remote in the early evenings and there’s only so much Hannah Montana a grown woman can take (Phineas and Ferb is good, though)/I’d rather read a good book/I watch stuff I like on DVD when I can watch it in satisfyingly long chunks rather than rationed and with adverts an hour a week.  But most importantly because I don’t find most of what’s on that interesting.   Even when I worked in TV ten years ago it was clear that the really creative, bright young things were gravitating much more towards what might be possible online than what could be done in a TV studio.  So not only is TV suffering from an increase in competition for its audience’s time, for me at least, it’s also suffering from a lack of  really strong content to fight back with.  So, all together now, why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

Saving the world one click at a time

Fllickr: Sean Stayte

 I’ve received several requests to sign online petitions to Save the BBC.  The petitioners seem to think that any cut to the BBC is an absolute outrage to be resisted until death – even if it is being proposed by the BBC itself, which does have a vested interest in its own survival.   In classic BBC fashion, they seem to have chosen the wrong things to cut – the good bits that the market isn’t  providing – but I can’t see that it’s wrong to admit that the BBC can’t do everything and scale back.  A pre-emptive strike against cuts being imposed from outside, perhaps? (And personally I hate and rarely use the BBC website, so big, so bland, so smug.  It should have been pruned years ago).

I haven’t signed the petitions, although I love the BBC for all its faults.  It’s the fizzing outrage of the emails that puts me off.  There’s no nuance in the argument, no recognition that there may be more than one side to be considered.  At least one of the organisations that petitions me for support, regularly asks for suggestions as to what I want them to protest about next.  It’s  as though it’s the  act of complaining that’s important,  the opportunity to vent about everything that’s wrong in the world, rather than doing the difficult and often dull work of bringing about real change.   A classic armchair warrior, I’ve clicked yes to petitions for Amnesty, Reprieve and Friends of the Earth,  pro-democracy in Burma, anti-homophobia in Uganda and  lots more that I can’t remember.  What happens to it all?  Is this real democracy in action, or  knee-jerk populism?  And, as one post on the Guardian’s 6Music story remarked, is it just me, or are Facebook and Twitter now running the country?

Nostalgia and armadillos

 Stewart Lee ranted about modern TV and in particular the current state of Channel 4 (a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home) on his show a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I have been nostalgic for the days when I worked at C4 and we did good stuff.  Arts programmes about the arts, that made you think ; documentaries that changed the law , added to the gaiety of the nation, and that were fought over in court. 

Of course, it might  be that Channel 4 is just the same rag bag of good stuff and tripe that it always was and what I’m really nostalgic for is being 27 again.  But what the hell.  It’s my birthday and I’m allowed to have the odd madeleine moment about TV  programmes of the 1990s if I want. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here’s a tribute to the only armadillo in history known to have introduced an arts programme (and subsequently to have died of a broken heart).