Here she comes. The unbrushed, talc-encrusted, low-heeled, apron-wearing matriarch of the tea tray. The one who gets all the gossip, the best one-liners, steals every scene, asks the case-solving question, puts everyone in their place and still has time to rustle up a tray of custard creams and a pot of watery tannin.
In so many of our best-loved comedies, crime dramas and soaps, that archetypal figure stalks in the background, just itching to steal the show: Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle, Sherlock’s Mrs Hudson, Poirot’s Ms Lemon, EastEnders’ Dot Cotton and Grantchester’s Mrs Maguire. These women – peach hosiery magnets for words like “indomitable”, “staunch” and “stately” – are a quintessential counterpart to that other figure: the monkish bachelor, the troubled hero. Where he locks himself away in a room to take cocaine and scrape out the DFS theme tune on a violin (thanks Sherlock), she answers the post and opens the door to witnesses. Where he sits at a desk listening to jazz and drinking tumblers of whisky, she polishes the taps and makes a face like a boxer licking a nettle. Where he chain-smokes through the New Testament in a grey cardigan, she falls perfectly and effortlessly through an open window. They are two sides of the same, sexless coin, he and she. Yet she remains the side note, while he gets his name in the title.
And yet, perhaps, that is about to change. The BBC has pledged to make half of all on-screen roles for women by 2020. Read that again. By 2020, women will make up half the people who appear on all BBC television and radio stations, and in leading on-screen roles. Auntie has also pledged to bring the workforce, including senior management, up to an even 50/50 split. I know a numerical reflection of the actual population is the least we can ask for. But that, Murdoch, is still the sound of a thwacking great gauntlet being thrown down at your spit-shined shoes. I don’t see anyone else trying it.
So how to bump up the female contingent, as the misogynist said to the sidekick? A good place to start would be to finally drag the housekeepers, the cleaners, the secretaries and the cooks out of the sidelines and into the limelight. Imagine a new incarnation of the crime drama where the legwork of reading newspapers, checking bloodstains, interviewing suspects, digging up clues and puzzling over police records is done by a cook in a tabard, between bouts of bean-popping, or whatever it is domesticated people do. Or a comedy not about a hopeless, hapless child-man living in a perpetual state of adolescent masturbation, but about the poor woman who has to go from flat-to-flat hoovering up after these hackneyed “legends”. What about a sitcom about the Kafka-esque horror of being a low-paid secretary in a male-dominated accountancy firm where all your spreadsheets get stolen by some Brooks Brothers shirted bellend called Benji who’s seen, occasionally, trying to learn close-hand magic from a YouTube tutorial. I’d watch it. I know lots of people who’d watch it.
We know that sitcoms about the usually sidelined female figures can work – Victoria Wood taught us that way back in 1998 with Dinnerladies. We know that a supposedly past-it female fusspot can crack a murder mystery – Miss Marple showed us how way back in 1956 with the first TV adaptation of A Murder Is Announced. We know women can be funny, that domestic life is just as meaningful as work life, that wit, intelligence and grit are just as much the preserve of the “spinster” as the “bachelor”. We know that even middle-aged women are allowed to leave the house these days. So why not grab this opportunity, this even split, this opening for on-screen and behind-the-camera women and drag the clever, low-paid, sassy, unglamorous, perceptive characters out of the additional cast and on to the show title.
A women’s work is never done. But it should, at least, be on the telly.
