The real trouble about women on TV is that they make men nervous

Syndicated to newspapers on 28 September 1967

ONE OF THE CONSISTENT minor mysteries of TV is its inability to use and exploit intelligent women on the screen. The concept of a female brain seems to be anathema to the box.

Fictional characters like Elsie Tanner or Emma Peel can acquire such a grip on TV audiences that they will wear black for their funerals and send them embroidered tea towels on their weddings.

Light entertainment artists like Dusty Springfield or Millicent Martin are embraced by TV with almost embarrassing haste and given the supreme accolade of named shows like Dusty or Mainly Millicent.

But it is difficult to envisage a programme called Just Dee or The Brophy Report with Dee Wells or Brigid Brophy as the centrifugal force holding together the other elements of a TV show.

It is true that in panel fames a bright woman like Lady Barnet or Olive Stephens will be accepted as long as she is doing something harmless like pitting her wits against men.

Desultory

But if she has a point-of-view, a personal philosophy, an attitude of mind which she would like to express as pungently and as forcefully as, say, Alan Whicker or David Frost or Robin Day, her days on the small screen are destined to be ruthlessly short.

Since it is an accepted fact that most TV audiences are women and that the woman’s finger dominates the TV switch, it is, indeed, odd that not a single intelligent woman has had anything but a desultory and brief flutter of prominence on TV since it began.

Baffled by this curious phenomenon, I sought some guidance from two of the most attractive and bright women that have appeared on British TV for years, Joan Bakewell and Eleanor Brown.

Joan Bakewell can be seen almost nightly on BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up tactfully and pertly interviewing an astonishing range of people over an astonishing range of subjects. She never seems at a loss for a question, never seems baffled for a reply.

Haughty

Eleanor Bron, who has a serene, almost haughty, beauty, was one of the consistent delights of the BBC satire shows, TW3 and Not So Much A Programme, with her devastating impressions of Tory wives, American culture seekers and Hampstead intellectuals. Films now occupy most of her time.

Their faces, pretty as they are, have not yet acquired that sort of familiarity which make them instantly recognisable in a crowd.

“I’m not pestered much for autographs,” said Joan Bakewell. “Nor do I get many dirty letters or rude phone calls. Strangers tend to think they know me when they see me on the street or a bus, but that’s all.”

Nor is Eleanor Bron’s experience much different. “I get the odd pornographic letter but only a few. I’m ex-directory so there are no rude telephone calls. There is an arrested expression on people’s faces when they see me on the street that I find amusing. A lot of people tell me that I look like Eleanor Bron.

“If people do recognise me, they tend to laugh. I hope with me and not at me. Socially, it’s an advantage in starting up a conversation. They don’t ask you what you do. When they do talk to me it’s usually to ask what David Frost is really like.”

Searching for a reason for the lack of interest in women on TV, both agreed that it had little to do with the view that women are more difficult to handle in this kind of job.

“It’s certainly not true that women are more temperamental and cannot stand up to the nervous strain of television,” said Miss Bakewell. “I believe women are much tougher and can survive the pressures better than men. Most women run two lives and cope with it. Men don’t.”

Miss Bron agreed that women with families do present more problems on a job than men, but this was not an exclusive TV concern.

“Men tend to think women are more fragile and likely to crash in a crisis. But a woman in tears is no different than a man who gets drunk in a crisis. In my experience, men on TV are more often in a worse shape than women.”

Why then this reluctance to allow women a serious place on the TV screen? Eleanor Bron, discussing interviewers, came close to a pertinent answer.

“There is something not neutral about a woman,” she said. “Men in their presence tend to be either chivalrous or flirtatious.

“This tends to elicit a phoney response from men. Viewers accept a man’s interviewing as a more natural condition.

“There is also a kind of forthrightness and aggressiveness needed for good TV which is not particularly feminine. Women to be attractive have to be conciliatory, but this is not the best way to elicit responses on TV. She can’t use the true arts of a woman for getting responses which is to be gentle, sympathetic and understanding.

Gentle

“If the programme is about politics then the interviewer must be tougher. And if a woman gets tough, an audience feels threatened and put upon. It’s not natural for her to be doing it”

Joan Bakewell thought that this argument applied that were controversial in theme.

“I don’t think I would be given an interview job that demanded a muscular, tough, relentless attitude on the part of the interviewer. It’s more difficult for a woman to be rude on TV. But I don’t think interviews have to be aggressive to be successful.

“I don’t want to be a cipher on the box. I hope people will think I have attitudes. But women are emotive objects and if she feels something she tends to express it very intensely. This might annoy men who hate losing an argument to a woman on TV.

“It looks like an act of sexual aggression if a woman tries to win an argument and that’s why it would be difficult to have a female Robin Day on the screen.”

Having said this, she paused for reflection. “Of course,” she said, after a moment’s silence, “I must admit that I also mind losing arguments.”