21/02/03

Girly Vision

Christopher Dunkley

Daily Mail

WITHIN the world of broadcasting, it has always been an open secret that television is predominantly a female medium. That is not to say that men don't watch it; of course they do. But the heaviest viewers tend to be women and the programmes which regularly get the highest ratings usually have more female than male viewers, notably the soap operas which dominate the Top Ten. Consequently, broadcasters have tended to put more effort into catering for women than men.

Now, however, something new is happening. From being a mere tendency, the feminisation of television is turning into a rout. Wherever you look - terrestrial broadcasting or the new cable and satellite channels, analogue or digital, news programmes or commercials - women and women's interests are favoured.

Female presenters are replacing males, and material traditionally regarded as being of particular interest to men is downgraded or sidelined. In some cases, men have to pay more for programmes that interest them.

Statisticians know that across the entire range of programme types, from light entertainment to news, the audience split is 40 per cent male to 60 per cent female.

In soap opera, the split is 39 per cent men to 61 per cent women. The position is reversed only in sport, where the figures are 65 per cent men to 35 per cent women.

The number of episodes of soap opera, so heavily favoured by women, is rising almost exponentially, with Coronation Street, Crossroads, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Family Affairs, Hollyoaks, Neighbours and more providing dozens of episodes every week.

At the same time, many of the top male attractions - sports such as soccer and boxing and virtually all first-run movies - are being spirited away to specialist subscription channels or pay-per-view networks.

Thus, while the quantity of women's favourite viewing goes up on the free terrestrial channels, men have to pay through the nose for the programmes they used to get for nothing.

The acceleration of this process may have something to do with efforts made in the past few years to promote women to the top jobs in TV.

As of this month, Fiona Bruce is said to be the highest paid newsreader in the land. Dawn Airey, who was chief executive of Channel 5 (or 'Five' as it is now called) has just become managing director of BskyB, with her former job being taken by another woman, Jane Lighting.

These days, the top ranks of the BBC are dominated by women, with BBCI and BBC2 each having a female controller - Lorraine Heggessey and Jane Root - and, above them, Jana Bennett is director of television.

Look through a week's schedules and, even leaving aside the daytime programmes which have always heavily favoured female viewers since more of them are available to view at that time (still true, though steadily changing) you find dozens, even scores, of programmes made specifically to appeal to women.

The BBC is in the midst of a season of programmes on domestic violence from which you might conclude that no woman ever laid a finger on a man. On a lighter note, consider this coming Wednesday. Programmes across the networks Include Footballers' Wives, Working Girls, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, The Golden Girls, Girls On The Job, Girls With Guns and Hairy Women.

I am not making this up. The billing for Hairy Women explains: 'A group of women discuss the issues surrounding female body hair,' including why fashion deems it so important to appear hairless, and reveal the extent to which their daily lives and routines are affected by the hair-removing process'.

THAT list consists exclusively of programmes which include the words 'wives', 'women' or girls' in their titles. There are plenty more, such as Greenham Common - about the women who set up the permanent demo outside the U.S. air force base - with titles which do not include such words.

On top of that, there are entire networks such as UK Style and Living which are aimed much more at women than men.

But is it not possible to pick out a parallel list in similar terms catering for male interests? Not that I can see.

Documentaries agonising over the trials of the morning shave for men seem shamefully absent from Wednesday's schedules ... and from every other day of the week. The only title I can find on Wednesday with the word 'husbands', 'men' or 'boys' in the title is The Men Who Killed Kennedy, on the History Channel.

Obviously, there are programmes in which the central concern is men or masculinity, but look at them closely and you find they differ Interestingly from their female counterparts.

In Sex And The City, famous for its portrayal of a group of trendy New York women, feminism is the dominant mindset. Men are seen as inept nerds, useless except for providing strappy sandals and, if the vibrator has run out of batteries, the occasional orgasm, usually unsatisfactory.

However, in a programme such as Men Behaving Badly, famous for its portrayal of young British men, the dominant mindset is not a masculine equivalent of feminism but, once again, feminism Itself.

HERE, too, men are seen as inept nerds, useless except for providing women with canned beer and not even the occasional orgasm, which is quite beyond them.

Tuesday will see the return to BBC2 of Manchild, a series which was hailed by some as a British male counterblast to Sex And The City.

Watch it while doing the crossword and that may seem credible, but look more care" and you find that, once again, this is not a celebration of masculinity but precisely the opposite.

It is dedicated to reinforcing the politically correct - meaning feminist -- attitudes of women towards middle-aged men who are shown as boastful, inept and, of course, incapable of getting in touch with their feelings (like all men, you know, Wordsworth, Elgar, Shakespeare emotional Illiterates one and all).

As far as the female presence on screen is concerned, the feminist creed appears to be 'What's yours is mine and what's mine's my own'.

Thus subjects such as child rearing, home making and nursing which have traditionally been seen as female territory have continued to be dominated by female presenters. But now, thanks to positive discrimination (do burglary and mugging become OK if you stick the word 'positive' in front of them?) women are also being favoured in traditionally male areas.

Watch snooker, which even today is hardly seething with female players, and you are likely to find it being presented on TV by Hazel Irvine. Turn to a soccer round-up and there's Gabby Logan. Switch to racing and you see Clare Balding or Tanya Stevenson.

All are good at their jobs, though the switch from men to women in such positions seems to be a one-way street. Are Chrissie Reidy, Helen Willetts, Sarah Wilmhurst and Helen Young so much better at doing the weather than any of the men available?

There are other women whose suitability to their jobs is so clear that no one would question their appointment. Katie Derham is an outstandingly good newsreader with no silly pronunciation habits. Ruby Wax is unmatched in asking embarrassing questions with a smile. Well, all right, a mad grin. Davina McCall may be loud and brash but in the jobs she does that is needed.

Yet there are others, more and more of them, who prompt the question: 'Is she there because her employers honestly think she's the best (how could they?) or because she's a woman?'

Yet it is not head-counting or even the counting of 13rogramme titles which bring out most vividly what is happening in TV's great sea change but a sequence of more subtle alterations in attitude.

Time was when the ideal of manhood would be exemplified on TV by a Royal Marine commando or an explorer: someone with great courage or daring, willing to face huge challenges and lead others on dangerous missions ' breaking boundaries, whether geographical, scientific or military.

Today, TV's ideal of manhood appears to be David Beckham, a football player much given to new hairdos, who sulks and adds an Alice band to his earrings and necklace in order to show off his eyebrow when it is accidentally grazed by his boss.

Beckham exemplifies the Diana-fication of Britain - in which the old virtue of the stiff upper lip is replaced by a determination to wallow publicly in shared emotion, preferably tearful. The phenomenon can be seen daily in such soul-baring sessions as The Oprah Winfrey Show and Trisha.

However, for the most vivid, indeed lurid, proof of the feminisation of TV you have to go to the commercials. The infantilisation, emasculation and ridicule of men has become one of the mainstays of advertising. In virtually every commercial break, men are shown as:

More stupid than women (the bloke with his head under the basin looking for something with which to wipe the lavatory when his gorgeous wife waltzes in and does the job in a flash with an expensive pre-moistened disposable towelette);

More Neanderthal than women (the grouch who starts out in the morning as, literally, an apeman and turns into a vaguely acceptable human being only by eating delicious Wheaty Pops);

More inept than women (the marathon-running ninny who tries to consume powdered soup at a drinks station while the svelte female runner speeds off gulping a proper drink);

More ignorant than women (the gormless middle-aged chap shoving a washing machine along the pavement while the beautiful young woman achieves all-day freshness with a simple packet of Sudso);

More pathetic than women 'Don't you want me baby?' wails the wimp to his feisty inamorata);

Or, of course, sexually inferior to women (the pitiful cur- licking the entire house clean at the behest of a beer-drizzling dominatrix who, at the end, is enraged because she has run out of alcohol with which to trick him into licking her body, beer and not passion being the only reason for today's emasculated man to do such a thing).

Ah, say the feminists, you protest too much. This is merely part of the balancing up process needed after all those decades when women were belittled and ridiculed in commercials.

Oh yes? Then it would be interesting to hear the names of three or four which subjected women to such denigration.

My impression is that the furthest the advertising industry ever dared to go in that direction was to portray women as ditzy but charming, vague but beautiful. The notion that commercials ever portrayed women repeatedly as sexless, ignorant and inept is another feminist fantasy.

So far men have been astonishingly calm and quiet about the feminisation of TV. imagine the squawking if the Manolo Blahnik had been on the other foot.

Today, the Americans who were first into the feminism jungle appear to have emerged on the far side.

Their broadcasters now create lots of post-feminist drama that appeals to men as well as women The Sopranos, 24, The West Wing, Six Fleet Under.

Of course, British broadcasters should give women equal opportunities - but they should also give men equal programming.