Irish writer and comedian Sharon Horgan has spoken out against the "overwhelmingly male-dominated" lists of directors that still dominate the television industry, ensuring that it still remains a "boys' club".
Horgan, known best as the co-writer and star of Channel 4’s Catastrophe, was critical of the entrenched instinct of TV executives to always opt for the “safe pair of hands”, which inevitably meant choosing “a male director who has been doing it for 20 years”.
“There’s still an old-guard mentality,” said Horgan. “There’s still such an overwhelmingly large amount of male directors that it’s tricky to change, even when women are in those positions of power as commissioners. The first people who end up on those lists of directors, no matter how hard you try, are overwhelmingly male.”
Working with Sky, Horgan recently produced a series of short comedy films for Halloween that brought in an all-female line-up of directors: Nida Manzoor, Emily Greenwood and Kate Herron. It was necessary, Horgan said, to have positive action initiatives such as this to champion women in comedy and television because "those lists will continue to be incredibly male unless people continue to take a bit of a chance on female talent".
She added: “It’s a boys’ club, there’s no denying that, and that’s why we still need these programmes that champion women, give them a safe space to work in, to change that narrative entirely. I’ve been working in this industry since 2001, and yes a lot has changed in a very positive way, but not enough and not quickly enough.”
They had gone out of their way to find female directors for the show
Horgan said that channels and network commissioners needed to “work a bit harder” to bring in women, citing how when she was working on the US TV series Divorce, which she wrote, they had gone out of their way to find female directors for the show.
“Unfortunately, because there’s less of them [female directors] out there, you have to work harder to find those names and convince people that they are right for the job. But we should all be doing that,” she said, adding that it was an “approach that has to come from our brothers as well as our sisters”.
Addressing the recent events that have unfolded following the dozen of accusations made by women against Harvey Weinstein, and the resulting #MeToo campaign, Horgan said it illustrated how hostile the television and film industry had been for women for too long.
“I’ve only skirted round the edges of Hollywood and it’s an incredibly male driven environment, but I really do think this will change things,” said Horgan. “This scandal is bringing down companies, it’s affecting the bottom line. I think now when decisions are made about who will run a company, who will have these positions of power in the industry, they are probably more likely to consider a woman now because they’ll feel they are in a safer pair of hands.”
The Sky Halloween shorts are among the several female-led projects that Horgan has worked on recently with her recently formed production company Merman, which she set up with producer Clelia Mountford. She recently completed the first series of the sitcom Motherland, starring Anna Maxwell Martin and Diane Morgan, which airs on the BBC in early November, an unusual example of a show with a female-led cast as well as a female executive, three female writers and a female co-director, leading to what Horgan jokingly described as a "toxic female environment".
There is still this gender disparity because it takes time
“It was brilliant because certainly didn’t feel weird, it didn’t feel odd and it didn’t feel like this was unusual, it just felt like a normal working environment,” she said.
She and Mountford said that even with an “insane” amount of work by female creatives increasingly landing on their desk, progress towards gender parity in TV was still frustrating. “There is still this gender disparity because it takes time,” said Horgan; “it takes an annoying amount of time for things to change.” – (Guardian Service)
