Today the Guardian printed – or uploaded – an article on Why Doctor Who Needs More Female Writers by Mathilda Gregory. An article seemingly inspired by a blog post by Stella Duffy. Of course, the question is rhetorical, because the article doesn’t actually say why more female writers instead of male writers would be a good thing. Because, I’m afraid, the premise of the article is codswallop.
You see, if the new series has failings in the quality of
its writing – and I am so not going there, don’t even ask, but if you do ask, it’s
all marvellous – then simply changing the gender of the writers isn’t going to
fix that. The writers will still, after all, be writing to the same briefs,
working with the same script editors, working within the same limitations, and
trying to capture the same house style. And any female writers would,
presumably, be selected on the same criteria as the current male writers i.e. people
with a proven track record in television drama, preferably very recently and successfully,
preferably with the BBC.
Which is where the CultBox article listing five potential
female writers falls down. These champions of feminism can’t even think of five
female writers currently working in television (!); in order to come up with suggestions
they have to resort to women with no track record. But if male writers with
no proven track record can’t get on the show, why on Earth should female writers?
Either writers are being selected on merit (and on their track record) or they
aren’t. If the best writers aren’t being chosen, then it’s not because of a
bias in gender, it’s because the people who choose the writers have a different
idea of what constitutes a good writer. Their criteria may be flawed, they may
be loopy, they may be back-to-front, but they have nothing to do with gender.
Of course, there are dozens of great female writers out
there who could and should write for Doctor Who not listed by CultBox, I could
list them, and top of the list would be godlike genius Sally Wainwright, who is almost
certainly too busy writing her own two hit series to write for anyone else’s. I
can also think of dozens of great male writers too. Their gender, though, doesn’t
come into it. Good writers are just good writers.
That’s one of the many great things about being a writer. It
doesn’t matter who you are, what social class you are, whether you are black or
white, old or young, abled or disabled, short or tall, male or female, straight or gay or undecided.
It doesn’t matter what you look like at all. You just bung your scripts or
manuscripts in the post or down the fibreoptic cable and they ping out the
other end and the only thing upon which you are judged is the quality of your
work (and its punctuality and adherence to the brief, of course). You write
from behind a glorious veil of ignorance. All the producer has to know you by
is your name, which may give them a few pointers if they’ve never heard of you
before but to be honest they’re not going to pay it much attention, it’s
so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We writers are all Robin Blands,
enigmatic, anonymous and androgynous.
Which is why, a few years ago, a comedy executive – I can’t
remember who it was – greatly annoyed me by saying that the BBC didn’t get
enough submissions from ethnic minorities. This executive – let’s say it was a ‘he’,
I honestly can’t remember, their gender is immaterial – had even gone to the
trouble of working out a percentage! But the thing is, they had no way of
knowing how many of the submissions they received were from non-white writers. When
you submit a script, you don’t fill in a form with your ethnic details, or your age or anything like that. No, they
just assumed that any writer who didn’t have an obviously ethnic-sounding name
was white (and, indeed, that any writer with an ethnic-sounding name was from an ethnic minority). Which
means that a script from a writer called, say, Eddie Pryor would go in the ‘white
writer’ pile. And script from a writer called Richard Murphy would go in the same pile. Now switch their surnames.
My point, if I may navigate a tortuous route back to it, is that writing - unlike so much of life – is as near to a
level playing field as you can get. When I first got commissioned to write a
Doctor Who book, the people who commissioned me had no idea who I was, how old
I was, my ethnicity, my sexuality, my lack of hair. They’d never met me. They may have guessed I
was male, because of my forename, but I doubt that was what swung it for me.
No, every bit of writing work I’ve ever been paid for, every single opportunity
I’ve been given, has been because of the standard of my writing (and
punctuality, and cheapness). That’s how it works if you’re a writer.
(I mean, have you seen a group of writers get together? With
a few honourable exceptions, it’s a meeting of the short, tubby, speccy, ugly,
antisocial society. With yours truly as president.)
The only argument in favour of deliberately trying to favour
female writers is to get a wider breadth of authorial voices, and I agree with
that to an extent. I’d say the same applies with getting more writers from
ethnic minorities, lower social classes, writers with disabilities, and so on.
But with the huge stonking great caveat that the whole point of being a writer
is that you can not only Write What You Know but you can empathise with people
from other walks of life and write them well. So if the problem is, say, that
the female characters aren’t well written, the solution isn’t to get more
female writers, it’s to get better writers, writers that can write female characters,
irrespective of whether the writers themselves are male or female. There are
plenty of men out there who can write women; there are women out there who can't write women. As far as my own writing is
concerned I don’t treat male or female characters any differently (I write them
equally atrociously) because IMHO writing is about looking out through a characters’ eyes,
not looking at a character from outside (and when you’re looking out, you’re
not seeing skin colour, or sexuality, or anything else that would be normal as far as the character is concerned – a black, gay character doesn’t wake up
in the morning and think ‘Ooh, I’m so black and gay today’, they think ‘bloomin
hell why did I forget to put the milk back in the fridge’). People
aren’t defined by their gender, their race, their shoe size, their waistline,
their class. Writers know that because a writer’s job is to transcend their own
personal experience and imagine themselves walking in other people’s shoes, and
they know it because their own careers are not based on their looks, gender
or anything else, but on, more or less, how good they are at what they do
(insofar that merit is recognised and rewarded, which, as mentioned above,
might not always be the case).
But oh, that article. What codswallop. Note how the writer
picks on The Sarah Jane Adventures to make her point, but doesn’t mention
Wolfblood, a CBBC show with a predominantly female writing list. Note how
she doesn’t mention Torchwood, because it also doesn’t fit her argument. Or
that the majority of producers working on Doctor Who since it came back have
been female (for all the difference their gender makes). Her argument is just
that Doctor Who should have more female writers because it’s one the BBC’s flagship
programmes; not because it would make the show better, but just because it
would speciously ‘improve the balance’. And, bear in mind, anything which doesn't make a television show better invariably makes it worse.
Oh, and as well as incorrectly assuming it is within Steven Moffat’s
gift to hire writers with no television track
record, she’s also labouring under the
misapprehension that shows like Doctor Who have ‘writers rooms’ and ‘writing teams’. If
only they did!