As the television event of the past five years, it’s not surprising that the revamped Doctor Who is turning out to be something of a talent crèche. Equally unsurprising is the fact that most of the Doctor scribes are men. The Welsh writer Helen Raynor is the exception: she cut her teeth script-editing the show right from its 2005 rebirth, then graduated to writing episodes of both Torchwood and Doctor Who on her own, including the excellent The Sontaran Stratagem. She is currently co-writing a new original series, The Fabulous Baker Boys, for BBC Wales, which will be a chunk of social realism firmly rooted in a small valleys town.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
A TV writing 'girl rush'
Benji Wilson in The Times reckons that women 'are making the running in British TV' and in terms of TV writing, '2010 looks as if it might be the beginning of a girl rush'. He lists six of the female writers he expects to make the biggest impact in upcoming months, including Guild member Helen Raynor.
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Great news, if women are finally starting to catch up (according to Guild figures they still only write about 25% of TV drama). But how patronising of Mr Wilson to talk about a "girl rush". Would he describe Alan Plater, Paul Abbott, Peters Bowker and Flannery, Anthony Horowitz, and Julian Fellowes as "boy writers"? No, thought not.
ReplyDeleteStop patronising us, and you never know - we might even manage to write scripts all on our own!
A FEMALE writer