Generally I feel that being a woman allows me a distinct advantage. Apart from a monthly cycle of pain wrought with uncontrollable emotion, comparable weakness in most physical activity and an extreme empathy which means I can’t walk past a charity worker or homeless person without emptying my pockets and signing up to a direct debit that is. In the world of comedy and writing anyway being a woman is normally a definite bonus. This is mainly because there aren’t many. I would say that probably about 5 percent of the London Comedy Writers are women, if that. In addition to the advantage of the very few numbers of women in the group, we can add the standard personality traits of the average male comedy writer. I won’t list them as it may be offensive, but I will say that it means that, despite being disgusting, unwashed and poorly dressed after a day at the bank, I get very well treated indeed at every meeting – like a rare species of bird.
Speaking of birds (dead ones, not rare ones) brings me to a recent time on a ComComedy shoot when the tables turned, and my being female was most certainly a disadvantage. There were two women on the shoot – me and a rather beautiful actress called Kate. The other fifteen or so crew and hangers-on were all men (boys). So the thoughtless writer of the sketch in question had ended his script with the mid-flight explosion of a couple of pigeons. Silly Mark Leeson. So we aimed to have a splattering of blood (ketchup) on the face of the actor as he visualised the bird exploding above him. I said that blowing ketchup into Mark’s face sounded like fun, and nominated myself for the task. My mission was to blow a straw full of ketchup into Mark’s face at the same time as throwing a handful of feathers at him whilst keeping out of shot and avoiding his rather posh coat. Easy. This was my moment, pulse racing, beads of sweat forming on my brow. And ‘ACTION’. Oh dear. I managed to blow the ketchup onto his shoulder (posh coat and continuity ruined) and throw the feathers in the air. I think he moved his face, but I was ridiculed for my girly lack of ability at aiming condiments. Boo. I would like to say that most of them have been aiming something else (wee) out of a tube for their whole lives at a hole far greater than the size of a mans face, and, in my experience, seem to miss a lot of the time. So there. After various attempts we decided that actually a better way would be to make a tennis ball sized patty of feathers and ketchup and throw them at the actors faces at the time of the supposed explosion. The boyfriend had one patty and I had the other and we each had an actor’s face to throw it at. Of course boyfriend managed to splat Mark perfectly in a very true to life pigeon explosion kind of way. My patty did hit Kate in the face, but not really with the force of a real life explosion and it kind of rolled onto her shoulder. There are two reasons for this, both of which relate to my being female. The first is that I didn’t really want to injure Kate with my pigeon patty. The second is that I’m not as sporty as the boyfriend and was worried about the accuracy of my throw at speed. I was ribbed about this, and will inevitably get the blame if they can’t edit a decent pigeon explosion out of the takes that we did.
The moral of the story is, whilst it might seem fun to volunteer to splat someone with ketchup on camera, with great power comes great responsibility, and only a man (or potentially a very skilled athlete type woman) can do it well.
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