Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (31 page)

Do I Hate Men?

I’m often accused of
hating men by the usual array of right-wingy tabloidy types who find it easy to
slot me into that box so that they can hate me back.

It’s
interesting how, for thousands and thousands of years, in our society, men have
had the upper hand — and as soon as women start to claw a bit of power into
their lives, a number of men feel it’s too much. Of course I don’t hate men as
an entire group — that would be utterly ridiculous, unless I was a separatist
feminist lesbian, which I’m not.

I
always used to do a line in my set in which I described the continuum along
which feminism seems to run these days. At the one end it takes in what are
called ‘lipstick feminists’ — women who have feminist ideals but want to do the
whole feminine bit as well — right along to the other end where you find your
male-clothes-wearing, short-haired, Doc Marten-sporting man-haters. The thing
is that, emotionally, I am probably more up the end of the lipstick gals, but I
look like I’m right down the other end with the dungaree-wearers.

The
five top things men do that annoy me are:

1.
Consume pornography

2.
Treat women like second-class citizens

3.
Intimidate women when they are in groups

4.
Good men tolerate bad men treating women like shit

5.
The vast majority cannot help themselves equating good looks with
attractiveness

As a woman who has never —
and will never — look like a model, one is constantly made aware of the level
of one’s attractiveness by those men who feel it’s OK for them to randomly
comment on a woman’s position in the ‘How-attractive-you-are-to-me-love’ chart
of female looks. Well, would you believe it, guys, quite a lot of us don’t like
that. And it’s particularly galling, if you try to make a point about women
being patronised, intimidated or not taken seriously, when the answer that
comes back is:

‘Oh,
you’re just jealous because you’re ugly.’

This is
so frustrating because I can hardly counter with, ‘Oh come on, boys, look at me
— I’m beautiful, admit it.’ The interesting thing is that I know lots of really
gorgeous-looking blonde women who are sick to bloody death of being treated as
if they’re thick as shit. And if you look at it, female types have, over the
years, been divided into very clichéd groups to satisfy the easy categorisation
of us lot.

So for
example you have:

·
The bimbo

·
The slag

·
The nympho

·
The harridan

·
The gold digger

·
The frigid cow

·
The lesbian (if you make
it apparent you don’t fancy them)

Ooh, how flattering it is,
to hear one’s gender divided into such positive categories. The division of men
into categories like this does not seem to exist, but I wish it did. If I got
the opportunity I would have:

·
The woman loather

·
The bed notcher

·
The five-year-old child

·
The ‘I need a housekeeper’
bloke

·
The eternal band member

·
The useless Herbert

I’m not saying that there
aren’t nice blokes around, there are plenty. but I’m sure men don’t want to be
reduced to a few pejorative phrases and neither do women.

Going
back to the intimidation theme for a moment, here is a typical story. Recently
I was in my car at the traffic-lights about midnight on the M11 link road and a
young woman was in the car in front. A car containing two men drew up alongside
her and the bloke on her side put down the window and began making the international
sign for blowjobs at her. I was appalled and so angry. If I’d had a
flamethrower in the car I would have used it. That sort of intimidation makes
me so mad. I followed the two cars for a bit, in case they were going to do
anything else, but thankfully a little further on, they turned off looking for
pastures new.

It is
incidents like this one and those from my own experience which continue to fuel
the feminist principles I have — and that ain’t never going to change. I really
wish for more power for women to fight against this sort of bullshit, even
though some people think that turns you into the anti-pleasure, anti-sex
ball-breaking harridan described earlier in this book. Well, it doesn’t, it
just makes me want to even the balance and I suppose brings me back to the joke
I did once about women being armed. If we women had the physical ability to
look after ourselves, perhaps that would improve things a little.

As
women’s place in society seems at present to be regressing to what it was before
the sixties and feminism happened, I have no idea what it’s going to be like in
the future. There are so many cultures impinging on ours that I believe have a
dodgy attitude towards women, that it remains to be seen whether the end result
will be a demotion of women’s place in society and we’ll end up back at home
slogging our guts out domestically. being exploited and unable to put a foot
outside the front door.

Do I Love All Women?

No, of course I don’t,
because that would be as bloody ridiculous as hating all men. I find it really
interesting these days that young women cannot bear to be associated with
feminism and are embarrassed to be called a feminist, for the reasons stated on
page 276.

The
Spice Girls and ‘girl power’ made an attempt to improve things, but a group of
young women who made pots of money aren’t a very realistic role model for the
rest of womanhood. In these days, when women can not only work but run a family
as well, it seems to me that more and more responsibility is being heaped onto
them and eventually they may just explode with the pressure.

However,
that’s not to say it’s all bad. Changes are occurring.

In the
days when I was a child, to be honest I hardly remember seeing my dad. He would
disappear in the morning and then reappear in the evening just before we went
to bed, and although he was around at the weekends and came on trips and
holidays, he was quite distant compared to my mum. These days, dads are much
more hands-on. The once exclusively female group who dropped children off for
school has now opened up to include more than a smattering of men. One hopes
that in this age of one step forward, two steps back gender relations, scores
will eventually even between the sexes, and that some sort of parity will be
achieved.

Your first appearances on
telly are so exciting because you can’t quite believe you’ve wiggled your way
into that flickering box that always sat in the corner of the living room
throughout your childhood. Television has always been magical to me, and I can
pretty much sit and watch any old bollocks from dawn till dusk. As a child I
drew the line at The Budget, however, and used to be really pissed off when
that was on because it meant they took
Crossroads
off the telly.

For
those of you who don’t remember
Crossroads
it was an early soap which
revolved round a motel set outside Birmingham (oh, the glamour). Many people
say that Victoria Wood based
Acorn Antiques
(the very, very funny
piss-take of a soap opera) on
Crossroads,
which was famous for its
microphones in shot, scenery moving and enormously long pauses between the
interaction of some characters. My dad’s friend from school, Ronald Allen, was
in it playing David Hunter, and there were many memorable characters who just
stayed in my head.

In my
first year as a solo stand-up without the safety net of my psychiatric nursing
job, I managed to make five appearances on TV and two of these were pilot
shows. A pilot is a possible series which is given money to make just one show,
see how it goes down with telly execs and the audience, and then it may be
taken up and an entire series made. As you can imagine, hundreds of pilot shows
fall at the first hurdle because the great idea in your head doesn’t somehow
translate into a workable piece of telly.

The two
pilots I did both disappeared without trace. The first one was a sort of
bohemian sketch show, the line-up being Hattie Hayridge (stand-up), Patrick
Marber (stand-up, now writer), Vicki Lickorish (kids’ telly), Paul Medford
(actor), Josie Lawrence (actor, comedian) and James Macabre (stand-up). The
show was a series of sketches, some music, and we went in every day for two
weeks to a rehearsal room in Brixton, to work on it. We were a fairly diverse
group and for some reason the show didn’t work. Either it was because we were
all so different, the chemistry wasn’t there — or possibly just because the
show was shit. Who knows?

It did
not get commissioned, but in some ways this was probably a good thing as it set
me down the road of reality. Decisions on what’s going on the box and what
isn’t tend to ultimately be the decision of one person —and therefore come down
to personal preference. To put it bluntly, if someone doesn’t like you, you’re
out.

Then
there is the problem of TV execs changing jobs every five minutes. You just
manage to get something commissioned and then that person leaves and another
one who can’t stand you comes into the post. Or perhaps they simply want to
stamp their own mark on the channel — in which case they clear out all the
pending stuff and you are flushed down the toilet with all the other hopefuls.

The
other show, for which I had much higher hopes but which also never went further
than the ‘possible’ stage, was a comedy about a DSS snooper looking for people
illegally claiming benefits. It revolved round a comedy club and starred Tom
Watt (him off
EastEnders
who used to play Lofty and is now a sport radio
pundit) and also Jerry Sadowitz, whom Tom was pursuing. The filming took place
in Birmingham and was my first taste of what a pain it can be to film things
like dramas. The problems are: it takes so long to set up cameras, get the
sound right, have everyone in the right place, and make the audience behave
normally i.e. not mouthing
Hello, Mum!
at the camera when it sweeps past.
In fact, it all takes so long that eventually one starts to slip into a coma of
boredom. I found the whole thing frustrating and irritating, which must be why
I’ve never gravitated towards a career in drama and films. Oh all right then, I
haven’t ‘cause I’ve always been pretty rubbish at acting.

Much of
my early telly was just due to me saying, ‘Oh God, yes please!’ because I
wanted to be on telly, thought if I turned it down they wouldn’t ask again, and
the money was pretty attractive too. That meant that I did make some pretty
massive errors of judgement, not least a show called
Only Fools and Turkeys
in
which I was a commentating Christmas fairy sitting in a café in West London.
First of all I was dressed up as a fairy (looked bloody ridiculous, of course —
and that was the point, I assume), then I was placed on a stool in a café by
the counter to deliver a series of monologues to camera.