ITV bans all male comedy writing teams

Ms Saskia Schuster, why am i not surprised by this. Now doubt she will have a job for life at the BBC very soon.

Hopefully she will do something about the imbalance of motorway workers being all male.

Love Island is a joke that's not funny

Lets be honest here there's no comedy on TV anymore

Mock The Week was a must watch when Frankie Boyle was on it, nowadays its got mainly left wing "comedians" on it and its about as funny as an abscess

am i being thick here but by doing this , is it not a form of discrimination ?

ITV will no longer commission comedy shows with all-male writers' rooms, the broadcaster's head of comedy has said.

Saskia Schuster said she realised last year that "an awful lot of my comedy entertainment shows are made up of all-male writing teams".

She said: "Too often the writing room is not sensitively run. It can be aggressive and slightly bullying."

She has now changed ITV's contracts, and female writers have been hired to join shows like ITV2's Celebability.

There has been "a significant lack of shows written by women or with women on the writing teams", she said.

Last year, when reviewing the gender balance of sitcom scripts she was sent, she realised that for every script she received from a female writer, she got five from men.

After consulting writers, producers, agents and performers, "the first thing I did was I changed my terms of commissioning," she told Channel 4's Diverse Festival in Bradford on Monday. "I won't commission anything with an all-male writing team."

Ms Schuster has launched a scheme called Comedy 50:50 to encourage more female comedy writers. She said female writers struggle because:

It is difficult to compete for jobs with men who have more writing credits
They can't find producers who "get" their voice and can develop their script to its full potential
They don't thrive as the lone female voice in a writers' room

"There can all too often be a sense of tokenism towards the lone female," she wrote on the Comedy 50:50 website. "Or the dominant perception is that the female is there purely so the production can hit quotas."

She has now changed ITV's contracts so any shows that are commissioned or recommissioned "must aim towards 50:50 gender representation".

So you can expect boring "comedy" that will need to have canned laughter over it

Remember shows like Steptoe And Son and On The Buses?

Long gone

"Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have written some of the most popular comedies on British Television including Porridge, The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet."

So they would have been banned in this day and age, this country gets destroyed daily by the pc leftist/liberals, they make me fkin sick!

there's a way around this. Miranda Hart & Dawn French could always dress up as women

Men tend to be funnier than women, especially on panel shows where there's a group of them, because the alpha-male instinct kicks in and they try to out-do eachother.  Women don't have that competitiveness built in them.  Of course, some women are very funny and some men are not, but that's bell curves.

"ITV bans male only writers. To discriminate on the grounds of gender is sexual discrimination. How about commissioning comedy shows which are funny regardless of gender, they are pretty thin on the ground."

Blackadder or The Peep Show would not been allowed to be shown ITV

Fawlty Towers the best example I can think of.

Can't argue about Fawlty Towers, but what writing has Connie Booth done before or after, by herself or even with anyone else?

A cynic might suggest she was co-credited for tax reason.

Women..know your limits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

Just identify as a female, she can't challenge that.

Yet another attack on men

The rate we are going, the only men that will be left will be the Muslim ones....

I would have thought that scripts should be decided by those that attract the biggest audience myself?

Men in our society are being far too fair to women, to the point of being unfair to themselves....


just my own opinion

Imagine the hue and cry if a man had banned all-women writing teams

I must admit I'd assumed that ITV comedy was written by an algorithm these days.

Missed it

When nobody watches comedy anymore because it isn't funny, and the advertisers stop advertising they'll soon replace people like her.

Men are better at burping and farting, but when a woman burps or farts it's funnier because of the element of surprise.