Bridget Christie Minds The Gap
R4 renews comedy series
More episodes from Bridget Christie and Kerry Godliman
Written by Jay Richardson in Chortle on July 18th, 2013
Radio 4 has recommissioned more comedy from Bridget Christie and Kerry Godliman.
It follows the news that Susan Calman’s stand-up show was returning, promoted to a prime-time 6.30pm slot.
Like Calman, Derek star Godliman took to Twitter to announce the news, writing last night: ‘Very excited to hear we’ll be doing a 2nd series of Kerry’s List for R4.’
Christie has been commissioned for a second series of four half-hour episodes of her show about feminism, Bridget Christie Minds The Gap.
She said: ‘This is very good news because since my last series about feminism went out, the sports commentator John Inverdale has been a stupid sexist tool and Nestle have launched a new brand of bottled water, marketed at “trendy, rich women” called Resource. So while I think it’s great that trendy, rich women now have some water to drink at last, it is a shame that Nestle didn’t think of launching a brand of bottled water aimed at unfashionable, poor babies in the developing world. The babies could’ve used it to mix with Nestlé’s baby milk formula, rather than the filthy, contaminated water they had to use instead.’
Few other details are currently available about the two shows, beyond that it will be delivered to Radio 4 by March, suggesting it will air shortly afterwards. The first series, which broadcast in March this year, ‘was bloody quick’ to make Christie explained, ‘around two months from commission to broadcast.’
There is no indication yet if Fred MacAulay will return as her co-star. But she added ‘I bloody hope so, he was brilliant. He is as far as I’m concerned but he might not want to do it.’
She added that she’d been taken ‘completely by surprise’ by the first series’ success, stating that she didn’t think a show focusing on feminism would ‘go down well at all. But I think there’s something in the air.’
When asked to elaborate further, she said: ‘This might make me sound like a twat. But I’ve had loads of teenage girls emailing me to say “Oh, if I’d known this programme was going to come out, I would have been able to cope with school and all this stuff that’s going on.”
‘Because there’s a lot of pressure on them. I think it’s much worse for them now than when I was a teenager in the Eighties. Because we were really moving in the right direction and it’s gone quite badly wrong.
‘With modern technology, they can be filmed and the language for young girls has changed, there’s a lot of pressure and looks and cosmetics, so much stuff they have to think about. A lot of them talk about if only they’d known there were other people who thought this wasn’t normal…’
Christie brings her show A Bic For Her, inspired by a pastel-coloured ballpoint pen marketed at women, to Edinburgh next month, where she will also be part of a Culture Show special for the BBC. As Chortle reported last week, she is writing ‘a funny book about feminism’ for publication in 2015.
She says that one of the main problems about writing humour on feminism is ‘not what you put in, it’s what you leave out. The thing is to pick your battles. When you do stuff about things that are a bit heavy, it’s important to be silly. Luckily, just as it’s struck me what a rubbish deal women in sport get, there are lots of men in sport saying really idiotic things.’
A former journalist, she also accuses the media of trying to impose feminist role models like Margaret Thatcher and Beyonce on women for their own agenda.
‘When the first series went out, I was asked to write 400 words on who my feminist heroes were. I said “Oh great, can I do it on Malala Yousaf?” [The Pakistani teenage activist shot in the head on a school bus] But I was told “we want to use a photo of Lena Dunham, can you make her your hero?”
‘Not only have you commodified our bodies – I sound like I’m preaching now – but we can’t even have feminism for ourselves now, even that’s becoming a commodity’.
– by Jay Richardson
Written by Jay Richardson in Chortle on 18th July 2013.
Filed Under: Bridget Christie Minds The Gap, Feature