Hildegard
Thursday 12th January 2023 4:30pm
Cornwall
140 posts
Quote: Lazzard @ 12th January 2023, 4:20 PM
The fact of the matter is 18-34 will be the age of the audience he needs to attract.
Old enough to have money, but young enough to buy something simply because the saw it on a commercial.
In terms of creating and enjoying comedy what he says is clearly nonsense.
Jack Bayles, the previous Head of Commissioning for Comedy at C4, was a good bloke.
He bemoaned the lack of senior/experienced writing talent - as he found himself constantly battling to get decent scripts out of, essentially, stand-ups who'd been given a show.
Agesim is huge problem in TV.
But there's f**k all you can do about it, because they'll always say it's the script they don't like, not the writer.
Which may, of course, be true.
I disagree you see. As a 57 yr old, female writer/performer I see a very strong push for comedy that represents that particular dynamic. People consume what they're told is 'zeitgeist' and whilst C4 has a diversity policy that covers, LGBTQ, disability and gender it completely misses out age. Young, male commissioners simply can't see how women over 50 could possibly be funny because they're boring, when women over 50 are an incredibly subversive, transgressive group. We simply don't give a f**k what anyone thinks of us.
That's why I disagree that nothing can be done about it. I've already got a producer interested in my sitcom about the menopause. If companies like C4 don't take their discriminatory blinkers off they're going to get left behind.