Tom Slater Tom Slater

Mock the Week’s real problem is nothing to do with sexism

Katherine Ryan (Getty images)

Is Mock the Week sexist? It’s a question that has haunted the BBC’s topical comedy panel show for much of its 15 years. And one of its most prominent female former panellists has just reignited the debate by claiming the show practises a kind of ‘pedestal feminism’, giving a few female comics a go to deflect criticism of its otherwise manifest sexism.

‘I had to stop doing it’, said Canadian comic Katherine Ryan, who has clocked up seven MtW appearances, on her podcast recently. ‘I knew that every time I was booked I was taking a job away from one of my female peers… I couldn’t do it anymore because of that fact alone – ‘No, Mock the Week doesn’t have a problem with women, look, Katherine Ryan’s on the show’.’

She stopped doing the show in 2015, a year after the BBC introduced a quota mandating at least one female comic per panel show. It was introduced largely in response to criticism of Mock the Week’s overwhelmingly male lineups, and an allegedly blokeish and competitive atmosphere that Jo Brand and others suggested was inhospitable to female comics.

Of course, concerns about tokenism were precisely why many opposed the quota in the first place. Mock the Week host Dara O Briain told the Radio Times in 2014 that the edict was patronising to female comics. He even namechecked Ryan, saying female MtW stars like her, who earned their spot on the basis of their talents, ‘will suddenly look like the token woman’.

That turned out to be quite prophetic. Six years later and Ryan is not only criticising that quota for its tokenism, but also painting it as a kind of sexist con. That the show has more recently featured two female comics in episodes is, according to Ryan, yet more proof of how far it has to go.

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