Trailblazers – Queens of TV Comedy at Hackney Empire

Humour in the everyday: Victoria Wood CBE

It’s a tired old myth that women are somehow not as funny as men, and one that Trailblazers – Queens of TV Comedy hopes to explode when it takes place this month at the Hackney Empire and BFI Southbank.

The idea is to celebrate those women in British TV Comedy who have blazed a trail, through the rare feat of hosting their own television show.

Concentrating on the careers of TV luminaries such as Joyce Grenfell, Beryl Reid, Diana Dors, Marti Caine, Victoria Wood and French & Saunders, the Empire will stage two nights that will intersperse rarely seen footage from the archive with live stand-up from contemporary female comics such as Josie Lawrence, Michelle De Swarte and Rosie Wilby.

Curator of the festival, Dick Fiddy, explains why having your own show on television was such a rarity for women and the different ways this select group of comics managed to do it.

He says: “It was an era where comedy was terribly male dominated, and when you think of all the wonderful comedians, like June Whitfield and Hattie Jacques, who were around at the time and didn’t get their own show, you realise the ones who did must have done something unusual.

“With someone like Joyce Grenfield, her style of story telling and fantastic knack of creating characters and getting accents right meant she didn’t have many rivals, not even male ones.

“So you could be a one-off, like her, or if you were a big enough music hall character, like Beryl Reid, you’ve already created a persona and are a shoo-in for television because you’re used to live performances.

British comedy treasure Barbara Windsor is lined up to host From the Halls at the Empire on 16 August, a celebration of some of the female stars of music hall and variety. It will be followed on 23 August by Some Girls Can Do it Standing Up, which will look at the work of comedians working in the modern era, such as Marti Caine and Victoria Wood.

“Comedy changed dramatically with the arrival of Victoria Wood and French and Saunders,” contends Fiddy.

“Suddenly women were writing their own stuff. It’s not that this hadn’t happened before, but with
Victoria Wood and French and Saunders you saw for the first time comedy in which women weren’t afraid to act outrageously and to do mad and weird things.

“Jennifer Saunders created a whole slap stick world with women getting drunk, behaving badly and doing pratfalls – the sorts of thing male writers might have been wary putting their actresses through.”

You might expect the work of these pioneering comedy ‘queens’ to inform and resonate in that of contemporary women comedians.

“I don’t know if they have been inspired directly,” Fiddy adds, “though there’s probably some deeper connection. There’s perhaps a sense that if someone hadn’t done it before it would’ve been even harder, that these pioneers have come and sort of smoothed the way. But it’s never been that easy, and I’d say that it’s still far from being a perfectly flat playing field.”