Entertainment is taking women seriously at last I

DAYTIME television can be pretty depressing.

Jeremy Kyle, Judge Rinder, US crime dramas that weren’t interesting first time around, endless repeats of Heartbeat, Come Dine With Me and those shows where people need a TV programme to help them buy a villa in the sun or a manor house in Cornwall that the rest of us could never afford in a months of Sundays.

They either don’t have the wit to do it on their own or they like showing off on telly.

It’s enough to make you put in a call to the Grim Reaper and say take me now, I’ve had enough.

Which is probably why the advert breaks are always full of exhortations to invest in a funeral plan so your family won’t have the expense of burying you.

Cheerful little 30 second dramas of elderly retired folk looking really chirpy because they’ve booked their final journey.

Sorry, but those advertisements are worse than Jeremy Kyle - and that’s saying something. Who needs them every afternoon, Monday to Friday?

Amazing that they pick daytime TV as peak period for their campaigns. I can’t recall seeing many screened at half time during live WAS taken to task for eulogising British characters from the golden age of comics yesterday.

Because the ones I mentioned were all male. The piece was sparked by the birthday of Superman, the ultimate America comic book legend, who first appeared 80 years ago when he was about 20, which now makes him 100.

For a nation that set its sights so high with its heroes it makes you wonder how Americans got Tango’d with the Orangeman in the White House.

My point was that I preferred understated British heroes like Alf Tupper, Wilson the Wonder Athlete and Andy Capp. The sort with whom we can identify as battling against all odds.

And, to be fair, when I was growing up, female characters were thin on the ground.

The Bash Street Kids, who have been attending the same school since 1954, only have one girl in their class, Toots. But Minnie the Minx and Beryl the Peril have both been causing mayhem for decades.

Mainstream comics of the past that I read were male orientated, although The Eagle launched a sister paper called Girl in 1951 to give Girl Power a chance.

It had comic strips about an air hostess, ballet dancer and showjumping, although it did go football.

Retired people are not thick. They have a lifetime of experience and know dying is an expensive business.

According to the Royal London National Funeral Cost Index, average cost of a burial is £4,257 and a cremation is £3,311.

And financial experts suggest other ways of taking care of out-ofcoffin expenses rather than a funeral plan: ensure in your will that costs will be paid by your estate, take out an ISA or a life insurance policy.

Stop the advertising and let those of us of a certain age take care of our own futures. where others had not been before, with a cover strip of Kitty Hawke and Her All Girl Crew about women running a charter airline. It wasn’t popular and was soon relegated to an inside slot.

Most comics practised stereotyping but Bunty, for instance, produced heroines like Simple Simone, a girl working with the French resistance in the war, and young Anella Roberts, who travelled through a dystopian Britain racked by alien invasion and civil war toreunite her family in The Survivors.

A bit different from gymkhanas, hairdressing and boarding schools.

I’m at a disadvantage recalling other female icons, as my street credibility as a burgeoning lad would have been badly dented if I’d been found with girl comics that often had pages where you cut out clothes to dress a young lady in her underwear.

All very innocent, I know, but it might still have taken some explaining.

The recent ground swell of change demanding equality, means all forms of entertainment will have to take women more seriously.

Jodie Whittaker has been cast as the first female Doctor Who and, while Cillian Murphy, star of Peaky