PEEPING TOM Why are all men in TV dramas such vile creeps?
...while the women are usually saintly pillars of strength
Officials for tourism in picturesque West Bay, the Dorset seaside village where crime drama Broadchurch was filmed, are said to be bereft that the serial has finished.
But i bet they’re not. Despite its jigsaw puzzle prettiness, the harbour community was portrayed as a place where all men are sexual predators.
Husbands, boyfriends, fathers and sons are, without exception, callous, controlling liars — every one of them easily capable of the vicious rape at the centre of the story.
There are tribal villages in rural Pakistan where menfolk have more respect for women than in Broadchurch.
sadly, this intense prejudice against men, amounting to guilty loathing of everything masculine, is nothing new in television. in one crime drama after another, the men are weak and selfpitying at best, cruelly deceitful most of the time, and frequently rapists, wife beaters and paedophiles.
Even the good guys are prey to their darker nature. Male sexual violence was so pervasive in Broadchurch that even the hero, Di alec Hardy (David Tennant) was not immune. When the pornaddicted local schoolboys started sharing indecent photos of his daughter, Hardy confronted them and threatened to cut off their penises.
Meanwhile, the female characters are pillars of strength, and often saintly in their determination to nurture their children despite the evil, feckless men on every side.
Think back across the police and crime serials of the past couple of years, and try to name one male character who is a noble, decent man, an incorruptible protector of the vulnerable, dedicated to opposing evil. it can’t be done. standing in his place are weasels, voyeurs, bullies, thugs, liars, psychopaths and sexual incontinents. in Broadchurch, it seemed as if rape victim Trish Winterman (Julie Hesmondhalgh) was surrounded by one of every type: her husband spied on her; her boss stalked her; her best mate’s husband took advantage of her; her taxi driver stole trophies from her. Her rapists were two young men she barely knew — the local sex fiend and his teenage apprentice.
Broadchurch was steeped in so much misandry that it is unthinkable that the same story could be filmed with the genders reversed. imagine the outcry if Trish were Josh, a man being spied on by his ex and pestered by his manageress, beset by neurotic witches, who gets sexually assaulted by a marauding hen party (i may have committed a hate crime merely by writing that sentence).
What elevated the political correctness of Broadchurch to ludicrous levels was its depiction of women as martyrs and saints. Every wife was a pillar of strength, every daughter a junior Joan of arc. Their leader was the local newspaper editor Maggie, who naturally was a lesbian.
This hopelessly trite bias came into flower with a march by the townswomen along the seafront promenade.
THE sisterhood were united against male violence, and tears were shed. Then they went home to do the washing up, while their oppressors scowled and shook their hairy fists.
One of the rallying cries of seventies feminism was ‘all Men are Rapists’. it was a brainlessly sexist claim. But like many simple slogans, it stuck. When it comes to propaganda, catchy lies beat nuanced argument every time. Which is why even now such an appallingly skewed view of men seems so widespread.
Think of former labour leader Ed Miliband, posing in a T-shirt that boasted: ‘This is what a feminist looks like.’ it might just have well have said: ‘i’m a man — really sorry about that.’
The same cringeing self-hatred underpins too much TV drama. if you watched Broadchurch — or crime dramas such as The Missing, Prime suspect 1973, Unforgotten, or Doctor foster — you were required to suspend your disbelief and accept that men are inhuman brutes. Deny that, and the plots ceased to make sense.
Even real-life crime programmes seem unable to resist framing history to prove that men are pointless at best, and dangerous monsters most of the time.
The Moorside told the bleak tale of nine-year-old shannon Matthews, whose hateful mother Karen staged her kidnapping in 2008 and milked it for all the attention and cash it was worth.
The BBc1 drama, starring sheridan smith as Karen’s friend, the tough matriarch of the Dewsbury council estate, was a story about women, but it repeatedly emphasised the hopelessness of men. Not one male on those streets earned his own oxygen. They were all drunks, druggies and child porn demons.
Gradually it became clear that every woman in the story had been sexually abused at one time or another. Dewsbury and Broadchurch might be at opposite ends of England, but they are twin towns in that sense.
crime serials have become a competition for right-on writers to display their credentials. Television is becoming an extension of the North london set, where beardy intellectuals vie to prove that their disgust for their own masculinity is more pious, more intense than any other man’s.
in these orgies of apology and self-flagellation that now pass for TV drama, ordinary scripts are replaced by a charge sheet of male crimes. see that lad with a mobile phone? it’s crammed with ‘revenge porn’. and what about that amiable family man, the one who is always ready to take soccer practice for the Under-11s? Wait till the police dig up his patio. it’s Highgate cemetery under there. Oh, his poor wife.
female characters are too often cardboard paragons of virtue, two-dimensional fakes who have noble purity tattooed across their brows. The irony that writers such as Broadchurch’s chris chibnall are incapable of seeing is that this feminist posturing is woefully sexist. if the men are rapists and the women are angels, where are the human beings?
You won’t see this in the current crop of U.s. crime shows. it’s a peculiarly British prejudice.
Take a psychological drama like Orange is The New Black, set in a women’s prison. it has won enough Emmys and Golden Globes to fill a getaway car and, though until recently it was available in the UK only via Netflix, it is now on TV through the sony subscription channel.
There are no flatpack saints. Many of the women behind bars are there by reason of their own stupidity and criminal ways. Others were dragged down by nogood men. some, like the heroine Piper (Taylor schilling), have left supportive boyfriends on the outside who are powerless to fix the mess made by their women.
CRUCIALLY, not all the male characters are manipulative or sexually aggressive. One or two are. The rest are frustrated idealists and middle-aged depressives: motorbike enthusiasts; failed musicians; cooks and gardeners, drinkers or abstainers or occasional pot smokers.
Human beings, in other words. Real characters who are not defined by their gender. There’s an interesting idea.
What is most frustrating is the evidence that most viewers don’t want our entertainment to be as aggressively self-righteous as an anti-Trump protest march. We want escapism — and that means characters, men and women, who ignite our imagination.
female viewers swooned last year as Tom Hiddleston played a knight errant in The Night Manager, based on a book by John le carré. Tom played ex-commando Jonathan Pine, who rescued a damsel from the clutches of an arms dealer and all-round cad (Hugh laurie). Pine wasn’t weird or sexually aggressive or boorish. He was dashing. it was sheer fantasy. it refused to feel sorry for itself. and we loved it.
Of course we did. Nobody switches on the telly hoping to feel bad about themselves. Great TV is about escapism, and we need more heroes.