TV is tough for older women, says Williams
Women over 50 are being forced out of television because they do not want to face speculation about how old they look, Sian Williams, 51, the former BBC newsreader who has moved to
Channel 5 News, has suggested. Williams, the only woman to host a flagship news bulletin on a terrestrial channel, said that a former chairman of the BBC once mistook her for a secretary who was “prettying up the place”. She has urged broadcasters to put more older women on screen.
WOMEN over the age of 50 are being forced out of television because they do not want to face endless speculation about how old or tired they look, Sian Williams, the former BBC newsreader who has moved to Channel 5 News, has suggested.
Williams, the only woman to host a flagship news bulletin on a terrestrial channel, said that a former chairman of the BBC once mistook her for a secretary who was “prettying up the place”, as she urged broadcasters to put more older women on screen.
The other terrestrial broadcasters all use men as their lead anchors – Huw Edwards at the BBC, Tom Bradby at ITV and Jon Snow at Channel 4 – and Williams is one of only three women over the age of 50 to front regular terrestrial bulletins, alongside Fiona Bruce on the BBC’s News at Six, and ITV’s Mary Nightingale. A number of women, such as Reeta Chakrabarti, act as stand-in presenters on the BBC.
Williams, 51, complained that her male colleagues, such as Edwards, 54, were treated differently from women. She said: “I was called ‘veteran’. They don’t call Huw Edwards ‘veteran’. We grew up together at BBC News and he’s a couple of years older than me.
“I am the only woman to head up a flagship terrestrial bulletin.
“The BBC did a survey 10 years ago, and its audience told it we need more normal-looking older women on telly. Ten years later, we’ve got three women over 50 reading the news [Nightingale is 52 and Bruce 51]. Is that enough? I don’t think so.”
The former BBC Breakfast host said older women “get a level of attention and scrutiny that men do not get, whether it’s what we look like, how old we’re looking, how tired we’re looking, what we’re wearing”.
She added: “You can see my face. I look like a 51-year-old, or as the papers would say, a 51-year-old mother of four. That is what I am – that is what you’re going to get on the news.”
Williams, who quit BBC Breakfast as she did not want to move with the programme to Salford, said that in her younger days at the BBC she had been mistaken for a secretary, and was told by bosses that audiences did not want women reading the news.
She said: “I remember working at BBC Radio Leeds. We had a visit from the BBC chairman, Marmaduke Hussey. I was on my typewriter, bashing away. He said to the news editor, ‘It’s nice to see a secretary prettying up the place.’ That sort of thing was part of the fabric. It was stuff you heard all the time. Women in broadcasting have grown up with this. “I was output-editing The World at
One, [when] we had a visit from a director-general, who I won’t name, who said to me, ‘You stand like a ballerina’. Another manager said to me, ‘The public would prefer their serious news delivered to them by a man’.
“When you grow up with that as a journalist, when you have the same level of experience of the man standing next to you, it is galling. But what you end up doing is sort of feeling humble and grateful about being there in the first place.”
Williams said that she was heartened by the fact that there are several female newsreaders in their forties, such as Kate Silverton, Sophie Raworth and Julie Etchingham, who show no sign of stepping down.
She said: “In five or 10 years, the picture will be very different. There will be this tranche of women who are going to be on the telly, and that gives me heart.”