Prime Suspect’s La Plante ‘humiliated’ as TV turns its back on her
LYNDA LA PLANTE, one of Britain’s most celebrated screenwriters and crime authors, has said it is now “virtually impossible” for her to make new dramas in a broadcasting environment dominated by the young.
The award-winning creator of Prime Suspect and Widows says she struggles to even get a producer to meet her to discuss a new project, describing it as humiliating.
Speaking on Boom Radio, the 81-yearold, whose work is credited with transforming British TV crime drama in the Nineties, has suggested that the dominance of television production by younger people is blocking older talent. In an exchange on Jo Brand’s Open
the Box show, La Plante was asked: “Being you, how easy is it to get a series made today, would you say?” She responded: “It’s virtually impossible.”
La Plante went on to describe how she is no longer being heard by those she has to rely on to get her work made.
“It’s humiliating. It’s even relegated to them hardly even giving me the time for an interview,” she told Brand, adding: “I mean, is it [my] age? Or is it somebody so young that they’ve never heard of anything that you’ve done previously?
“But the humiliation… the only thing that really and truly lifts me up are writing novels and being able to talk to my fans and have the success of the novels.”
La Plante is the latest in a line of women in film and TV to have spoken out over their experience of ageism in the industry.
In 2022 dozens of actors including Juliet Stevenson, Meera Syal, David Tennant, Keeley Hawes and Lesley Manville called for better on-screen representation of women older than 45 to fight against the “entrenched” ageism within the industry.
Dame Helen Mirren, who played DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, has also condemned age discrimination in entertainment, saying last month: “It is a sort of uncomfortable moment, when you realise in my industry, ‘oh, they didn’t want me because I was good, they wanted me because I was young’.”
La Plante also told Brand that considering the success of Prime Suspect, Above Suspicion and her early 1980s drama Widows, she “should be an incredibly rich woman, which I’m not”, and cites issues with her contracts.
For all her success in portraying strong independent female characters, La Plante confesses a large section of her audience remembers her for her early acting role as the hay fever-suffering ghost Tamara Novek in the 1970s BBC children’s series Rentaghost.
“I played some nurse that when she sneezed, she disappeared. This show has haunted me,” she told Brand. “The producer, Jeremy Swan, said, ‘Oh, it’s a little thing. It’s just a little thing. It’s a little series. It’s a little kid’s show. It’s not going to go anywhere.’
“It’s followed me like a torment. I can be giving a lecture at Cambridge or Oxford about crime and somebody will put their hand up in the Q&A part and say: ‘Were you in Rentaghost?’ ‘Yes I was!’”
‘Is it somebody so young they’ve never heard of anything you’ve done previously?”