When Sandi Toksvig says women are cut out of panel shows, she really isn’t exaggerating. I once walked into the office of a production company to work on the second episode of a comedy panel show. They’d booked me (and several people who are now household names but will here remain nameless, to protect the guilty) to record a series, the first of which had been broadcast the night before. I hadn’t seen it because I was out gigging and Twitter didn’t exist, which made it harder for strangers to tell you something had gone disastrously wrong with your life and career.
So I didn’t know why the producer was apologising until someone explained. There were two women and three men on the show, which was (and still is) unusual. We had recorded about an hour for a half-hour programme. It had gone well. We had made each other laugh. But somehow, between the recording and the broadcast, the editors had managed to cut every single thing I’d said and all but one sentence of what my female colleague had said. They had kept in plenty of footage of us smiling and laughing. But somehow they hadn’t noticed that they had cut out all our words. In fact, they never did notice: the channel controller called to ask what the hell had happened, and only then did they realise what they’d done.
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