ITV drops all-male comedy writing teams in push for equality

Head of comedy made the vow after noting ‘significant lack’ of women in writers’ rooms

Head of comedy Saskia Schuster, whose projects include ‘Benidorm’, made the decision (Kieron McCarron/Tiger Aspect)

ITV has revealed it will no longer commission comedy shows that have an all-male writing team.

The broadcaster’s head of comedy, Saskia Schuster, made the announcement after realising that the shows she works on had “an awful lot” of teams without any women.

Speaking on a panel at Diverse Festival, Ms Schuster said: “Too often the writing room is not sensitively run. It can be aggressive and slightly bullying.”

She added that her terms of commission have now been changed, after consulting writers, producers and agents.

Ms Schuster will even shun anything written by a team that features a “token woman”.

Ms Schuster, who noted a “significant lack” of women in writers’ rooms, has long been an advocate for equality in comedy writing. In 2018, she founded the initiative Comedy 50:50. She wrote on its website: “There can all too often be a sense of tokenism towards the lone female. Or the dominant perception is that the female is there purely so the production can hit quotas.”

She also runs confidence workshops as well as events in which producers are “forced” to have three conversations with female writers.

Assisting Ms Schuster in her cause is writer the Brona C Titley, who has joined the team for comedy panel show CelebAbility. Titley, who also featured on the panel, revealed she had been the sole woman in eight out of 15 writers’ rooms in recent years.

“If you have the same type of writers in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, then you’re only getting one kind of joke, and if you’ve got different voices in the room, you’re getting different kinds of jokes,” she said.

Another of Schuster’s TV projects includes hit sitcom Benidorm.