Letter: Sexism aside, BBC drama is a class apart

IT SEEMS a shame that in an otherwise excellent article by Antonia Bird ('Screening out male fantasies', 12 July) which highlighted sexual stereotyping in the BBC's 'quality' drama output, she could only point us in the direction of her own work (The Men's Room, shown in 1990) as a more even-handed example of the genre.

The series itself typifies an equally discriminatory trend prevalent in much of the corporation's recent, expensively produced drama - that of apparently excluding from the majority of its subject matter that proportion of the population who do not live in Hampstead, do not speak in middle-class accents, are not called Adrian (or indeed Antonia), were not educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and do not spend every waking hour agonising over their spouses' tortuous infidelities in NW5.

Could such an obsession with these equally hackneyed stereotypes have something to do with the BBC drama department populating itself almost entirely with individuals of a similar ilk?

I think the licence-payer should be told.

John Biggins

Bishopston

South Wales