Phenomenon

The Archers has become a thing.

It's being reported on the news, Woman's Hour are devoting a daily slot to it and top political opinion writers are finding that the copy they file won't even be considered unless it mentions an everyday story of country folk.

Everyone is listening to the Archers and it's odd. 

It's like being that child in the playground who was quite happy playing shops with the things from trees on his own until the cool kids decided to make it their game too. The poor thing then has to decide whether to stop playing, join the cool kids, or carry on his own game. Those choices aren't all valid, though, because the cool kids won't let him play and once everyone else has discovered his game it never feels the same again. 

I'm pleased for the writers and actors of The Archers, of course I am. They deserve the praise. The Helen and Rob storyline has been beautifully played out and they have  brought domestic abuse into everyday discussion. 

I'm not one of those listeners that the press are writing about who are cross that their nice fantasy of 1950s country living has been destroyed because I'm not sure they exist or they haven't been listening properly. What about Grace Archer,who burnt to death in 1955 (I'm not old enough to have been listening since then but her ghost returned recently),Brian Aldridge, who was kicked in the head by a cow with BSE in 1989 and suffered from epilepsy for a while, John Archer, who fell off the Fergie (it's a tractor) and died on the day my son was born in 1998, (giving me an excuse for a huge cry during the Omnibus - nothing to do with milk coming in and cracked nipples, honestly!) ,  Kathy Perks, who was raped by Wilmot-Brown (I could be confusing soaps) in 2004, Nigel Pargeter who fell off the roof (don't ask - he was always an idiot), and many more? Helen, herself, hasn't had an entirely blameless life. Her brother was John (death by tractor), she lived with a grumpy gamekeeper who killed himself, became anorexic, had a son by AI (not unusual in the country - it's how all the cows do it), makes cheese and ran a village shop with her best friend until her brother (not the dead one) ditched the friend at the alter and the friend decided not to speak to her again. 

I want to point out to everyone that is getting upset about what they consider to be unrealistic sensational story lines that IT'S JUST A STORY.

Honestly, you would think that writers have a duty to only write the truth. Nobody writes the whole truth. EVER. It would be boring. And parts of the story are probably truth for some people. 

I like radio drama. It's only one step away from reading. I like the way it lets you picture things and I'm very upset about articles that show photos of the actress playing Helen. She doesn't look like that in my head. I like the way it stretches and grows over time. I am always so impressed with The Archers scriptwriters who seem to remember every earlier detail, even those that someone else wrote.

It's not for everyone, though. Just because something dramatic is happening that reflects a very important and under talked about part of every day life that doesn't mean that the Archers should suddenly become required listening.  Soon, this story will be over and people who don't like listening to Lynda Snell complain (using the best long words ever) that she can't find a man (for her play), or Ruth laughing about the stock cube in the shower joke (No, I don't understand it either), or Jim and Robert in a bird watching war (quite a difficult thing on the radio), or the gentle sound of mooing from the sheep (Ambridge is the only place that you can hear sheep moo)  will be very disappointed.

I'm quite happy not being one of the cool kids. I started listening to the Archers before I knew what it was and made a conscious choice to listen on a Sunday morning, while my mum made lunch, when I was in my early teens. Sunday was a ritual day.  I would go to the local shop on my bike and be allowed to spend the change from buying the paper on some sweets.  When I got back, instead of doing the usual teenage thing of disappearing, I sat at the table with the paper, writing articles that I would never send (always been a poor finisher) for the Young Observer Reporter's Club.  I was a proper member with a battered card that went everywhere with me as I thought it would give me the access of Nancy Drew if I ever saw a murder (which I didn't).  When I went to college I continued to listen on a Sunday morning.  I don't think this made me very popular: 10am on a Sunday morning was always a little early for most students to be woken with the sound of Barwick Green dum de dumming along the corridor.  The Archers on a Sunday morning has been my religion.  Once I was asked to sing with a good choir and had to turn them down because part of the agreement was to sing on Sunday morning in church.  "I can't," I said, "I have a prior committment."
"Oh, I hope you don't mind me being nosy but what do you do on a Sunday morning that you can't get out of?"
I did mind and made some excuse about the allotment and being so busy all week.  It just wouldn't have been cool for a woman in her early thirties to confess to listening to the Archers, although I'm not sure that being an allotment owner was any better.

Now that I am nearly at the age where it would be fine to be an Archer's listener (average age 52) it's not something that needs to be kept a secret.  The cool kids are doing it. Will they still let me play?  Will they have changed the game forever?

I think I'll be OK though.  I think the cool kids will stop playing before they destroy the game.  Most are only reluctantly listening anyway and are, quite frankly, rude.

Suzanne Moore in the Guardian

Why is it that the cool kids always think they know what us weedy little things are thinking? I do not think 'actual soaps' are beneath me.  I'm not sure what an actual soap is.  I  currently have a regular appointment at Holby and have watched Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Brookside, Neighbours, Home and Away, Doctors, the Flying Doctors and Hollyoaks.  I like stories.  I like people, of all classes (what is class dyslexia?).  The Archers has endured.  I didn't grow out of it when I stopped being a teenager and it was no longer relevant to me.  It didn't stop when not enough people were listening to it.

Long live the Archers, even when it stops being a phenomenon.

The Trouble with Women

I can see that it's time for me to have another feminist rant. I've been avoiding it for a while so forgive me if I don't manage to rant in a calm, reasoned, succinct way.

The press is all over it.
 Now.
Only now.

They are claiming a sexist row has erupted in the Labour Party because Jeremy Corbyn has failed to put any women in the top power four positions in the cabinet. He is quoted in the Independent as saying that those roles were, "defined in the 19th century to reflect an era before women or workers even had the vote". This makes him look like a complete dinosaur, which is probably unfair. The other side of the press are rejoicing the new Shadow Cabinet, which has more women than men by number; a situation that has never occurred before. This is being used as a, "Shut up women. What are you complaining about?" story.

People are a bit confused about this. They are sure they've seen lots of women in politics. They are almost certain that there were more women than men. There were women everywhere. This is due to a particularly interesting psychological phenomena that I like to call, 'women shine brighter,' but the psychology world calls The Gender Perception Gap. There have been studies where people are put in a room full of people and asked to say how many there are of each sex. The men always over estimate the numbers of women. In fact if a room is 17% women , men believe it to be a 50:50 balance and it only takes 33% of women in a room for men to feel outnumbered. I'm not sure how women rate the balance but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's not a similar result. 

And this is the point of my rant. Gender equality will never happen if we keep pitching men against women.  

Men and women are not separate species. We do not need to compete for the same space. We are designed to live together.

It is important to note inequalities and ask questions about why they happened. If we are unaware of them we can never change them. Unfortunately, anyone who does this gets drawn into a battle: men vs women. If a woman notices it she is a harridan. A good example of this was an article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/12/jeremy-corbyn-not-one-female-voice, where she observed that in the hall where the leadership vote was announced no one heard a single woman's voice. The comments on the article and the abuse she received on Twitter were predictable. She wasn't wrong to observe that all the excellent female candidates lost to duller, less competent men and that there seems to be a natural bias to vote for a man, which is something society needs to address if we are ever going to get equality.   However, if you read the comments you would think she had just recommended androcide. Men threatened all sorts of violence and women were cross that she had the temerity to question their right to vote for a man. 

I was concerned about the way the female candidates were being viewed from a very early stage in the Labour leadership campaign. Not only were they assessed on their partner but they were also lumped together and referred to as the girls. When Tessa Jowell was beaten in the election to run for London Mayor by Sadiq Khan (who The Daily Mail has described as lacklustre) I started to worry about whether the brilliant Stella Creasy or Angela Eagle could hold the deputy vote. I had no idea who their male opponents were but I didn't think that was going to matter.  Although, now he has been elected I do remember Tom Watson as the man who called Gove a pipsqueak in the commons, which was very funny.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't to blame for any of this. People voted for him because they were excited by a Labour Party that cared about equality more than an individual's right to accumulate wealth.  Many people who might have voted for a woman switched to him because of what he was saying (or rather what people said he was saying because Corbyn doesn't talk to the press). However, if Jeremy had never been on the ballot paper I suspect that Andy Burnham would be the leader of the party now. 

I have been ranting on this topic all weekend. As we drove back from, yet another, university open day the Long Suffering Husband was listening to a sports radio channel. The presenter introduced his female co-presenter as a 'bench-wench.' She laughed, so he said it again and again and again. I exploded, "See! This is why women can never be elected to positions of power. Even she's not taking herself seriously. This is disgusting."

My son, who had rejected this University because there were no ovens in the student accommodation and he couldn't go anywhere were he couldn't make cake, agreed with me but tried to calm me down by saying that it was only a football programme. 

The Long Suffering Husband, who was still chuckling at the rhyme of bench-wench, decided to live life on the edge. 

"You know what the problem with women is?" he asked rhetorically.

I bit my lip.

"Margaret Thatcher."

He looked smug. There was silence in the car, as my son mouthed WTF in slow motion. I could feel the pressure building. 
My son was thinking, "She's gonna blow. I've always wanted to see a volcano erupt but I didn't want to be stuck in a car with it when it happened."
The LSH was oblivious. "You know what I mean?" He persisted. "We've had a woman Prime Minister and..."

I was quite calm.

"You know the trouble with men?" I interrupted "Hitler! No wonder no one has ever let a man lead them ever again. Oh, wait, they have. How silly of me. It must be my stupid woman's brain that stopped me making that connection. Maybe I need to get back to the kitchen."

It's very quiet after a volcano erupts.

Please don't tell him but the LSH might have a point.  Women seem to need other women to be perfect and please all people.  Helen Mirren made an observation that she gets angry when she sees men with their arm draped over the shoulder of their partner because to her it implies ownership. How dare she?  She can't say that.  There might be some people who like having an arm draped across their shoulder.  There might be men who are genuinely unable to hold themselves up in a pub without the aid of their shorter woman, who have no intention of owning her.   Female voices from Twitter, the Daily Mail and Loose Women exploded.  Finally, they had something serious to discuss; a woman who had said something that not everyone would agree with. This surely has to be more important that poverty, pay inequality, child care, sex trafficking, female genital mutilation and certainly more important than having a government that represents all sections of society.

At the end of the day

Les Miserables is a wonderful film.  It's a wonderful musical.  It's my favourite and I love it.  I've seen it lots of times.  It's the only musical I have seen more than twice.  The film doesn't give you the whole body vibration that you get when you see it live.  You don't feel the vibration from the music of the (pretty large) pit orchestra.  The barricade scenes seem smaller and less dramatic in the film and some of the singing lacks the accurate pitching that you would expect in a West End Stage show.  But the film gives a much greater understanding.  You can see the emotion on the faces of the characters, no matter how far back in the theatre you sit.  The first time I saw Les Mis in the theatre I knew I loved it and I knew it had something to do with a prisoner number 24601, who was an amazing singer (It was Colm Wilkinson).  I was a bit confused about who the women were and I don't think I had any idea that so much time had passed.  Each time I saw it I understood a bit more.  I read Victor Hugo's book and looked up some of the history of the French Revolution.  This understanding took me 26 years! Only an idiot could watch the film and not understand what is happening.  Huge Act Man does a wonderful job of aging, and still looking gorgeous, even when nose deep in french shit.  There is no doubt that many years pass.  The little Eponine and Cosette look like their grown up actors.  Anne Hathaway leaves you in absolutely no doubt that Fontaine is having a terrible life and that death is somehow a blessing and a relief and even a cold heartless woman like me was moved to tears by her performance of I Dreamed a Dream.

The Long Suffering Husband loves Les Miserables too but the film enlightened him in a new way.  "What I don't understand is why those women in the factory turned her in like that," he said.  "Were they jealous of her because she was pretty? There wouldn't have been any story if they'd just helped her out."  He's right and the worrying thing is that this sort of thing isn't just the stuff of fiction and the past.  Women are turning on each other all the time and there really isn't any need. Maybe, when men were in short supply women had to compete, they may have had to prove they were the most beautiful, smartest, best mates and that they would produce the best children and if they couldn't do that then they had to nobble the competition.  Now, it's time to let all of that go.

Women of the media are currently proving that they will do anything to eliminate the competition.  Last week,  Suzanne Moore had an essay from a previously published book published in the Spectator.  It was a good essay all about female anger and contained the apparently offensive line, "We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual."  Personally, I don't know what a Brazilian transsexual looks like or whether I want a body  like a woman who used to be a man who lives in Brazil.  I know now that Brazil has terrible human rights record for these people but I'm still confused about what was wrong with the original line.  Today, her supposed friend, Julie Birchill has written a piece in the Guardian supporting Ms Moore and all I can say is with friends like that she doesn't need any enemies.  It rings of the women in Les Miserables crowding round and singing, "You must send the slut away or we'll all end in the gutter and it's us whose having to pay at the end of the day."  

Today, there was another female journalist who decided to write a spiteful piece about Clare Balding. Liz Jones is now the subject of women screaming for her public humiliation.  The article summed up how many women feel about other successful women.  The threat of Clare Balding being successful, despite not 'bothering to shop at Prada and having face-lifts like the rest of us' is too much to bear for this poor successful Daily Mail journalist and so she calls for the woman in 'terrible shoes' to be thrown out of the club in case we all have to suffer.  

Women may not be competing for men to have babies with any more but to get and keep top jobs it seems we are still using those old skills.  It's time we learnt from the men.  The way to get more women into these jobs is to help each other out, go and play golf, do each other favours and above all not to even notice what shoes someone is wearing.

At the end of the day it might mean that there is no story to tell but I would much rather no women ended in the gutter and no one had to pay.