Head of ITV comedy drops all-male writing teams

ITV’s head of comedy has said she will no longer commission any show with an all-male writing team, or one that has just a “token woman”.

Saskia Schuster took action after an audit of her shows revealed “an awful lot” of all-male teams and a “significant lack” of women in scripted commissions. She said for every five scripts sent to her by a man, she would receive just one by a woman.

“Too often the writing room is not sensitively run. It can be aggressive and slightly bullying,” Schuster told Diverse Festival on Monday, according to the BBC, where she featured in a panel discussion titled “why employing more women writers in comedy matters”.

After consulting writers, producers, agents and performers, Schuster, whose commissions include Benidorm and CelebAbility, said she changed her terms of commission and refused any offering written exclusively by men.

“I won’t commission anything with an all-male writing team.”

Writer Brona C Titley, who works on Celebability, told the festival: “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.”

Schuster has pushed for equality in comedy writing for years in her role in ITV. She founded the initiative Comedy 50:50 in February 2018 after becoming inspired by an event about gender equality in the industry at Bafta and realising that “as the comedy commissioner at ITV, it’s up to me to drive the narrative”.

She discovered female writers were often at a disadvantage because men usually already had more writing credits, because it was hard to find producers who “get” their voices and develop their scripts and the fact that “female writers often don’t thrive as the lone female voice in the writing room”.