When women’s stories are respected as much as men’s, it results in diverse, exciting work.
Gwyneth Paltrow. Angelina Jolie. Lupita Nyong’o. Romola Garai. Rose McGowan. These are just some of the women who have spoken out about their experiences of sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. It’s been an extraordinary year for women in culture: rumours of violence persisting around figures such as Harvey Weinstein are finally being addressed. Women are finally being heard.
The story of sexism in Hollywood extends beyond sexual violence. The writer and actress Rashida Jones recently left her role as a writer on Toy Story 4 due to Pixar’s discriminatory culture. Studio head John Lasseter has been accused of unwanted advances, but Jones resigned because of a creative culture that repeatedly dismissed the voices of women and people of colour.
When women’s stories are respected as much as men’s, it results in diverse, exciting work. Many of 2017’s cultural highlights have been the result of women fighting back against patriarchal systems in entertainment. The HBO series Big Little Lies dominated this year’s Emmys (as did The Handmaid’s Tale): it was made by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, which the actress set up specifically to address a lack of compelling female roles. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird has become Rotten Tomatoes ’s highest-rated movie of all time; Gerwig made the film “to offer a female counterpart to tales such as The 400 Blows and Boyhood ”. Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi explored an experience that now looks eerily similar to accusations made against Louis CK, a storyline she hoped would draw attention to systemic sexual harassment in comedy.
If 2017 has taught us to listen to anything, it’s the stories of women, both on and off camera.
“In the beginning there were words, and they came with a tune. That’s how the world was made. How the lands and the stars and the little gods and the animals and the cliffs that bind existence came to be…” Christmas radio dramas are tricky. Too fast, too slow, too ravenous, too humble? Do we want to listen or submit to a companionable burble? A five-day adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2005 novel Anansi Boys (BBC Radio 4,11.30pm, 25-29 December) zig-zags between feeling tones in a woozy, chameleonic way. It’s the acme of seasonal radio – whether you concentrate on it or not.
Anansi Boys is a tale about an ancient West African trickster “spider-God” and his sons (one of whom works in a theatrical agency off Drury Lane), and during any five minute stretch it can sound like: Rudyard Kipling (“All the animals owned the stories, especially the tiger”), Nigella (“Curried goat and sweet potato pudding – just a snack”), Jeffrey Bernard (“We don’t mourn a father’s passing with a house red”), Kay Mellor (“Are we going into Ronnie Scotts? I need a wee”), Fleetwood Mac (“Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night”) and Hamlet (especially when someone mournfully digs a grave in the rain).
It is also that very Gaimanesque (and very British – see Alan Moore and China Miéville) mix of science fiction, Gothic and fantasy, dickying with rhymes and resonances, and playing with formal structure. But, more than anything, it’s a fun story, about man’s native wit doing battle with the supernatural, which might just be a shadow-self. From its opening seconds it captures the feeling of something stretching out, as though in a hammock – a one-hour World Service adaptation in 2007 infuriated Gaiman, so this time there is markedly no rush. Each phrase and sound effect contains a teasingly gleeful amount of information.
High points: Lenny Henry (appearing in multiple roles) singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” on stage in a bar. He sounds like Dionysus. And the bar-crawl scenes with two young brothers, which culminate in the aghast sipping of soluble aspirin while enduring a vomitous hangover akin to Withnail claiming a pig had shat in his head: “What is this? ARSENIC?” Too true!
