Caitlin Moran says the BBC turned down Raised By Wolves (C4) because they already had a "female" sitcom lined up. Maybe. Or maybe they said no it because it wasn't very good. After watching it twice I think the Beeb's decision had little to do with the show's vagina ratio.
Raised by Wolves is based on Moran's childhood in Wolverhampton, where she lived in a council house with seven siblings, and was home-schooled by her eccentric family. The sitcom is set in the present day but set to a near-constant 1980s pop soundtrack.
It's traditional in a TV review to briefly summarise the plot here, but there wasn't one. Germaine has a crush. The family go foraging. Yoko gets her period. There's a randy grandfather.
Lack of plot doesn't matter as long as there are absorbing characters but, apart from the mother, Della, there were none. Each daughter in the family was a clumsy stereotype: Germaine was the loud one; Aretha the clever one, Yoko the shy one and the mother, Della, was the feisty one. Men are also represented by stereotypes, being either sex-crazed or bullies.
Each character, apart from Della, was so thin you could read small-print through them, and they were armed with nothing other than occasional lines of witty dialogue which was often screamed at us. Lacing together the various manic scenes were some funny lines but these were diminished by being trumpeted at us. The writers seemed so proud of their occasional gems that they rose up to wallop us with their self-consciously clever dialogue, and its need to brag pushed it through the grinder of words, coming out as clunky and inauthentic.
Della was a welcome relief. She was invigorating, being tough and gutsy and with a joyously cynical edge. Teaching her girls to forage, she didn't deliver a sermon on the beauty of nature, but commanded them to 'frig off and put some of it in a plastic bag!" and when Germaine is being bullied she simply ordered her to stand upright: "You've got the posture of a victim. Sort it out!"
She takes her children to forage as she's convinced the apocalypse is nigh, but this reeked of a cumbersome feminist message: women, surviving on their own, get it? (elbow, elbow, nudge!)
But the spark of Della was constantly being snuffed out by the great clunking hand of Moran and her taboo-busting agenda. She said she likes to break taboos by dragging them into the light but she squandered this noble mission by going on about periods. How bloody novel! Like a sniggering schoolboy, Moran and co dropped endless jokes about menstruation into the script, talking about "jam rags" and "lady mouseholes", turning your knickers inside out and having to stuff "a small mattress in your pants."
They're talking about periods! Isn't this delightfully shocking? And then the writers dragged us even further, the brave feminist warriors that they are, by actually describing the blood, saying it's "all thick and viscous, like jam!" I say let their names be engraved in history beside Emmeline Pankhurst.
Since when was menstruation taboo? Perhaps when I was 11 and my mum left a pastel-coloured leaflet on my bed then shut me in the room, alone, to read it. But are we not adults now? Yet the writers expect us to snigger at their blood-spotted banter. Exactly who is being patronised here? Is it men whom they think will be shocked, or is it the women who'll apparently be nodding and cheering, saying 'well thank God SOMEONE had the guts to talk about periods!'
There was nothing brave and taboo-busting in this. Indeed, it would've been far more of a bold statement if a character had said 'a period is simply the lining of the womb being shed.' But no, it must be tarted up in blood and shock, to make girls smirk and boys grimace.
Della takes Yoko, her taboo-bleeding daughter, to the chemist to buy some sanitary towels, and to permit more juvenile jokes about periods. Well, she's not much of a survivialist after all, is she? She should have been teaching her daughters how to construct a sanitary towel in a post-apocalyptic landscape, where they may be forced to patch one together from leaves and perhaps a scrap of wool from an irradiated sheep, plucked from a barbed wire fence.
But to be fair to the writers, they did take care to bravely bust other taboos. If menstruation wasn't sufficient, we were also treated to equine erections and geriatric sex.
The whole sitcom was loud and tiresome, sodden with juvenile emotions, weighed down with clunking feminist tropes, and all echoing to the screech of: LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!
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