Image via V Festival's Twitter
So, there are absolutely no women in the V Festival comedy line-up. Not one, in a list of just under 30 comedians! Surely this is craziness. In a year when the BBC have announced there will be at least one woman on every panel show, and after the nationwide outcry when comedian Jenny Collier was cancelled from a line-up due to "too many women on the bill": Is this really acceptable? Didn't they get the memo? "We are trying not to be sexist about women in comedy anymore". Tut.
Apparently (according to Twitter), V Festival's reply to all this is "no-one was available" but that's almost as bad as "oh it was your birthday, didn't you get my text". It shocks me that not one female comedian in the whole of the UK is available! We could go overseas if we've exhausted all the UK possibilities. It sounds like V Festival set up a Facebook group, invited all the female comedians they knew and didn't even send out a group message to remind everyone. Come on, no-one checks their event invites anymore!
Whilst the male comedian line-up is a great one and we wouldn't want any of those beauties to lose a gig, the line-up should be representative of the comedy circuit and, shock horror, there are lots of women on the circuit and even some on TV! Have no fear, I am not going to go on about the fact that women ARE FUNNY because it's just that: a fact, and doesn't need addressing anymore than that (cue sexist arguments in the comments below). The bottom line is that in 2014 this isn't acceptable (I mean it wouldn't be in 2013 either). So, let's see how many shares this article gets and then at least their marketing team will feel the pain of such a mammoth oversight (sorry guys).
Samantha Baines is an award-winning actress and comedian. She has problems with
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