ITV has announced that they will no longer be commissioning comedy shows written by teams made up entirely of men.
The channel’s head of comedy Saskia Schuster is launching a new initiative called Comedy 50:50, which aims to make comedy writers’ rooms more diverse.
“Too often the writing room is not sensitively run. It can be aggressive and slightly bullying,” she told Channel 4′s Diverse Festival, as reported by the BBC.
After noticing last year that she was receiving five times as many comedy scripts from men as from women, Saskia said she realised “an awful lot of [ITV’s] comedy entertainment shows are made up of all-male writing teams”.
This led to the formation of Comedy 50:50, as well as a change to ITV’s regulations that will insist all commissioned or recommissioned shows must “aim towards 50:50 gender representation”.
Among the shows affected is Plebs, the ITV2 sitcom written by male team Sam Leifer and Tom Basden, who will now be shadowed by female writers on any future series.
Brona C Titley has also been introduced to the writers’ team on the ITV2 panel show Celebability, which was all-male for its first two series.
Speaking at the same panel, Brona said: “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, and if you’ve got different voices in the room, you’re getting different kinds of jokes.
“You want to represent the wide audience that’s watching. You want diversity in voice, or else it won’t be as funny because it won’t be appealing to as many people.”
While the main ITV channel has made a shift towards drama in recent years, there are still a number of original comedy shows airing on its sister channel ITV2, including panel show Celebrity Juice and sitcom Superstore.