TOMORROW night, on sofas across Scotland, plenty of perfectly nice folk will settle down with a glass of wine to watch a woman being stoned to death.
They will hear the sickening thuds, see the blood oozing from her face, and observe the way her head, atop a body buried upright in the dirt, goes this way and that, like a balloon on a stick.
And when the episode is over, these same viewers will be counting the minutes till next Friday and another instalment of The Bridge, the Scandinavian crime drama that makes The Wire look like Juliet Bravo.
This, the fourth and final series, is being heralded as the darkest ever. Considering the first season began in 2011 with a woman sliced in two like a side of ham, viewers should be afraid, very afraid. Still, given the apparently insatiable appetite for such programmes there seems no danger of audiences turning away in disgust, much to the dismay of those who believe the violence has gone too far.
“Television culture has made rape and the ritualistic murder of women an industry unto itself and audiences are lapping it up,” says the actress Doon Mackichan.
As Germaine Greer pointed out in the Radio Times recently, the majority of those doing the lapping up are women. “Female victimisation sells,” wrote the author of The Female Eunuch. “What should disturb us is that it sells to women.”
Women do indeed outnumber men when it comes to buying crime fiction. They increasingly dominate crime writing, too. Post Harry Potter, JK Rowling found success again with war veteran turned private investigator Cormoran Strike. The Strike books have in turn become successful television dramas. On television in general, the trend is towards having women detectives in charge.
Women might seem ideally placed, then, to forge a revolution from within. Will they do so, or in the multi-channel era is crime destined to become ever more shocking just to get the viewers’ attention? If a woman being stoned is considered prime time entertainment today, what might your daughter be watching 20 years from now?
It was being offered the part as a detective that led Mackichan to make a Radio 4 documentary, Body Count Rising, on this subject. The actress best known of late for playing chatty Cathy in the Scots sitcom Two Doors Down was told the new show would be a “total reworking of the old form”. But on asking how many episodes involved violence against women she was told four out of six. Mackichan declined.
Had the answer been different, Mackichan could have joined the ranks of famous women detectives that run in a long line from Miss Marple to Sergeant "Pepper" Anderson in Police Woman, Cagney and Lacey, DI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, DI Maggie Forbes in The Gentle Touch; and on to the crime fighting heroines of today led by Sarah Lund in The Killing, Saga Noren of The Bridge, and Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley.
So crowded are the ranks that it takes more than just being a woman to stand out. In Happy Valley, for example, Sgt Cawood’s daughter was a victim of crime. Sometimes, the search for a unique selling point can go to ludicrous lengths, as in David Hare’s recent BBC drama Collateral, when it emerged that DI Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan) had once been a pole vaulter. While the plot never called on her to demonstrate the skill, at least the detail stuck in the mind.
Saga Noren’s USP is her Asperger’s, though no one ever refers to it as such. According to Sofia Helin’s portrayal of the character, this puts Saga at a certain distance from the horrors she witnesses. Perhaps this detachment is why she is able to stomach scenes of mutilation that leave her male colleagues retching.
In appearance, Saga is very much the new model European detective. No DI Jane Tennison business suits for her. No cashmere sweaters like Christine Cagney. Saga wears leather trousers, bovver boots and a coat with huge pockets to avoid the need for anything so girly as a handbag. When she pulls a double shift and needs to change she whips her T-shirt off in the middle of the office and fetches a spare from the desk drawer.
Not all women detectives keep things as real. BBC2 drama The Fall has been attacked for glamourising violence against women with its movie standard production values and its movie star central characters, Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and serial killer Paul Spector (played by Jamie Dornan of 50 Shades fame). Its creator, Allan Cubitt, has said his aim was to empower women, but critics have disagreed. Journalist and New Statesman TV critic Rachel Cooke has said the programme’s “veil of classiness” should not be allowed to obscure a drama that is “strikingly nasty”.
The backlash against sexualised violence has led to the launch of a new literary competition. The £2000 Staunch book prize, to be awarded on November 25 (the international day for the elimination of violence against women), will go to a thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”.
The competition’s founder is the writer Bridget Lawless. “We launched the Staunch Book Prize because we felt that there’s just such an overload of violence towards women in fiction. When women in the real world are fighting sexual abuse and violence, or being murdered because they’re women, the casual and endless depiction of women as victims sits uneasily alongside their fight.”
For some, writing about violence against women is a way to expose it. Val McDermid, the bestselling, award-winning crime novelist, says: “As long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed.”
Change is happening. The BBC Scotland series Shetland, for example, was widely praised for the way it handled the rape of Detective Sergeant Alison “Tosh” Macintosh. There was no rape scene, no flashback. Instead, everything the viewer needed to know about the horror was evident in the demeanour of Tosh and her shocked colleagues.
If crime dramas have tipped into exploitation perhaps the bad old ways will only disappear when more women occupy the real seats of power in television: as commissioning editors and directors. A few Val McDermid-types and Denis Minas (her fellow Scots crime writing doyenne), calling the shots on what gets made and how would soon sort the good guys from the bad. The increasing number of women TV critics have a part to play too.
Whatever the answer, for Mackichan, a Staunch prize judge, putting a stop to sexualised violence on television cannot happen quickly enough.
“Thirty years ago ethnic minorities used to be the butt of jokes,” she argued in Body Count Rising. “Then a new wave of comedy came and washed away the old prejudices and it was better, fresher, more intelligent. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve reached zero tolerance of these over-used images and can move on from stories of brutalised women as entertainment fodder.”
Over to you, Saga.
The Bridge, BBC2, 9pm. Body Count Rising is still available on BBC iPlayer radio. staunchbookprize.com
TOP WOMEN ‘TECS
Cagney and Lacey
Job: NYPD detectives
Active: 1982-88; 1994-96
Description: Cagney (Sharon Gless) was sex and the city single, while Lacey (Tyne Daly) had hubby Harvey.
USP: Like Ginger Rogers, as good as their male counterparts, and they did it all in heels.
Laure Berthaud
Job: Paris police captain
Active: 2005-today
Description: Laure (Caroline Proust) will go to extreme lengths to crack a case, working right up to the moment she went into labour.
USP: One of the boys.
Jane Tennison
Job: Detective Superintendent, Met
Active: 1991-2006
Description: A killer could run from Tennison (Helen Mirren) but once in the interview room he was a goner.
USP: Demanded to be called guv’nor rather than ma’am. Still the queen of women tecs.
VI Warshawski
Job: Chicago PI
Active: 1982-today
Description: Sara Paretsky’s creation is a feminist hero, principled, resourceful, and a dog lover.
USP: The books are bestsellers but move to the big screen (with Kathleen Turner as VI) was a flop.
Catherine Cawood
Job: Sergeant, Yorkshire
Active: 2014-today
Description: Bringing up her grandson after the loss of her daughter, Catherine does not have her troubles to seek.
USP: Sally Wainwright’s creation is beloved by Bafta judges and viewers alike.
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