In a development that absolutely must not catch on, something interesting has happened on a TV chatshow. What a precedent: I’m desperately hoping the entertainment industry rallies around to prevent it ever happening again. We can probably count on it. The dance of all chatshows these days is almost entirely mechanised. You go on. You do your rehearsed anecdotes. The news that the late Michael Parkinson is being relaunched as an AI barely raises an eyebrow because it’s all so synthetic anyway.
Therefore the moments when it isn’t take on outsize significance. As you may have guessed, we are talking about last Friday’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, on which the Blitz star Saoirse Ronan appeared as a guest alongside Gladiator II actors Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal and Day of the Jackal leading man Eddie Redmayne. We join the sofa as Redmayne is doing an anecdote about how his Jackal preparation involved being trained in self-defence, in order to do what Team America would call “his acting”. (Not how Eddie put it, obviously. And yet, the reality.) Redmayne’s revelation that he was shown how to use a phone as a weapon if attacked proves quite the hoot, with Mescal riffing on the absurdity – “Who’s actually going to do that, though?” – Norton chiming in, and Denzel laughing along. Ronan is trying to say something but she gets honked over, before managing to cut through with a line for the ages: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time”.
Oooooof. The look on the other actors’ faces after Saoirse has detonated this chat-icide bomb is hilariously mesmerising, as is the sudden silence, which is split-second but also seems to last 27 years. Ronan obligingly diffuses it by provoking audience applause with a rallying, “amirite ladies?”. And then everyone moves on. Well, everyone except the internet, which has been picking over the entrails ever since.
The clip itself will be familiar to any woman who has ever wondered if they can be arsed interrupting some self-styled comedy gold happening around them to say something that matters to them. As mentioned, Saoirse herself has at least one failed attempt at interjection before waiting, as one must, and trying again – at which point the guys are having such a rip-roaring time doing their bit that they initially don’t appear to realise she has opted not to respond with the timeworn improv gambit “yes and … ”.
Possibly the best part of the entire thing is the moment after, surely a shoo-in for the Best Silence Oscar. Personally I’d have liked it to have been broken by Denzel thundering “WHERE IS YOUR IMPROV NOW?”, but for some reason such lines desert our leading men. Caught unawares, Redmayne offers a sort of wan yas-kween nod. But the applause for Ronan is seized on as a natural break, and the conversation moves on without anyone at all discussing by far and away the most fascinating thing said on the sofa thus far.
But look, I know what you might be thinking: is all this unfair? I mean, they’re only on a flipping chatshow, aren’t they? The trouble is that there are so few of these sort of moments in the obsessively controlled world of contemporary showbiz that we are left with the somewhat absurd situation of twats like me remorselessly analysing this tiny clip like we’re huddled in the White House situation room watching live footage of some Seal team raid on a stronghold, and holding our breath for the kill order. And yet, this one proves no less satisfying each time you see it. Ladies and gentlemen – she got ’em.
No one is suggesting that the male actors and presenter involved deserve some huge backlash for this. What people are saying is that the moment was telling. When clips like this go viral, it’s for a reason. For this many civilians to share them – this many female civilians, let’s face it – means they instantly saw something they recognised. Most, if not absolutely all, women have been in a version of that conversation in their time, and almost all of us have not found the precise words to say in the moment it was happening, instead either coming up with them while stewing on the way home, or two weeks later in the middle of the night (still stewing).
For the right words to be found in the moment, on primetime television, is a fantasy arguably more powerful than any of the ones the chaps are currently promoting in their movies and prestige TV projects. No offence to the Roman gladiator, former-Roman-gladiator-turned-arms-dealer, and public school assassin with whom Saoirse was sharing the sofa. But Mescal and Washington just got totally colosseumed, while Redmayne took an absolute burn bullet to the forehead.
Even now, their publicists will be frantically workshopping reflective answers for pending interviews in which they may be asked about Ronan’s point. What makes it somehow more darkly amusing is that these particular three male actors are always projected as being among the good guys of showbiz. And I’m sure they are. But what they can’t do, even with all their combined decades of Acting, is think their way into the part of literally any woman, in any place, walking home after dark or on an almost deserted route on just another day of a lifetime of knowing she could be prey. You get quite good at thinking about how boring little things like phones or keys could defend you in those moments, as any woman will wearily concede. We all dream of a future without this forever hum of fear, where we too could join in the absurdist joke.
And yes, of course it was all just a joke. But consider the real-life context in which this tiny little sofa vignette occurred. We are a week off a US presidential election in which the fact that the bookies’ favourite has been accused of multiple sexual assaults over multiple decades has not even been an election issue. Even with my expectations adjusted to meet the times, it will never not blow my mind that we are going to get to the end of this presidential campaign and the fact that at least 26 – TWENTY SIX – women have accused one candidate of sexual assault just has not even remotely dominated the news cycle. There has not been one week or even one day in which that message has caught fire and everyone has talked of absolutely nothing else. It is just – what? – accepted? Expected? Priced in? Boring? Either way, perhaps it helps explain why many women are not in their best “take a joke” mood right now.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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