The Female Pilot Club Podcast, hosted by award-winning comedy TV and Radio writer and Female Pilot Club founder Kay Stonham (My Family, Harry Enfield and Chums, Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression, Shaun the Sheep,) with writer Abigail Burdess (Tracey Ullman’s Show, Paddington, That Mitchell & Webb Look) and featuring resident actor Emily Chase has launched on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Stonham and Burdess talk comedy script-writing with women writers–from absolute beginners to Emmy award winners. The podcast features clips with top comedy performers from live Female Pilot Club shows.
“The Female Pilot Club exists to amplify brilliant female comedy voices and to help great TV pilot scripts take off and fly!” says Kay Stonham, “And the Female Pilot Club podcast is a chance to grow the club and welcome even more people in–to get a sneaky look behind the scenes of writing TV comedy.”
Interviews with Female Pilot Clubbers like Succession writer Georgia Pritchett and The Appeal writer Janice Hallett (winner of the Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year) will explore how to write a really funny script, just how much crime does pay, and whether or not you are allowed four breasts in a writers room. As well as revealing their script-writing secrets, writers will dish the dirt on what it’s really like to be a female writer in the world of comedy.
The Club was founded to address inequality. Female writers continue to face challenges pursuing careers in the film and television industry. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) revealed in their 2018 Gender Inequality and Screenwriters report that only 17% of comedy films
made in the UK had at least one female writer, and that just 11% of TV sitcoms were predominantly female-written.
Together, Stonham and Burdess boast a collective 40 years in British comedy. Stonham has created series for Radio 4, and her TV credits include Harry Enfield and Chums and My Family (BBC1), and award-winning shows like Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression (BBC1), Shaun the Sheep, and Millie Inbetween (CBBC). Burdess has written on Tracey Ullman’s Show (BBC1), Paddington (Nickelodeon) and the BAFTA-winning That Mitchell & Webb Look (BBC2). Actor Emily Chase (founder of Casting Workshops) brings her vast knowledge of comedy actors to the club.
But The Female Pilot Club goes beyond the three founders. “The Club’s bigger than us,” Burdess says, “We wanted to make a meeting place for women creators in comedy. Somewhere women could talk openly about our successes and setbacks and let a little light into the often opaque processes of getting TV made.”
The Female Pilot Club aims to break down barriers for female writers, interviewing comedy’s best writing talent in order to inform, inspire, and of course, make you laugh. “What’s the collective noun for a group of women writers?” Burdess adds, “A gaggle of writers? A murder of writers? I know! A bunch of tits! That sounds more like it. It’s basically a bunch of tits talking about jokes.”
The Female Pilot Club Podcast is available onSpotify and Apple Podcasts
