A Book for Her
by
Bridget Christie
Published 1 Jul 2015
I don’t know for certain, but I’m pretty sure the Foster’s Award panel judges wouldn’t have chosen a show in which a person just read out some Amazon reviews other people had written, for sixty minutes. Not when there were 500-odd other comedy shows on the Fringe they could’ve chosen. So I had the title and the pen routine. I just needed to get another fifty-five minutes together before August. I remember doing a terrible work-in-progress show at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival. Apart from the pen stuff it was awful. Every year, around April/May, when I’m starting to write a new show for Edinburgh, I look like I’ve never been onstage before. It’s disconcerting but also thrilling. It reminds you of the precariousness of it all and it keeps you grounded. Luckily, not long after the work-in-progress gig, Sir Stirling Moss, the icon of British motor racing, said the following stupid thing on the radio about female drivers in F1: ‘The mental stress I think would be pretty difficult for a lady to deal with in a practical fashion.
…
She’s only seven, my own son’s age, but her childhood, as she knew it, is over now, gone forever, just because some loser 5,000 years ago lost the plot and blurted out his magic cure for controlling women. My reaction to this photo made me question everything, about myself and about the wider issue. Have we become desensitised to what we consider ‘Third World problems?’ On the May bank holiday weekend, I stopped at a motorway service station on my way to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival in Wales, where I was performing my most recent stand-up show, An Ungrateful Woman. Above the hand dryers in the ladies’ toilets were posters of African girls who were being sold as child brides. The girls were ten. They were being sold to men of fifty or sixty. It’s obviously abhorrent and disgusting, but I watched woman after woman passively consume this information as they dried their hands.