The conviction of Russell Brand for rape and sexual assault, together with the misconduct allegations facing the comedian and children’s author David Walliams, has shifted scrutiny from individual men to the institutions that hosted, broadcast and profited from them. Walliams has denied allegations reported by the Guardian and ITV News, but the Met police are now investigating him over separate sexual misconduct claims. Across the television industry, the question being pressed is whether the structures around these men, from commissioning executives to production companies, failed in any duty of care they owed to the women who worked alongside them.
That question reaches into the archive. In a 2008 episode of BBC Two’s comedy panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the choreographer Arlene Phillips, then the only woman on the programme, was told by the host Simon Amstell that she looked like she ran “a good whore house”. Phillips responded with a story, apparently delivered with faux sincerity, about being asked to find dancers with “very special abilities” who might want to party after filming. The presenter Dermot O’Leary mimed picking up a phone and asked: “When you’re dancing tonight, do you mind having sex afterwards?” Everyone laughed. As clips like this have resurfaced, they are being re-read not as isolated jokes but as evidence of what broadcasters and their wider culture permitted, and of who bore responsibility for permitting it.
Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, described the popular culture of the 2000s as “profoundly, openly, cheerfully horrible to women”. She argued that the shift from third-wave feminism to postfeminism in the 1990s created an environment in which women were expected to own their own objectification, to enjoy it, profit from it and never complain. She cited Geri Halliwell and Kylie Minogue kissing on TFI Friday as a “surprise” for the host Chris Evans, and Victoria Beckham being asked to step on a scale weeks after giving birth.
The record of that era is extensive, and much of it passed through editorial desks without objection. Tabloids published upskirt pictures. In 2004, the celebrity magazine Heat devoted an entire special to celebrity cellulite, circling patches of skin on the legs of women including Beyoncé and Martine McCutcheon. When the singer Charlotte Church was 15, a website ran a countdown to her 16th birthday, when she would reach the age of consent, and the Sun reported it. The Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles, then 28, said on air that he wanted to take Church’s virginity. Similar countdowns targeted Emma Watson. Church has since reflected that she was made into a caricature, sexualised, patronised and ridiculed, and that the narrative of who she was in the world was taken from her. Britney Spears, in her memoir The Woman in Me, recalled reporters asking whether her breasts were real and whether her hymen was intact. Ben Widdicombe, a former New York gossip columnist, wrote in his memoir Gatecrasher that the aftermath of 9/11 fed an insatiable hunger for light, “sexy” stories, and that he genuinely feared the press would hound Spears to her death. He added that audiences shared responsibility: the public was baying for her humiliation, and the tabloids obliged.
Meanwhile, the comedy industry has come under particular examination. During live performances of Little Britain, Walliams played Des Kaye, a former children’s entertainer and sex offender who pulled down audience members’ trousers and attempted to kiss them. In 2008 the journalist Mary O’Hara described how the comic Johnny Vegas brought a young woman on stage at a London gig, groped her and repeatedly pulled up her skirt; her solicitors later said the woman had gone along with the joke willingly, and his representatives have been contacted for comment. On Channel 4’s The Big Fat Quiz of the Year in 2007, the only woman on the panel, a 21-year-old Lily Allen, was the subject of remarks from Jonathan Ross and Noel Fielding, with Brand quipping about the risk of ruining a man’s reputation over an uncommitted rape. Allen said in 2023 that rewatching the footage made her uncomfortable, though it had not at the time, because it was the culture.
What has changed since? Jessica Toomey, director of the Live Comedy Association and the Women in Comedy festival, pointed to the absence of formal reporting procedures and the small number of women in positions of power, noting that many victims would not have felt empowered, informed or supported enough to report. Josie Long, who described her own backstage encounters with Brand, said this week that even at the smallest end of the spectrum the culture was designed to tokenise and sexualise women.
Whether accountability structures have genuinely improved remains contested. Lucy Beaumont, who revealed herself as a whistleblower in the Walliams investigation, said this week that there is no HR department in TV and no proper duty of care, and that she feared speaking publicly about powerful figures could end her career. Tara Joshi, co-host of the podcast Twenty Twenty, cautioned against treating the 2000s as a closed chapter, noting that Brand was still working in major film and television productions into the 2020s, and that his conviction happened only because an indisputable number of people came forward. As Jack Searle put it, it remains difficult to get anyone to call out abusive behaviour when their salary depends on not doing so. Whether broadcasters and regulators can build structures that change that calculation is the question the industry has yet to answer.