Sofie Buckland reviews “Sex, The City and Me”, BBC2, June 17
I wasn’t expecting to much enjoy BBC2’s one-off drama about sex discrimination at a city bank, “Sex, the city, and me”. It was one of those programmes you only switch on after being faced with a Sunday night schedule barren of anything remotely entertaining.
It’s hard to motivate ourselves, as socialist feminists, to get passionate about the plight of top city bankers being paid a bit less than male executives, or, in the case of Sarah Parish’s leading role, being hounded out and bullied for having a baby. Of course bourgeois women, earning more than most of us will ever dream of in one year’s bonus, face sexism, because all women do. And of course, it’s unfair and we’re against it — but the preoccupation of the media and politicians with this sexism, ignoring the reality that it is low-paid, working-class women who bear the brunt of financial hardship, overwork and sexist attitudes, rings a little hollow.
Despite this, the drama was actually very enjoyable, if a little light on politics — the antics of the city boys don’t fail to rile despite my discomfort with the political focus. Parish’s character behaves just as badly as her city-boy chums until she becomes pregnant — there is a strong implication that women in the city are forced to adopt the drinking, swearing, lap dance-enjoying persona to get ahead, and the programme left viewers wondering how much this makes them complicit in their own oppression.
Similarly, the brief flash of feminist anger from Sarah Lancashire’s hardnosed city lawyer, urging Parish not to let the boys of her bank win, is confounded by her final act, persuading Parish to take the offered settlement and secrecy clause, rather than holding out for a tribunal decision and a public skewering of the sexist bank.
Well-filmed and entertaining, the BBC avoided the stereotypes of crusading feminist lawyer, evil sexist boss and heroic female lead, instead portraying interesting, multi-sided characters, although this left the ending, with the bank saving face, more than a little unsatisfying. The message seemed to be “the city is sexist, but it’s really hard to do anything about it, and at least she got her money”.
The only glimmer of real politics in this middle-class world was the scene where Parish asks a working-class, black female cleaner to steal some documents from her former workplace.
After her initial discomfort, Parish offers her money, to which she responds “your money can’t buy everything — the real world doesn’t work like that”. Viewers with the smallest sliver of class politics will have shuddered uneasily at the affluent banker character asking the cleaner to do something which could very well lose her her job — a much scarier prospect when you don’t have a highly-paid lawyer to defend you.
All in all, it was reasonably complex and interesting, but not to be taken too seriously. It’s about time the BBC showed a drama of similar calibre about some real, ordinary women fighting sexism.