Women on TV need to have good legs while men can look like dogs’ bottoms
Miss Lumley recounted : Newscasting is dissimilar, and with what I call settee girls not in a patronising way who host current affairs shows.
They have to be young, tasty, showing beautiful legs, a little bit of washed hair falling down the back and not the wonderful Moira Stewart doing the business.
If you do not look good, you are out.
But only ladies. Men can appear like dogs’ bottoms, she said to the Radio Times. The survey, conducted by the Radio Times also discovered that the average age of female stories presenters is 41. Against this, in the States the average age is 46. On American TV there are a few outstanding ladies over sixty presenting major stories and current affairs programs, including Katie Couric, 53, Christine Amanpour, 52 and Diane Sawyer, 64, who was promoted to anchor ABC’s flagship stories show. A few high visibility BBC presenters spoke out against the present ageism in TV as a part of the magazine’s reporting of the survey. Carol Klein, 64 a presenter on BBC’s Gardening World program asserted : I believe it’s clearly less complicated for blokes to grow older in TV, just as it is in any other strata of life. As a girl you have got to be twice as good at what you are good at, but even then it does not guarantee you can hold onto your job. Fiona Armstrong, 53, newsreader on the 24 hour BBC Stories channel, describe it as the princess and the frog phenomenon where young and glamorous lady were ganged up ‘a reasonably un-beautiful man’.