In a land of ladies being ladylike and gents being gents, it would be very establishment and fitting for the winner of the BAFTA Fellowship award to graciously applaud British television and film. But Helen Mirren isn’t most people, and she’s instead had a bit of a pop at British television.
The actress isn’t upset with the violence in our dramas – she did star in Prime Suspect, after all – so much as the high female body count. ‘Most of those bodies are young women,’ she told The Observer. She does have a point, especially when you look at programmes like The Fall, where not only were a series of young women murdered, but the killer was seen as very sexy and alluring. And isn’t it funny that the fact that loads of women are killed is just something we expect to happen?
She’s not the first person to have pointed out this problem in crime dramas. Playwright David Hare){href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hare_(playwright)' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'} said only last week that he found it hard to believe just how many people are killed in every episode of The Bridge: ‘I can't personally stand the body count in contemporary drama. I just think it's ridiculous.’
This isn’t the first time the 68-year-old actress (yep, count ’em) has spoken out against violence in films, either. Despite appearing in old-bloke-pisstakey-action films REDand, um, RED 2, she has since insisted that she doesn’t play a role where she shoots anyone because, ‘I do get terribly upset when I see films where people are just randomly shot. I think they all have families to go to, children at home.’
N’aww. Do you think there’s too much violence in British crime dramas? Or is that the whole point of a crime drama?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.