Could Baby Reindeer spell the end of comedy’s ‘open secret’ culture?
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While millions of viewers have been gripped by Richard Gadd’s ordeal at the hands of Martha, his alleged stalker, in Baby Reindeer, less attention has been paid to the sexual violence he endures at the hands of another man.
The hit Netflix drama, based on Gadd’s own experiences in which he stars as a fictionalised version of himself called Donny Dunn, features scenes in which he is repeatedly sexually assaulted and, eventually, raped by a comedy writer.
Richard Osman, the TV presenter and erstwhile comedy producer, set hares running this week when he said that the true identity of Gadd’s fictional abuser, Darrien O’Connor, had for years been widely known in comic circles. Gadd had been “very open to people in the industry about who that person was”, he said on his podcast, The Rest is Entertainment. “So people in the industry know who that person was.”
“Obviously that person has never been prosecuted; he has never gone to trial,” Osman added. “But everyone knows who he is talking about.”
Several innocent men have been falsely accused of being the real-life O’Connor, but the episode serves to highlight something bigger: although it has been almost seven years since the #MeToo movement kicked off, comedy is one of the few remaining showbiz industries that has not had a reckoning. Could this now be the time?
There have been sporadic stories about alleged bad behaviour. Russell Brand was accused of rape and sexual assault by four women in a Sunday Times and the Times investigation last September. He denies all of the allegations.
The exposé was heralded in some quarters as potentially being the first crack in the dam that would cause the floodgates to open but, so far, that has not come to pass.
Which is not to say that these things are not discussed privately. When journalists investigating the Brand story told potential sources that they were working on a #MeToo story about a leading comedy figure, they were told of allegations about another famous comic altogether. It underlines how rife stories of bad behaviour are in the industry.
Katherine Ryan, the Canadian stand-up, told Louis Theroux that the misconduct allegations against a certain male entertainer were an “open secret” in the comedy world. “It’s very dangerous for us to have this conversation,” she said on a 2022 podcast. “I’m happy to have it, but it’s a litigious minefield because lots of people have tried to nail this person down for their alleged crimes and this person has very good lawyers, so am I going to put my mortgage on the line by saying who this person is or entering into any conversations like that? We’ve seen what happens to people who talk about alleged predators.”
Ryan had admitted that she had called a fellow performer “a predator to his face and in front of everyone” while filming a TV programme. It later emerged that she was referring to Brand, during the Comedy Central series Roast Battle, which was filmed in 2017.
When she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs last year, after the Brand investigation was published, Ryan said that she had got “a lot of pushback” for not naming him at the time.
Ryan told Lauren Laverne: “[I got] a lot of: ‘Why won’t you say who it is?’ It’s because everyone knows who it is, what they want is the women’s names, and that’s what I won’t give and that’s why I’m reluctant. No one’s asking for his name. It’s funny how people go straight to accusing: ‘You’re the problem, you won’t give his name.’
“We’re not the problem. I had a choice – I could go to work with someone who I believe to be a perpetrator of sexual assault or I could turn down the job. Those were my options.”
There are structural factors behind why comedy has these issues. There is no structure or regulation to speak of in the industry, while most of the work is done at night by freelancers — the vast majority of whom are men — who enjoy a drink.
Others who have been accused of misconduct include the Scottish comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli, who was dropped by the BBC after 16 women alleged physical and sexual violence; he was arrested in August last year on suspicion of non-recent sex offences and appeared in a Glasgow court in March. The next court date for the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant has yet to be set. He has yet to enter a plea.
There are efforts, formal and informal, to make things better. There is a WhatsApp group for hundreds of female comedians that acts “as a safe space”, the stand-up and podcaster Stevie Martin wrote in the Telegraph in 2020. Yet Martin said she was forced to leave a month later because the volume of stories about dodgy men made her start to “feel panicky whenever I heard my phone ping”.
At around the same time, two new organisations popped up to try and start regulating the comic Wild West. Kiri Pritchard-McLean, one of the founders of Get Off! Live Comedy, told the BBC that she was trying to set up a standardised sexual harassment policy for clubs and their performers.
“[The comedy circuit is] an unregulated group of people wafting around doing their own thing, which is one of the reasons why it’s brilliant,” she said. “But the problem there is that we’ve all just trusted people to do the right thing and for decades people haven’t been doing that.”
Yet the recommendations of Get Off! and another similar body, the Live Comedy Association, have not been adopted as industry standards in terms of handling complaints and HR matters.
There is no doubting the sincerity of those who want to change comedy for the better. But anybody who hopes that the runaway success of Baby Reindeer would help the industry banish its tacit tolerance of bad behaviour are likely to be disappointed.
