Lesbian stand-up comedian, Rhona Cameron has a standard answer for anyone who brings up comparisons between her new BBC sitcom, and the show that brought Ellen DeGeneris out of the closet in living rooms across the US. In a myriad of interviews, all focusing on the sexual preferences of the central character in Rhona, as well as during live chat on the Internet immediately following last Tuesday's debut airing, she has stated that while comparisons are inevitable, her "sexuality does not drive the storyline, whereas Ellen's did".
It's clear that Cameron wants to steer her sitcom well clear of the lesbian label. Having made her name on the circuit openly identified as a gay comedian, she went on to become one half of the presenting team on BBC's vanguard magazine show, Gaytime TV. But now that she's firmly embedded in the media consciousness as lesbian, she doesn't want her self-penned sitcom to disappear down the same plug-hole as Ellen did. Ellen only became a sitcom in which the central character's sexuality drove the storyline after the US comedian decided to use her show to come out to the world. In the season that followed, her ratings plummeted and long before the last show aired this side of the water, Ellen had already been axed from the US schedules. Before DeGeneris came out, her show was almost identical to Cameron's.
True, Ellen's central character was asexual, whereas Rhona states her homosexuality in the very first scene of episode one, but to all intents and purposes the two sitcoms follow a very similar, safe pattern.
The sitcom, above all other genres, has been predominantly responsible for the integration of lesbian and gay characters into the television mainstream. Since the days when John Inman measured inside legs at Grace Brother's department store, homosexual representations have been a staple in television comedy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, hardly a British sitcom half hour went by without some reference to, or the appearance of an outrageously stereotyped gay man - some as walk-on characters, others as regulars in the Are You Being Served? or It Ain't Half Hot, Mum vein.
Lesbians didn't figure in the early days, but more recently they have begun to surface in US sitcoms as standby characters. Shows such as Roseanne started the ball rolling by introducing Sandra Bernhard in a bisexual role, followed by Roseanne's lesbian kiss with Mariel Hemingway, and then topped by the coming out of her character's mother. Roseanne's successful use of lesbian storylines and characters prompted other shows such as Friends and Mad About You to do the same, giving the impression that it was safe for DeGeneris to finally come out of her closet. But what DeGeneris didn't seem to realise was that lesbian and gay characters only worked on US TV as long as they fitted into the heterosexual framework. On Friends, Ross's lesbian ex-wife and her lover not only provided clean-cut, asexual, but beautiful images of women who love women, neatly filling liberal, politically correct agendas, but they also provided lots of laughs as the butt of the emasculated Ross joke for the lead straight characters, and consequently straight audiences.
Last year, the US networks took this concept one step further and created Will and Grace, a sitcom about a gay man and his straight girlfriend. Vaunted in the press as the first "gay" sitcom, at the end of the first episode Will and Grace shared a kiss which simmered with sexual longing. The truth is that Will is a heterosexual trapped in a gay man's character outline. Will and Grace is primarily aimed at a mass straight audience with a whole set of expectations that must be catered to. When it comes down to the ratings game, America's first "gay" sitcom is just another heterosexual show, with homosexual characters hamming up the sidelines.
The inclusion of gay and lesbian characters in sitcom has always been about getting straight laughs. Before Ellen DeGeneris came out, her character was more involved in the intricacies of her straight friends' relationships than her own non-existent love-life. When she finally identified herself as gay, the show became more about her sexuality than the conflicts of her co-stars, and therefore was no longer speaking to a heterosexual audience. Although Rhona talks about sleeping with other women in the first episode of her sitcom, it is the lives and loves of her two heterosexual friends that take precedence in the following half-hour. Strangely, in a show that has its central character's name as a title, she is relegated to the sidelines.
Reluctant as Cameron is to talk about her sitcom in terms of sexuality, she might do well to look at the following BBC's other gay sitcom, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! has garnered, and the runaway success of Channel 4's drama, Queer As Folk, in terms of how far the viewing public has come in accepting homosexual characters as part of specifically gay-identified television shows. Whereas Rhona is just another average sitcom about thirtysomething relationships, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! refused to anticipate a conservative audience reaction and ironically embraced the 1970s gay stereotyping of Are You Being Served? Writer Jonathan Harvey unapologetically dished up a Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe for a generation over the sexuality divide, and scored BBC's biggest hit since Absolutely Fabulous.
Meanwhile, Queer As Folk exuberantly presented gay men as almost everything the moral majority said they were - sex-obsessed, promiscuous, anti-family, unable to sustain committed relationships, ultimately selfish - and dared to show this lifestyle off as something to be envied. On one level, the series came across as shallow and ultimately misrepresentative, on another it was a revolutionary vision of the gay identity for mass consummation, gay and straight. Such was its clout, in the two years since it first hit our screens, that Queer As Folk has been screened in 13 countries. In the US, where even public networks would balk at such graphic material, director Joel Schumacher has bought the concept, planning to relocate the story to New Jersey for a 22-part series commissioned by cable network, Showtime.
Admittedly the Showtime version of Queer As Folk will probably be toned down until its subversive message and the sexuality of its central characters can be "normalised" enough for middle-American consumption, but the very fact that it is being adapted speaks volumes about the way gay representations on television are headed. Instead of looking to the US for the lead, as Cameron has done with Rhona, America is now looking to British broadcasting for gay guidance. The axing of Ellen only represents the fears of US networks as they anticipate the tastes of American audiences.
The creators of Queer As Folk and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! refused to go down that road, and established new audience boundaries the US networks can't ignore. Perhaps if Rhona had gone down the same road, it might have done a similar service for lesbian representations, and Cameron could consequently have had a hit on her hands.