Rebecca Front fed up with ‘can women be funny?’ question

ACTRESS Rebecca Front has said she gets fed up with the suggestion that women are not capable of doing comedy.

The 52-year-old has appeared in comedies including news spoofs On The Hour and The Day Today and The Catherine Tate Show, and won the Bafta TV Award for best female comedy performance for The Thick Of It in 2010.

But she told Radio Times the question of whether females can be funny “comes up again and again”.

She said: “Although ironically when I started doing drama one critic said, ‘It’s very distracting because I’ve seen her in comedy and I can’t take her seriously’.

“You can’t win with some people.”

Morwenna Banks, who co-writes and co-stars in radio show Shush!, agreed: “It’s so frustrating.”

The pair launched the programme about two eccentric librarians in 2015.

Front said: ” I remember when I was at Oxford, John Sparkes, who was in [Channel 4 sketch show] Absolutely, saying, ‘You’ve got to meet Morwenna Banks – I’ve been watching her at Cambridge, you’re going to love her, she’s hilarious’.

“So not only are women funny, but this programme has clearly been our destiny since day one.”