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Bad Girls are back
Britain’s biggest lesbian export hits US shores – well, televisions – this year. By LeeAnn Kreigh.
British actor Mandana Jones is an international lesbian icon who portrayed one of the most beloved lesbian characters in television history. So why is it so few people in America – gay or straight – know about her, the character she played, or Britain’s hit show Bad Girls, which lasted eight seasons and featured one of televisions most captivating lesbian storylines for three of those?
The
answer isn’t terribly exciting. It involved difficulties
selling the program in the US and distribution delays
for US versions of the DVD’s.
What is exciting is that Bad Girls has finally arrived
here. The first season is available on DVD and LOGO began
airing the program earlier this year. In addition, the
FX network is developing an American version of the show,
with plans to transfer most of the storylines and all
the main characters, including lesbian inmate Nikki Wade
(played by Jones) and the prison official she falls in
love with, Helen Stewart.
Yes, more than 40 countries around the world saw it first, but it seems America has, at last, discovered Bad Girls.
Jones says what American viewers have been missing is, quite simply, television history. “We broke down barriers, portraying things the public didn’t normally have in their front room at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday evening. Bad Girls was really fresh and original. And it was absolutely groundbreaking.”
The network television portrayal of two women falling slowly and madly in love over three seasons was indeed groundbreaking in Britain in 1999 – and, sadly, it remains almost unfathomable for network television stations in the US almost a decade later.
Bad Girls takes place in Larkhall, a fictional women’s prison filled with an ever-changing assortment of “screws” (prison officers) and inmates. Although the drama sometimes veers into campy humour, most of the storylines hinge on serious explorations of the treatment and struggles of women in prison.
Maureen Chadwick, the lead writer and one of the program’s three lesbian creators, says, “It’s a show about survival…. It’s a mixture of women from all different classes and races and ages, all thrown together in this grim institution where they’re trying to repair their wrecked lives.”
Jones describes Nikki as “intelligent, sensitive and fearless,” a complex character who “made people take their notion of what a lesbian is out of a very, very, small box they never dared to look at.”
Nikki eventually falls for Helen, an apparently straight prison official played by Simone Lahbib. Although they share a commitment to prisoner rights and reform, Nikki’s quick temper and sharp tongue contrast sharply with Helen’s suppressed emotions and rule-abiding ways. The increased tension and chemistry builds between them over three years, creating one of the most remarkable slow burns in lesbian TV history.
“It was the first show that went out in prime time that didn’t just tip a hat at the notion of two women being in love.” Jones says. “It really ran a proper storyline that had a slow simmer and took a long time before it came to a boil.”
Much of the credit goes to Chadwick and the other two lesbian creators, who Chadwick says, “set out to make the kind of television we wanted to watch ourselves, where women were active agents themselves rather than objects of men’s stories.”
One of the creators’ challenges was making a mainstream audience believe in – and even pull for - Nikki and Helen’s relationship. To do so, they engaged in what Chadwick calls “subversion by seduction.”
The idea, she says, was to lead viewers “on a journey where they would become so interested and engaged with the story, the characters and the telling that they would hurdle over their prejudices and hardly notice their concerns. They would go on an emotional journey and arrive somewhere at the other end of it where they felt differently about the issue.”
The technique worked as Bad Girls quickly became a nationwide phenomenon. Along with winning its timeslot, the show won two National Television Awards and was named the country’s best-loved drama four years in a row.
During her years on the show, Jones says the British media focused on the inevitable straight-playing-gay questions, such as what was it like to kiss her beautiful co-star. The sensationalism disappointed Jones, whose goal was to create a character with such depth and complexity that her sexuality would be secondary, if not entirely forgotten.
“When I approached it I thought, I don’t want to play this gay love story. I want to take the gay word and the gay label out,” she says. “I thought, tell it for what it is, which is just a love story that happens to be taking place in very bizarre circumstances that intensifies things. For it to be powerful, I thought you had to first get people past their in-built phobias that it happens to be between two women.”
Jones is proud of the impact the character has had on viewers around the world. “With most roles, you do your bit and it doesn’t really transfer much beyond the box in the corner of the living room. Nikki Wade is a character that touched people’s lives, and I’m honoured because there aren’t a lot of roles that can do that.”
In Britain, Chadwick says Bad Girls was sometimes marketed in a simplistic and demeaning way, as a titillating “babe behind bars” melodrama. “Some people see the camp side of it rather than the underlying issues,” she says, “but it doesn’t really matter, I suppose, because our fans get it.”
And now, at last, viewers in the US have a chance to “get it” as well.
With thanks to a Helen and Nikki forum member who passed the scans of this magazine on.