I have the same gut-based anxiety about Phoebe Waller-Bridge's career trajectory as I did when I returned home to find my son atop the scaffolding on our building eating a Mars bar. Then, as now, I was quickly surrounded by a crowd of neighbours shouting: "Be careful up there","It's dangerous, you know", "All it takes is one wrong step". Because almost everything Waller-Bridge does or says, is watched by an audience multiplying quicker than Scott Flansburg. And we know where that ends for successful women at the top of their game. (See: Lena Dunham and Twitter screaming, "Kill yourself!")
Such is the white heat of Waller-Bridge that Private Eye has a running gag over the random use of her photo: "Is this article justified in using a photo of Fleabag?" it jokes. "We hope you don't mind us using a photo of the hit 33-year-old whose award-winning series has revolutionised comedy for ever." She is reported to have signed a deal with Amazon worth £15m a year, and be collaborating on a new film with her sister, Isobel. And she has just been named "most powerful person in television" by the Radio Times.
In a "rare public appearance" (really she is television's snow leopard) the actress/writer/comedian/creator of Killing Eve appeared in an on-stage chat at the Royal Festival Hall to mark the publication of Fleabag: The Scriptures. Revelations included: the "hot priest" in Fleabag was based on a real monk called Father William; she and Andrew Scott ("hot priest" actor) will work again. Plus much (justified) pant-wetting over her involvement in the new James Bond, No Time to Die.
But it was this month's American Vogue cover that gave me a real sense of foreboding. No, I gasped. Not the kiss-of-death Vogue cover. Waller-Bridge has been our unfailing constant, our female-rage touchstone, the thing we could rely on amid the economic gloom and the complete collapse of our political system. Since Fleabag arrived in 2016 with her wartime hairdo and brittle British humour — flinty, risqué, bloody funny — she has been an obvious heroine for today.
Perhaps there is foreshadowing from Olivia Colman. Last year she was in that Radio Times top spot. "This is hilarious. Got an Oscar!" she said, accepting best actress for The Favourite and thawing even the hardest Hollywood heart. She posed for Vogue. She announced that she would be playing the actual Queen in The Crown (series 3). The writing was on the wall.
OK, not on the wall, but in the column of right-wing commentator Charles Moore. He hauteured that although "Ms Colman … is one of the best actresses of the age … She has a distinct left-wing face." What? And yet when the entire series dropped on Netflix, it was clear she had been miscast. As one colleague put it: "Who thought it was a good idea to cast our most skittish, emotionally alive actress as the dead iron claw that is our Queen?"
Olivia Colman portrays Queen Elizabeth II in a scene from the third season of "The Crown." Photo / AP
It is the unholy alliance of our binge society and craven industry honchos: we scream for more of this glittering talent; they wring them dry. Tina Fey (Mean Girls, 30 Rock, Vogue cover) was killed for The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (perceived racism against Asians); gifted stand-up Amy Schumer (Trainwreck, Vogue cover) stumbled — perhaps through an avenue of flapping pay checks — into the excruciating I Feel Pretty. It was not pretty. And then, Lena. After Tiny Furniture, Dunham was given a "blind script" deal by HBO, hailed a genius for Girls, made the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world, graced — you've guessed it — Vogue, and then had several crashes at high speed with maximum casualties, including family, after she chose to reveal that she had examined her one-year-old sister's genitals when she was seven.
I am not saying women aren't responsible for their crashes. Or that they shouldn't be entitled to a few. A duff film, a dud piece, a throwaway line, a bum note — who cares? Well, perhaps no one would if we didn't expect them to turn everything into gold. I wonder what will happen if James Bond turns out to be too exotic for the mainstream? Will Waller-Bridge be accused of killing Bond? Are the snipers already hoisting their M82s onto tripods?
Dunham recently treated a journalist to a slideshow of her surgically removed uterus (no, not a crass metaphor). While talking, she squeezed the blackheads of her sphynx cat, which the writer described as looking like "a walking foreskin". Last I read, she was walking with a cane (again, not a metaphor).
Like my sure-footed son on the scaffolding, I hope and pray Waller-Bridge will be fine.
