A Deep Dive into Film Criticism with Critic and Podcaster Wendy Lloyd

Wendy’s career began in BBC local radio aged 16 before she became a presenter and producer at BBC GLR in London. Presenter positions at Radio Luxembourg, Virgin Radio and BBC Radio 1 followed. Wendy has hosted Top Of The Pops with Robbie Williams, travelled the world as a reporter for The Travel Channel, interviewed Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, J-Lo, and many more Hollywood stars. But let’s go right back to the beginning…

Wendy didn’t really visit the cinema as a child. She was one of six children and so taking the whole family would have been quite an expense; but she did enjoy watching black and white movies on BBC2 on a Saturday afternoon. However, it was actually in music and music radio where her career kicked off, and after DJing on Radio Luxembourg (where she was part of the historic radio station’s final lineup), she returned to the UK, and a show on Virgin Radio on Saturday and Sunday afternoons where she had the freedom to include her own editorial features:

“With a peak time show there’s a lot of people who’ve got a lot of fingers in pies about what goes in your show - but when you're on the weekends or late at night you get quite a bit of free rein.”

It was while working the afternoon shows that Wendy received comp tickets to a screening of Mike Myers film, ‘So I Married an Axe Murderer’. Surrounded by critics in the cinema, Wendy bathed in the humour and silliness of the spectacle while, around her, she sensed the critics looking down their nose at the film. It was this sniffy attitude that prompted her to begin doing film reviews on her radio show which, she acknowledges, was a really useful thing to do for her career, giving her a differentiation beyond the music. 

So, as an official film critic by 1993 and with host of ITV’s The Little Picture Show in 1995 under her belt, she was invited to be part of the Critics Circle in 1999. The Circle includes all reviewers, so for books, theatre, dance and film (Wendy is now very active in ensuring the Circle is as diverse and inclusive as possible) and one has to apply and be accepted by a committee in order to join. Between starting in 1993 and joining the Circle six years later, Wendy had noticed how her fellow critics were a lot of white blokes, usually middle-aged or older. She was in the minority as a woman and, being new to the field, she often deferred to these critics. They were more experienced, but even back then she felt like it was a very closed shop.

“I was literally an outsider by being a young woman and that was quite extraordinary for me because by that time I'd spent six or seven years working in radio and all of that stuff that is creative and dynamic and sexy and fun and then I'm around a very different environment. So for a long time it was difficult but I just got on with it and obviously I got lots of great opportunities and I made the most of them.” 

In 2013, Wendy decided to undertake a part-time psychology degree and it was in her final year, in autumn 2017, that the #metoo movement happened. She saw the momentum gathering around her and decided to focus her final project on inequalities within film criticism. She set her thoughts down in her 5,000 word undergraduate dissertation but felt like it wasn’t enough, so she decided to continue her research with a Masters at LSE. 

“It was incredibly serendipitous because this had been something I had felt and sat on for a long time then these movements come about that suddenly give you permission as a woman to gripe about the things you want to gripe about. And into the pot comes also wider issues to do with race, disability, class - you name it. For so many of us I think we needed to have that wider cultural permission because it was really hard to get a grasp on how you can speak about it in terms of film reviews. I had already started to be a little bit more feminist in my reviews, but I always felt like I had to kind of do it undercover, rein it in, hide it in plain sight and it was so liberating to be able to go ‘No, I'm gonna bitch and moan about this bloody film with only men in it’. And I didn't have to hide anymore.”

Spurred on by her Masters, Wendy launched a podcast, Open to Criticism, which continues in this vein; speaking about film criticism with a range of other voices including critics, journalists and academics. And clearly this is a conversation that is long overdue because, after just one season, the podcast was nominated for two Independent Podcast Awards. Wendy is rightly proud of the success of the podcast and says the response has been amazing. 

“I'm very much aware it's an evergreen podcast. It's a podcast which people will be coming to in years to come because of the stuff that it's talking about. I mean on the one hand you hope it will get out of date because we'll be going ‘oh wasn't that ridiculous when we were struggling with those things’. But for the time being it's about that open conversation and I get such great feedback from people all the time and it always warms my heart because as a podcaster that's what you need. I've been down rabbit warrens of research and I've loved it and there's been this sense of ‘I've got to get this out here’. And so now to finally be putting it out there and getting a response - all the hard work feels very worthwhile.”

It seems that the podcast is such a success because there really is nothing else out there like it. There is film theory and feminist film theory - people like Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, bell hooks. Then the academics: Rosalind Gill, Angela Mcrobbie - who speak about the sexualisation of culture, misogyny, inequalities in the creative cultural industries (which of course includes film criticism) but little that is specifically about film criticism (and why it matters who does it). Though Professor Mattias Frey and his book The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism was highlighted by Wendy as something of a Bible for her during her Masters degree. 

Other podcasts were mentioned, such as The F-Rated podcast and fellow film critic Anna Smith’s fantastic Girls on Film, but again these focus much more on film, rather than film criticism. 

“My issue was that it was too easy to just always look at the culture specifically on the screen and not step back to the people mediating it because there's a whole element of inequality that goes on around how we talk about it. It's something that flies under the radar for audiences especially I think and that's what is very important for me about my podcast. It's for anybody who loves film because if you love film you're going to read about film and if you're reading about film, isn't it worthwhile stopping and going who am I reading, who am I listening to, what might their perspective be on the world and on film and on cinema and on whose stories are valued?”

It’s really important to consider this. Everything we are exposed to has usually come to you through a filter. It’s something discussed often in book publishing - who is the gatekeeper? If we don’t have diverse agents and editors and publishers then how will we have diverse stories and voices? And the same can be said for film criticism. If all the film reviews we read are written by a homogeneous mass of white, male, middle-aged critics, is that not going to affect the films that get promoted? As Wendy says: 

“What's primed you to choose to watch that film over the other one? And are you even thinking about the fact that most of the films that are getting nominated for awards are of a particular ilk? The good thing about award season now is the voices get more and more shoutier - as they should - about the nonsense of female directors not being valued. I mean, look at Greta Gerwig not being nominated for Barbie. It’s funny, isn't it? Because they are awards, it’s all so darn subjective. But at the end of the day, you can't say the film is amazing and all these things are amazing, but the director has nothing to do with it. It's very bizarre and you just can't help but think there's some blinkered thinking there about what we perceive a director to be and who we perceive it to be and it's probably incredibly unconscious on the part of the people voting in the academy, but they're not thinking that credibility and director equals female. They're still not thinking that.”

"They're not thinking that credibility and director equals female."

Wendy acknowledges that she is coming to the podcast picking apart the Western Centric issues within Western culture. But, she says, the joy of her podcast is that she is still learning. After the intensity of her Masters research, now she gets to explore the same themes in a more conversational way and identify how to make changes. She spoke of a specific example on her podcast episode with critic Kaleem Aftab about film criticism beyond the Western gaze. Aftab was speaking about censorship in relation to a Muslim filmmaker and Wendy realised that her questions to him had come at this perspective of censorship with a complete Western mentality. 

“I'm very interested in how we as critics incorporate and expand our knowledge of how we critique things outside of our own culture as well as making sure that we have those other cultural voices speaking for themselves because that's really been the main issue is that we have had white men speaking on behalf of women and all other cultures for way too long. It's very easy to look back and go ‘God isn’t it amazing that we used to say that or we'd think that’ but we always have to do that hand in hand with recognising that there's going to be a s*** ton of stuff we're doing now that we haven't realised yet. But as long as we're all learning and we're respecting each other along the way then that's all you can do really, because you can't know everything and we can't know each other's perspectives. So we have to allow other people to talk about their culture and then our opinions and critique of other cultures are going to be more refined and relevant basically. It doesn't become this whole thing of everybody's got to stay in their own lane, but if you're going to talk about somebody else's lane, at the very least you need to have let them speak about their lane first.”

Of course, getting into film criticism is harder now than it was when Wendy first started out, even with the emergence of social media platforms, blogs, vlogs and all the other ways in which you can get your voice out. There are more potential reviewers, but less ways to earn a living from it. Fees for articles have stayed static or even gone down and the paid opportunities are smaller and smaller. Wendy’s advice is simple and practical; diversify and find your niche. Just being a good writer or speaker with a strong opinion is unfortunately not enough anymore. The entire arts sector in the UK has also been decimated by cuts in recent times and we are reverting to a time when only the richest can afford to have a career in the sector.  

“There's a highly classed inequality that there's acres of research on but nothing ever changes because how's it going to change when we're living in a country where the politicians in power are only making divisions wider? So it's a tough one and I feel for anybody coming up now wanting to be a film critic.”

In terms of wider equality in the film industry, Wendy echoes the sentiment of the other interviewees in our F-Rated partnership series: it is all about the money. Crucially, it is not just paying female directors the same as male ones (though that of course would be a bonus). It is about women being the ones with the purse strings. The people with the money are the ones who are, to some extent, deciding what is valued and what stories get told.

“You need female hedge fund managers.

The money men are literally still that - money men. We've got all these inequalities in the creative industries but it's a damn sight more varied and dynamic and equal than finance. So if someone comes along and says we've got these three directors and one of them is a woman then they're going to dismiss that out and out because, in their world, women don't get a look in.”

As the interview winds to a close, and after speaking more about Greta Gerwig, naturally, conversation turns to films that Wendy has enjoyed in recent years. Thankfully she is still able to enjoy films away from the day job! She highlights Maestro and All of Us Strangers as two beautifully moving works of emotional storytelling and speaks passionately about the mastery of Dune. In full flow on the films she loves, it’s easy to see why Wendy has seen such success as a film critic and radio presenter.