Clodagh Finn: Time for a drama on real-life ‘girl stunt reporters’

Why do TV producers insist on remaking the classics when there are so many real-life adventures that are far more dramatic?

David Tennant with Ibrahim Koma and Leonie Benesch in ‘Around the World in 80 Days’. Why why do TV producers insist on remaking the classics when there are so many real-life adventures that are far more dramatic? Such as Nellie Bly or Elizabeth Bisland’s sensational round-the-world trip in 72 days and 76 days in 1889.

I punched the air when journalist Abigail Fix burst into the stuffy gentleman’s Reform Club and berated the editor of The Daily Telegraph for putting a man’s byline on her column in a gloriously boisterous scene in the BBC remake of Around the World in 80 Days.

If you are going to revisit a classic and broadcast it during peak festive viewing, you have to give it a modern twist.

It might have had Jules Verne purists “choking on their turkey sandwiches”, as reported by the Daily Mail, but transforming Detective Fix, the Scotland Yard
inspector of the 1872 novel, into a plucky female reporter is nearer the reality of the late 19th century than you might imagine.

Inspiration

I thought it must have been a nod to Nellie Bly, the real-life American journalist who took inspiration from the famous novel and went around the world in a record-breaking 72 days in 1889.

In fact, the scene where the fictional Abigail Fix (Leonie Benesch) is trying to persuade her editor (and father) to allow her chart Phileas Fogg’s journey around the world echoes the actual exchange between Nellie Bly and her editor at the New York World a decade and a half later.

Her editor was keen on the idea but after speaking with the newspaper’s business manager came back to Bly with the conclusion that it was ‘impossible’.

“In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone, you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes,” he said.

Furious, Bly told the editor to start a man on a round-the-world trip, she would start on the same day and report for another newspaper.

The project was shelved but, a year later, she was given the go-ahead, and off she went in a dress tailored to withstand three months of constant wear. Travelling by train, steamship, rickshaw, horse, and donkey, she sailed from New York to London in seven days and continued on through Europe to Egypt and the Suez Canal.

When passing through France, she even made a quick hop to Amiens in the north to meet author Jules Verne. He said he would applaud her with both hands if she beat Fogg.

In the first episode of the latest TV remake, we also went to Paris to gain an insight into the life and motivations of Jean Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s faithful valet. Casting a black actor, Ibrahim Koma, in the role prompted another outburst from the purists who complained it was “woke nonsense”; a step too far in imposing inclusivity and diversity on the past.

Cue more choking on turkey sandwiches. In contrast, I was in TV-watching clover; there is nothing like a few good stunts and proxy adventures to take you through the in-between days of late December. And before you could say “historical drama doesn’t have to be faithful to the book, much less real life”, we were in the middle of revolutionary Paris and a plot to kill the French president.

Gutsy girl

Better still, our gutsy girl reporter was right in the middle of the action. Mind you, (spoiler alert) she did manage to get the star of the show Phileas Fogg (David Tennant) shot, but what’s a stray bullet when we have six more episodes and a sequel to go.

I’ll be glued to the screen, but I’ll also be wondering why TV producers insist on remaking the classics when there are so many real-life adventures that are far more dramatic? The story of Nellie Bly’s sensational round-the-world trip is certainly one.

That in itself would make a lively TV series, but the real story gets even better. Bly was unaware that she was competing with another
female reporter who was heading around the world in the opposite direction.

When the editor of Cosmopolitan got wind of Bly’s adventures, he commissioned journalist Elizabeth Bisland to race against her in an
attempt to woo readers from a rival publication, not to mention beat the fictional Fogg at his own game.

Bisland even passed through Cobh when she caught the steam passenger ship SS Bothnia there in January 1890.

Nellie Bly won out in the end, circumnavigating the globe in 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes, compared to Bisland’s 76 days and 12 hours, but both were ahead of the fictional Fogg. Both women also wrote books that include accounts of myriad adventures, fast trains, slow boats, bribes, false reports of victory — the stuff of any good TV drama. In fact, the story of those early female journalists would also make a cracking TV series. In the 1880s and 1890s, newspapers keen to boost circulation hired a new generation of ‘girl stunt reporters’ who went undercover to expose corruption and appalling conditions in mental hospitals and factories. Nellie Bly, herself, was foremost among those pioneers of investigative journalism and famously faked mental illness so that she could expose the appalling conditions inside mental asylums.

In 1887, her series Inside the Madhouse, documenting the starvation and abuse of patients at Blackwell’s Island, was published in the New York World. It was a publishing sensation but it also shamed the authorities into investing $50,000 in the asylum system.

Her story and those of many others are told in fascinating detail in Kim Todd’s excellent book Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters” published earlier this year.

“Stunt reporters,” she wrote, “put a new female character in the headlines — not a victim of assault or murder — but a protagonist. Bravery was their brand. It was like they stepped out of the adventure tales that flew off the bookstore shelves, except that they were real.”

Todd dedicated her book to those “ink-stained Amazons”.

Irish ones

I can think of a few Irish ones who deserve much more attention, such as Kathleen Blake ‘Kit’ Coleman (1856-1915). She was born in Galway and emigrated to Canada aged 28 after her husband, and sadly their two-year-old daughter died.

She went on to become the world’s first accredited woman war correspondent when she reported on the Spanish-American War in 1898. Later, while working on the Toronto Daily Mail, she complained about being desk-bound when she wanted to travel, and also “skirmished with new management” insisting that the woman’s page keep its intellectual content.

“I detest fashion and think it is paying us women a poor compliment to imagine we cannot take an interest in the highest and very deepest challenges of the day,” she once wrote.

Tara Giddens, researcher of Irish women journalists of the 19th and 20th century, also describes how she toyed with readers who were invited to guess her gender and identity.

Her readers — or her ‘paper children’ as she called them — knew her as a forthright journalist, but she was also a single working mother caring for two children.

Now there is a TV adaptation crying out to be made.