Media Parents

Doon Mackichan has written (hilariously and often painfully) in her memoir about her principled career choices and where they’ve got her as a staunch feminist. You can imagine. Now motherhood is shaping her decisions, Mackichan is a lonely voice in this looks-obsessed industry calling out botox, writes Media Parents Director Amy Walker.

Doon Mackichan on the banks of Loch Rannoch with Media Parents Amy Walker

“I don’t want to shame women who want to do things to their faces because it’s completely their face and they can do what they like. I think what we have to be responsible for, is the legacy we’re giving to younger girls. So if you’re a mum and if you are like ‘Oh I just hate that line’ – when your daughter sees her first line, she’s going to hate that line. So we’re just teaching our daughters that we are not happy with our faces, so we’re basically under the tools of the patriarchy…”

We’re sitting on a bench beside Loch Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, where Doon is running her creative writing and wild swimming retreat. I privately wonder if she is carrying the black marker pen she famously uses to deface cosmetic surgery ads, but I guess there won’t be too many billboards around here.

“Plastic surgery has never been so massive – the blue circles of shame made us hate ourselves – so beautiful young women hate themselves and their bodies” Doon continues, “So if we’re just going – ‘oh it’s just a little freshen up’ – that’s actually very insidious because that’s bleeding into a culture that says ‘I don’t want to see an older face’. We are role models. It’s everywhere now, even some of our favourite actresses are succumbing to it. They have work done to keep working…”

Personally, I’m relieved to hear this opposition to botox from Doon – it’s refreshing and inspiring to have an unbotoxed public figure unrepentantly sticking two fingers up at the cosmetic industry. We need more feminist icons like her to be open and honest and lead a separate path, loudly. Reflecting on the conversation later, I realise I feel a pressure lifted that has sat on me for at least a year, and I’m not even on screen. My close friends are pretty much divided down the middle in terms of botoxers and notoxers. They talk to me about it – the procedures or the resistance – and those who are resisting are frequently told by other women that they need work.

Don’t be mistaken – Doon does have physical advantages over many of us. She is beautiful, tall, built like a greyhound, clever, funny. She has been cast opposite Jon Hamm, say no more: “I have to have a word with myself when I see myself on screen – because you see yourself in high definition – that was a terrible, terrible invention” she says, her eyes crinkling with laughter. “HD is every thread vein – imagine you think ‘I don’t like that photo because I don’t like my neck’ – imagine you’re just a moving photo which is effectively what that is… I want to be someone whose face moves and whose face is her history. I don’t like looking at faces that have been “done” – I can’t bear watching them. I feel very passionate about botox because it’s filtering down an image of self-hatred” says Mackichan.

But touched up faces are undoubtedly the majority of faces on screen these days, and Doon is likely making a decision that could cost her roles. Nonetheless, she is insistent that her career choices haven’t been solely financially motivated, and has been open about using Universal Credit to keep herself and her family afloat during lockdown. It’s surprising to learn that a performer of her standing was in that position, and yet in the Guardian long read publicising Doon Mackichan’s book and career, amongst many things, she reflects regretfully on being “a little bit poor”. Like many creative freelancers at the moment, Doon may well get poorer if the government doesn’t step up its efforts to jumpstart TV and the creative arts. Despite her recent BAFTA nomination, the future of the BBC sitcom Two Doors Down, in which she plays “foul-mouthed, half cut and self-centred” alcoholic Glaswegian housewife Cathy, is uncertain after the sudden death of writer and friend, Simon Carlyle. The team behind the show bravely and subtly put alcoholism at the centre of a Christmas special – if you haven’t seen it is remarkable, funny, authentic. Production of Season 3 of her Amazon show Good Omens also looked uncertain for while. Most of us it seems are walking this precipice of talent, luck, contacts, persistence.

Even so, Doon is principled about the work she will and won’t take – she enters into everything with best feminist intentions and on her own terms. She has written in her book about holding out against the advances of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity – a line she won’t cross. I do think she could clean up in the jungle – I’m convinced she would massively increase the devoted following her character Cathy has in Scotland (we dine in a private room at the highland hotel so she is not continuously mobbed), her earnings from that alone would likely buy a London flat. But it’s not an argument I’m going to win. “I would lose my integrity if I went into the jungle – my whole career has been about trying to guard that” says Mackichan firmly. Likewise her face. “Hopefully it’s going to pass, this [botox] fad, but I’ve got a feeling it’s embedding. The only way to stop it is to show girls botox is not the only way.”

Doon’s way is generally not the easy way. In her book she is creative, determined, battling her demons. In front of me at the lochside she tells me she is often described in interviews as cold, but she definitely sees herself as a sister. And the sisterhood has brought us here, to surprisingly sunny Loch Rannoch, on the swimming and writing retreat.

“I started a cold water swimming group through the pandemic. Three of us started in Hastings, socially distanced… and by the end it had swelled to 103… Coming out of the water I would just feel ‘Wow! My mental health is recovered’. When I got back to London I just remember thinking ‘I want to give this to more women’”. And so she has. Along with Travel Matters, Doon runs this annual retreat. The one I attend is an interesting mix of people who have never cold water swum before, alongside women with a compulsion to hurl themselves into freezing water daily; published writers, women who have not enjoyed creative writing since school, and quite a few in between.

https://www.travelmatters.co.uk/scotland-wild-swimming-writing

“Cold water swimming is a quick fitness fix” Doon tells one of the women as she emerges from the water, energy renewed. “Fitness in three minutes!” And who would deny this busy, determined career woman and divorced mother a quick fix? She has seen a path to taking others along on her ride. After three days, everyone on the retreat is embracing the water and the writing at their own level of comfort, some beyond. There are writers who arrived blocked, one cold water swimmer who slammed on the brakes when the water reached her ankles on day one – she is now up to her goosepimpled knees. I’ve used the cold swim part of things to get into gear for October’s #Dipaday, which has inspired me to take part in the November 3^rd https://marchforcleanwater.org. As for the writing side of things, you’re reading some of it.

Doon is a charming facilitator, offering writing prompts, and sparse but strict rules for the daily two-hour creative period: no laptops and complete silence. The only water regs are to listen to the health and safety briefing and to make some noise on entry. The group is fairly socially diverse, and expertly curated by Doon, who definitely earns her whack by hosting nightly drinks and dinners with the retreatants, where we largely laugh and laugh. [There is booze, it’s not that kind of retreat].

For Doon’s part, cold water swimming helped her write her memoir “My Lady Parts: A Life Fighting Stereotypes”. She wrote it during the pandemic. “It wasn’t written for publication, I just sat down and wrote a chapter each day, working backwards from the present… What a cold dip does is it just blasts out all those voices that tell you what’s the point in doing that? Not sure I would have done it without the swimming, not sure I would have been quite as alive.”

As for so many of us, lockdown was not an easy time, we are still coming out of its shadows, and many of us with or without domestic responsibilities are grappling its legacy in creative terms. “Our focus is completely punctured by so many things in our day – admin, life, children, partners, parents – ageing parents – it’s ridiculous” says Mackichan. “You don’t have to do that all day, you can set aside two hours – two hours is a long time, you can get a lot done.”

Wild swimmers at Loch Rannock. Just do it. Join some of us at marchforcleanwater.org London Nov 3rd

Media Parents will be publishing short pieces of work from the retreat drawn from family life. If you would like to write for the Media Parents blog, please get in touch.  For more information about Doon Mackichan’s retreat click here.