Nobody over 38

Comer was one of six actresses nominated for the leading actress award at this year’s television Baftas and “there wasn’t a single woman in her category over the age of 38”, Clark said.

She added: “Older women, if featured on screen at all, tend to be the adjunct to the male characters. In the main, their function is to be humourless, cautious, dangerous and difficult.”

Weisz previously defended the age gap in Page Eight, telling one interviewer: “I’m not sure how old Bill is… [the characters] connect with their hearts and they have a great amount of empathy. Anyway, I think people of all sorts of different ages can get it on. It doesn’t bother me.”

TV now dominant

Elsewhere in the podcast, Sir David addressed the state of British theatre and said it no longer occupied an important role in national discourse because television is now the dominant medium.

“I think you could talk to the whole country from the theatre in the 20th century. I don’t see anyone doing it in the 21st. That excitement that you had with John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, you were entering the bloodstream with theatre. It doesn’t feel that way now.”

Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth, is “probably the most famous play of the 21st century”, Sir David said, “but if you mention that to a non-theatre person, they have never heard of it. If you mention Look Back in Anger, they’ve heard of it.

“That sense that theatre is somewhere from which you can somehow radiate out from everything: I think that’s television now.”

He also lamented that no current playwright can be held up as the “voice of a generation”, because theatres want to promote diverse voices. 

“Theatres are at their best when you sense that the artistic director is saying, ‘This is somebody I really need you to listen to’,” he said. “Richard Eyre, for better or worse, anointed me in that role [at the National Theatre],” he said.

“If you talk to playwrights now, they say that whole thing of ‘voice of a generation’ is gone. You now have to listen to 12 voices and diversity is the thing in the theatre, in every sense.”