Time & Perspective Quote by Diana Rigg

“I made a bit of a stink” lands with the kind of dry, self-editing understatement that Diana Rigg could weaponize in a single eyebrow raise. The phrase is almost comically modest: not “I protested,” not “I fought,” but “a bit of a stink,” as if principled dissent were an impolite odor she inadvertently released into a room of well-bred people. That’s the trick. She uses genteel language to expose how “good manners” get deployed as a disciplinary tool, especially against women who refuse to be decorative.

The follow-up - “At the time, it was considered very bad form” - sharpens the blade. “Bad form” is theater-adjacent diction: stagecraft meets class code. It frames backlash not as a response to the substance of her complaint but as a critique of her style. Don’t make noise. Don’t embarrass the institution. Keep your grievance small enough to be ignored. Rigg’s subtext is that the culture policed conduct more aggressively than it policed injustice.

Context matters because Rigg came up in an industry that sold glamour while running on hierarchy: directors, producers, leading men at the top; actresses expected to be grateful, pliant, and eternally “professional.” When she describes her pushback in the language of etiquette, she’s pointing at the real offense: not what she asked for, but that she asked at all. The line works because it’s funny without being cute - a compressed history of how dissent gets reframed as rudeness, and how rudeness becomes the price of self-respect.