Sometimes, the details you leave out – like, the fact that you have a husband and children – come back to bite you. Which is exactly what happens to Linda, the woman at the heart of fantastic British sitcom The Change, which is back for a second season that is just as hilarious and acerbic as the first, pulling no punches in its biting social commentary about the role of women in the home and in broader society.
In the first season, we met Linda (played by comedian Bridget Christie, writer and director of the show, and nominated for a BAFTA for her role), a supermarket worker and parent of two teenagers who has a rather unpleasant epiphany during her 50th birthday party when her husband Steve (Omid Djalili) gives a lacklustre speech in which he praises her for being not only hot for her age, but a dedicated mother. He says this while she stands there holding a garbage bag, having just spent most of her own party cleaning up after guests instead of enjoying the attention (which appears to have mostly gone to Steve for being kind enough as to still be attracted to her).
It’s a formative, shocking moment for Linda as she realises that to some people, even the most important people, a wife and a mother is all she is. Fed up with being reduced to her sex appeal and servitude, and fresh from an appointment in which she learns the long list of symptoms she has been suffering from are not due to cancer but actually menopause, Linda decides to get back on her old motorcycle and ride to the Forest of Dean to find a time capsule she hid there as a child. And maybe find herself, too. After she’s gone, Steve (in a desperate bid to figure out housework) finds dozens of notebooks labelled by year in which Linda has logged every second she’d ever spent on chores in her marriage. It adds up to 3.5 million minutes.
Linda has an awkward start when she arrives in the Forest of Dean, but eventually she wins the trust and friendship of the eccentric locals she encounters. Every woman in the show is over fifty, and there are no relationships or sex because, despite being a sitcom, The Change is serious about letting its women characters shine without reducing them to the archetypes we know and loathe.
...despite being a sitcom, The Change is serious about letting its women characters shine...
Linda’s adventures culminate in her new friends naming her the Eel Festival’s first-ever Eel Queen (the title has previously always gone to a man). With a band of women at her side, she celebrates transitions both harsh and joyful and claims menopause as rebirth, a privilege to experience in a world where so many women are killed before they can age. Caught up in the ecstasy and joy of truly being seen for the first time, Linda’s worship comes to a screeching halt when Steve arrives to drag her home, thereby revealing to the town that she is not the inspiring, single, child-free woman they believed but a wife with two children. The horror!
(L-R) Tanya Moodie as Joy and Bridget Christie as Linda. Source: Channel 4 / Jon Hall / Expectation TV / Channel4
Season two picks up right where season one left off, with Linda’s newfound friends hurt and betrayed to learn she has lied about who she is. A trial is called and held in a local cafe where Linda must defend her secrets, and the result is a life-affirming tear-jerker of a speech in which we are reminded that, amidst the hilarity and chaos, this show is also a story of women’s suffering that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.
The scene is the perfect encapsulation of the show’s defiance: it knows its subject matter is heavy, and its jokes are hilarious, and these things do not exist in contrast to one another but in fact come hand in hand because if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. That is often what it means to be a woman
But if season one was about Linda finding herself, then season two is about womanhood as a collective.
Linda (Bridget Christie) and her friends face new challenges in season 2. Credit: Jon Hall / Expectation TV / Channel4
As Linda continues to make up for the 3.5 million minutes she has spent prioritising others (in the weeks she’s been at the Forest of Dean, she hasn’t even used 5000), an entire movement inspired by her logbooks is born. Women across the town begin counting the unpaid labour they do daily, and as the men in their lives refuse to challenge their own entitlement, a gender war is born.
Season two of The Change asks pertinent questions not just of what is wrong with our world, but of what can be done here and now to fix our future ourselves. Bridget Christie’s script simmers with female rage, but she also knows where to channel that energy: not at the hapless victims of patriarchy, but at the system that upholds it. Her depiction of menopause as not the end of a woman's life and relevance, but as the beginning of a change that is simultaneously liberating and rage-inducing, resulted in widespread critical acclaim and multiple award nominations when it was released. There’s nothing else like it out there.
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