At the end of the first series of The Change we left our menopausal heroine (and never had those two words been seen together before Bridget Christie came along) in the Forest of Dean, dressed as the Eel Queen, finding joy in all her transitions. That is until her hapless husband showed up to drag her home. Noooooo! Don’t do it, Linda!!! Series two, fear not, picks up right where we left off. Linda (Christie) has still only used up 4,320 minutes of her time accrued from 3.5m minutes of domestic drudgery. She is still refusing to go home. Steve (Omid Djalili), her husband, still has jam on his face. And The Change is still the best (and probably the only) TV comedy series ever written about menopause.
Of course, like “the change”, this is about so much more than menopause. Christie’s glorious feminist sitcom is a meditation on witchcraft and witch-hunts, paganism, veganism, activism, community, the climate emergency, mushrooms, misogyny, the importance of wringing out a cloth before using it to wipe surfaces, and our national identity. If the first series tracked Linda’s journey to find herself, the second is about what roots that newly uncovered self might put down, and how they might grow an entire movement. By the final episode, stationers “from Gloucester to Bristol” have run out of “Linda’s ledgers” as an army of incensed women start logging chores, wearing “Je suis Linda” T-shirts, and playing pool in the pub before midday. The men, eventually, let them get on with it and sign up to the mandatory housework programme “For Men Who Wipe” with Pig Man. And the mother oak tree felled at the end of the first series grows a fresh green shoot. Hallelujah!
Before all that tree-huggery, though, there is deep discord. Enraged by Linda’s new role as “the Mick Lynch of dusting”, the Verderer – surely the best-named angry white Englishman in TV history – orders a town trial at Sarah’s Cafe. Enter judge Joy (Tanya Moodie), who following Linda’s genuinely moving defence – “Did you know it takes three minutes and 12 seconds to shake crumbs out of a toaster?” – casts a vote as to whether she should “leave” or “remain”. The result is close: 48% to 52%. Linda remains! Brexit never looked so farcical, or on the nose.
Each episode is named after a natural phenomenon, ancient ritual or modern concept. Like “Mycelium” – the thin fungal threads connecting plants and trees via underground mycorrhizal networks – in which Linda’s chore ledger goes stratospheric and the newly radicalised townswomen start plaguing her with questions: “Does sex go in the chore ledger, Linda?” “What about the hand jobs? And the mouth jobs? And the bum jobs?” Her answer? If it feels like a chore, it goes in. Wise woman.
Or “Psilocybin”, in which the eels feeding the men at The Eel Cafe since 1850 become critically endangered, Linda forages for a vegan alternative and the menfolk end up on the trip of a lifetime, producing scenes “like something out of a Ken Russell film”. Inevitably, they claim they have been “eelmasculated”. And the Eel Sisters (whose configuration has changed this series, one of them now being Theresa, fresh out of jail) hold a silent supper for some dead spirits and Linda, who – spoiler alert! – as it turns out is their half-sister. The women go on strike, Steve and Siobhain (Liza Tarbuck), Linda’s domineering sister, have full-blown midlife crises of their own, and, worst of all, the men start using one cloth to wipe everything. Retch!
The Change is ambitious, surreal, moving, and above all hysterically funny. It is unlike anything else on TV. Partly that is because Christie is a powerhouse of a standup immune to trotting out tired old tropes. Pig Man, for instance, may be a literal caveman but he is the most highly evolved character of them all, and he loves housework. Christie’s absurdly British humour is also key, with hyperspecific jokes about, say, the zoologist and ethnologist Desmond Morris v the Welsh TV presenter Johnny Morris, and she can nail the national character with an observation as neat as a placard scrawled with “Public castration is not a good idea”. But there is a seriousness at the soft heart of it: her bucolic vision is of a Britain that may not exist but very much could if we just ringfenced local funding to pay women “chore benefit”, and learned from the mushrooms. Oh, and gave more women their own TV shows.
It concludes with another (gentle) cliffhanger, maintaining the possibility of a third series. (And if there isn’t one, we now have the how-to manual for enacting the feminist uprising.) It also ends, like the first series, in a state of unfettered jubilation as Linda guides a hippy celebration round the mother tree and makes yet another inspirational speech: “Every living thing has a natural life cycle and every living thing dies, and that’s the natural order. We fear it but we can live a life of purpose, like truffles.” It’s not easy to weave an ecstatic, rousing and laugh-a-minute TV show out of a toxic patchwork of midlife despair, domestic inequality, sexism, misogyny, culture wars and ecological and political crises, but Christie has gone and done it again. What a joyful transition.
